It’s early, of course, but we have had a good two weeks with Akuma and the latest Street Fighter 6 rebalance, seen a few major events play out, and have seen community reactions as players from around the globe explore and share their findings in this updated version of the game.
Standing on a full year’s worth of watchful analysis through Season 1, DreamKing and I have come up with a list of the five characters we think are most likely to be the top tiers of Season 2.
It seems Capcom has kept the spirit of Street Fighter 6 very much intact, but have implemented changes that are sure to switch things up a decent bit as the tier list does appear to be moving and shaking.
Something to keep in mind as we analyze things here early on: we aren’t coming from nothing. We’ve had an entire first year where certain characters were established to be at certain parts of the tier list, and so there’s something to be said of their potential when it comes to the top 5.
Luke, for instance, was often deemed to be the absolute best of the bunch. His tools worked synergistically to allow him advantages both in the neutral game as well as in the inevitable rush down corner situations he’d make for himself, and he’s widely the same character he was in Season 1.
Capcom did nerf some of his most problematic moves like crouching medium punch, but they were also careful to grant him buffs in similar arenas (his standing heavy punch and OD enhancements are now better) to ensure he doesn’t lose too much of his momentum.
It seems Capcom wants Luke to be amongst the stronger characters in the game, and even though others around him have been buffed and his changes may result in an overall reduction in power, he’d need to fall a full five places to be out of the top 5, and that’s a tall order.
On the other side of this coin are the likes of characters like Ryu, A.K.I. and Zangief, all of whom were on the mid to lower end of the spectrum during Street Fighter 6’s initial year. These three are amongst the biggest winners of the patch, but did they get enough to rocket them all the way up into the top five?
Indeed it’s always been difficult to establish groupings of tier placements in Street Fighter 6 as the game’s Drive System and general balance has made the discrepancies between fighters relatively small, and that’s a good thing. You’ll often hear how “top 5 has like 8 characters in it,” as it’s incredibly hard to order swaths of the game’s tiers.
That continues here in Season 2 as it proved difficult to come up with a top 5, and we simply had to include a few honorable mentions in the discussion in addition to our final picks.
There are others still that could easily be in this particular conversation that we felt we didn’t have as much to say on right now, but that all goes to show just how competitive this season of play is shaping up to be.
All that established, we’re more than happy to hear what you think on the subject. Please hit up the comments here as well as on the YouTube video directly (along with a like and a subscription to our YouTube Channel) to share whether you agree or not, and which characters you think are the ones to watch out for this year and why.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:15 – Character 1
12:26 – Character 2
21:24 – Character 3
26:01 – Character 4
34:39 – Character 5
40:12 – Honorable Mentions