That headline is genuine; it very well may be the case that the Street Fighter community is at a point (at least within the particular feel and flow of Street Fighter 6) where we’re comfortable with sequences like the one you’re about to watch involving Rashid, but it’s certainly worth giving second thought to.
We stumbled across a quick clip from the incredibly talented Evo 2024 runner up, NASR|Big Bird, as he hits a combo that, by itself gives Rashid a particularly potent advantage over a lot of his roster mates. It’s cool and it’s obviously effective, but we immediately couldn’t help but wondering if this kind of thing is just too much.
Cornering your opponent is an advantage in virtually every fighting game since it takes away movement options, makes the defender more predictable, and can often lead to extended corner-only combos. On top of all of those perks, Street Fighter 6’s Drive Impact mechanic makes having your back to the wall even more of a potential death sentence.
With this in mind it’s no wonder that some of the best characters in the first year of the game have been those who can most efficiently carry foes to the corner.
In our clip Big Bird is cornered and knocked down by an Akuma opponent who flubs wake up pressure timing and winds up eating a counter hit wake up jab.
This relatively common occurrence is followed by a coast to coast combo that corners Akuma, leads into a safe jump set up for Rashid, and has a net cost of just over 3 bars of Drive Gauge:
Rashid corner to corner combo into safe jump setup pic.twitter.com/iIE1pCHh91
— NASR | Adel (@Bigbird_fgc) August 1, 2024
That was all off of a defensive jab. You’d be forgiven if you felt like this particular ability is a little imbalanced in terms of risk and cost/reward, especially when you consider how advantage in the corner is one of the intentional perks of Marisa’s level 3 super/Critical Art.
She gets you cornered from anywhere on screen with a +14 advantage follow up (and doles out a huge chunk of damage) for spending three bars of Super meter. Rashid gets you cornered from anywhere on screen and gets a full safe jump follow up for 3 bars of Drive Gauge.
It’s important to view a character in the context of their entire kit, (Rashid’s bonkers level 2 Super doesn’t really help his case here, though) but it doesn’t feel unsafe to say that the ability to corner an opponent from anywhere should come with a little more cost or risk than this, even in a vacuum.
This is the kind of advantage that seems to skyrocket characters to the top of the tier charts and might be something Capcom wants to reduce or make more costly to those who are capable soon. They otherwise risk leaving players feeling cheated, as it’s one thing to lose to something that feels balanced, and another to lose to something that so conspicuously does not.
What do you think? Should characters like Rashid and Ken have as much horizontal carry as they do for as cheap as it for them to do it? Are there other characters who have this powerful ability that need to be looked at? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.