Since the earliest days of Street Fighter 2, fireball or projectile wars have been a key ingredient when it comes to the franchise’s unique personality, feel, and flow of battle.
The art of the Street Fighter fireball has surely evolved over the years as new characters come out with new ways of tossing them (SF4’s Juri can hold and throw them with her feet, for instance, while SF3’s Remy can shoot multiple Sonic Booms at varying heights ) and existing characters garner updated properties. It seems Capcom is making a major change to an established fireball function in Street Fighter 6, which has the potential to massively change the way fireball wars play out in Street Fighter.
Projectiles in Street Fighter almost always clash, meaning that when two players toss them out at roughly the same time, they’ll collide and cancel one another out. Compare this to Mortal Kombat, for example, wherein projectiles often pass right through each other.
Even this seemingly minute difference drastically changes what it means to throw a fireball in each game, and affects strategy and general approach as a result.
In some recently recorded footage of Street Fighter 6’s current pre-release build, it looks as though developers have made significant alteration to the way EX fireballs function relative to how they have over the last 20+ years. Rooflemonger’s latest video digs into this as well as other notable observations.
When Capcom introduced EX versions of moves in Street Fighter 3, (where you can spend a bit of your meter to enhance special attacks) fireballs mostly became multi-hitting.
An EX fireball would have 2 or 3 hits, meaning that if it clashed with a regular fireball, one hit would be absorbed and then the projectile would continue flying forward with however remaining hits it still had.
One can imagine what this meant for fireball wars as a player could quickly gain advantage by strategically throwing an EX projectile, and this is how things have worked in the franchise pretty much ever since. Until now, apparently.
EX fireballs in Street Fighter 6 still do garner additional hits, but they don’t seem to lose any of their hits if they clash on the way to their target. We see an example in which Ryu and Chun-Li are chucking plasma at one another, Chun shoots an EX that absorbs two of Ryu’s regular fireballs, and said EX flies all the way to Ryu and still hits him twice.
We’ll let Rooflemonger do the rest of the showing and explaining via the video here, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on this drastic change in the comments.
Do you hope this makes it to Street Fighter 6’s release in 2023, or do you hope developers revert to the old way of doing things before then?
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