Of course, in addition to being the strongest single indicator of player skill, footsies are the most pure, fundamental, and important part of Street Fighter gameplay. What if, however, someone told you that both your focus and reliance on footsie play in Street Fighter 6 was robbing you of potential wins on a regular basis?
Content creator Chris F has dared to go out on a limb in his latest video and publicly proclaim that footsies might not be all its chocked up to have been; at least not when it comes to the way the community tends to talk about it.
Infil’s goated fighting game glossary starts its “footsies” definition with: “A complicated, often nebulous term that refers to the battle for controlling the space in front of you, often by using good pokes.”
Footsies takes place when both characters have the most freedom to do the most things, where potential is at its maximum in a given fighting game round, and where advantage is widely mined out of smart strategy.
To thrive in this part of the fight is certainly to have immense advantage, but has the fighting game community put such great an emphasis on this nebulous concept that players have become distracted from or even encouraged against fleshing out other, arguably more important, facets of gameplay?
At least when it comes to Street Fighter 6, Chris F would say it has. In his new video Chris reminds us of the power of learning our characters’ post-footsie strategy and set play, which he divines might be a crucially missing piece of a lot of players’ puzzles.
The argument is by no means to cast footsies by the wayside, but if you’ve been struggling to be as consistent as you’d like to be in Street Fighter 6, it very well might be that you need to re-balance your approach and work on refining other parts of your play even beyond the almighty footsies.