You’ve got your combos down, you understand the mechanics of the game, and you’re pretty good at beating up on your friends in Street Fighter 6. Yet, when you muster up the courage to dive into a ranked session online, it seems every other opponent (even those ranked lower than you) is giving you more trouble than they should. In fact, if you’re honest, you’re losing to quite a few people that you “should” be beating.
If reading the above scratches a particular itch for you, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Street Fighter 6 retains an impressive balance for a new fighting game, but that doesn’t mean the scales between performing offense and defense are level. This is the subject of 801 Strider’s recent video wherein he highlights the issue that’s most likely holding your progress up: stopping unga bunga play.
For those who haven’t heard the slang before, “unga” play refers to a kind of unabashed commitment to offense that often involves gimmicky tricks and a headstrong approach that sees the player refuse to alter their approach.
This, of course, sounds like a losing strategy (and it ultimately is) but it’s one thing to say it’d be easy to counter such play, and a whole other thing to actually be able to do so in the heat of battle.
If you’ve played more than a match or two in Street Fighter 6 then you know just how many routes to quick offense it affords players, especially those who choose the majority of the top tiers. Defense, on the other hand, is neither as intuitive or easy to execute.
This is more or less the case in most all fighting games, but as Strider points out, is particularly prominent in SF6.
“Players like this will smoke the vast majority of people,” he says. “I think that’s a huge breaking point in this game that will determine how consistent you are… can you deal with unga?” He goes on to note that this is “what separates good players from great players,” as you do tend to see the pros more consistently able to deal with the approach.
Most of us are already aware of the concept of unga bunga and how strong it can feel in SF6, but if you haven’t spent enough time training yourself to be comfortable with things like anti airs, countering Drive Rush, baiting out reversals, and being ready to Perfect Parry dial in sequences, you’re likely going to lose.
Strider has a lot more to say to help you identify and practice getting over this particular hurdle (there’s a good bit of NSFW language, just as a heads up) which you can view in the full video here. Let us know if his talk inspired you to try out some new strategies or training regiments in the comments after you watch.