Street Fighter 6

> Learn controls and practice for 10 hours.
> Get repeatedly kicked by hot women.
10/10 would like to get crushed again

There is no official "big brother mode", but a random person I matched against beat the crap out of me and then spent a solid 2 hours just rematching and doing basic moves until I learned to block. I must have went 60-0 against this Akuma but learned the basics in the process and can now hadouken consistently. Talk about welcoming community.

Street Fighter is the quintessential fighting game. Every major fighting game term applies here, except for those related to team battles. The satisfaction of reading an opponent’s move and punishing their mistakes is unparalleled. The game doesn’t rely on slowdown mechanics because it gives you the sense that you’ve truly earned your counters.

While the overall presentation isn’t my favorite, the game mechanics are so deep that Street Fighter has become my favorite fighting game. Every move serves a purpose, and mastering Street Fighter will make you a stronger player. The combo timings can be challenging, especially if you’re coming from a game like Guilty Gear, where the timings are lenient. I found the combo timings in Street Fighter difficult at first, but the beauty of this game is that combos aren’t everything.

Even if you miss combo timings, you can still win rounds and enjoy the game. Reading your opponent and understanding their strategies is much more rewarding. The game's pace is slower than many anime fighters, which require a lot more rapid decision-making. In Street Fighter, the slower pace means there’s more emphasis on strategic thinking during neutral play.

Wins in Street Fighter are deeply satisfying, more so than in many other fighting games I’ve tried. I highly recommend giving it a try!

As a core product, Street Fighter 6 is a triumph. Capcom took years of feedback about what did and didn't work through the Street Fighter 5 era, listened and adapted. The product is polished to a mirror sheen. As a fighting game, the systems are really well thought out, work together, and provide for a fantastic fighting experience that can be picked up easily enough but have significant depth to them. The roster is diverse, reasonably sized, and has enough variety that you can find someone that you'll like playing. The newcomers in particular landed incredibly well, with designs like Marisa, Manon and Kimberly being instantly iconic and full of personality. The online experience, critical for a modern day fighting title, is also superb, with fantastic rollback netcode, plenty of features, a sensibly balanced ranked ladder, good matchmaking, and quick load times. It's easy to load up SF6, play a bunch of online rounds, and feel like you got a great gaming experience.
Capcom also did a very savvy thing, centering the experience around two overlapping tentpoles; World Tour mode and Modern controls. World Tour is effectively what a big budget beat-em-up would look like in the modern era - roaming around some open world maps, getting into fights, getting money and experience and cosmetics to dress up your (extremely customizable and potentially grotesquely deformed) avatar. All the while, you're interacting with the SF6 roster, learning their styles, mixing and matching moves, and getting to know them as characters outside of the fighting arena. It's part extended mechanics tutorial, part street brawl, and really quite a lot of fun. It also plays extremely well with Modern controls, which is a fully usable control scheme that cuts the execution requirements from the traditional 6 button technical input scheme to a four button version that includes some simple auto-combos and one-button specials. While purists might get snobby about it, Modern does exactly what it sets out to do - lets less experienced players be competitive in versus matches, and shift the focus from technical control inputs to the more important strategic layer of movement, positioning, traps, and mindgames, which is where fighting games shine.
All this said, SF6 is being tremendously let down and hurt by some very questionable ongoing development and business decisions. The game itself, outside of the traditional season pass DLC characters we have so far (two of them released, two announced), has been stagnating in a way that some of its contemporaries are not; Capcom has elected to go with an annual balance patch, which means the meta hasn't really shifted since launch and characters with glaring weaknesses in their kit remain undertuned and underrepresented. Ongoing content releases have mostly been focused on avatar cosmetics and other items that can't be used or show up outside of gimmick avatar battles. Most of these come through the now-obligatory premium battlepasses; while the paid tracks ultimately can be self-sustaining if you play enough matches, they cycle extremely quickly and turn SF6 into the grindy type of live service experience. Capcom also has gotten into using predatory micro and macrotransaction practices, using a combination of secondary mobile-style currencies (sold in bundles that never quite fit right, of course) and extremely overpriced premium cosmetics (fifteen dollar TMNT costumes, anyone? fifteen dollars per turtle, that is). This culminated in the long awaited Outfit 3 release, with new costumes for the whole roster - a breath of fresh air for a stagnating visual experience marred by the costumes being expensive (six dollars each), not available in any sort of bulk bundle, and only available using Capcom's secondary currency. There is no world in which it can be considered justifiable to have to pay over 100 dollars for a roster-wide single outfit update, even if they were available a-la carte and are very high quality designs.
So, SF6. I do recommend it if you like or want to like fighting games, because it's really a great 2D fighter. That said, if you are sensitive to or put off by some of the gaming industry's worst practices, they're showing up in full force here and there's no real indication that Capcom is listening to player feedback on the subject. It's certainly killed a lot of my drive to follow and play the game on an ongoing fashion, and I have to note it as a real black eye on the experience.

Tired of your teammates throwing your comp games? Play Street Fighter 6
Tired of spin-botting cheaters? Play Street Fighter 6
Tired of Overwatch? Play Street Fighter 6
Even if you're new to the genre, there are plenty of ways to make this game still enjoyable. Absolutely worth it.

Great game! The only downside is: You cant unlock new characters by playing the game, only buying it.

I know it was ever like this but it is about time for it to change.

Capcom needs to monetize with cosmetic only.

I may be a Tekken fan but objectively speaking this game is as perfect as fighter can possibly get – online matches are found in seconds if not milliseconds and run like clockwork, controls feel intuitive and fluid, ingame tutorial actually explains the basics of fighting games like frame data, characters and environments look lively, vibrant and most importantly discernible, even losing in SF6 doesn’t feel as bad as in other FGs to me because of everlasting feel-good vibe permeating the game. It’s a perfect entry point for anyone even remotely interested in this genre.