There’s a certain novelty that comes with the fact that SNK’s Terry Bogard has broken the mold and become the first non-Capcom figure to appear as a playable character in the more than 40 years that Street Fighter has been around, and developers made it a point to bring some of Mr. Bogard’s unique SNK style with him.
Terry has thus been designed to be filled to the brim with Easter eggs and fun references to his many past appearances, and most of the time these have proven executed perfectly, but there’s one maneuver of Terry’s that even the keenly observant Broski cannot make much sense of.
You want your guest characters to still be playing Street Fighter, but you also want to call back to some of the unique flavor of their original appearances. When Capcom brought Rival Schools’ Akira into Street Fighter 5, for example, they conspicuously peppered in some Rival Schools flair by giving her launches into air combos and incorporating some tag-team action into her Daigo Super.
Fatal Fury, Terry’s original property, has featured a lane system that allows characters to move slightly into the background or foreground as they duel in an otherwise two dimensional space.
Terry can’t quite zip into the background and scurry past his opponents in the same way you’d see in Fatal Fury, but Capcom did call back to the lane system in one of his target combos: Passing Sway.
Passing Sway is Terry’s move that, depending on the buttons you use and whether or not it lands as hit, you can use to briefly maneuver for some odd cross up interactions. It appears as though developers intended this to serve as a mix up tool, but in practice even Broski can’t figure out how to make it make much sense.
Whenever you give one character an ability none of the others have, you risk giving them an expressway to the top of the tier list. As such, developers must be especially cautious about erring on the side of such moves being less effective rather than overly so.
First of all, you have to sacrifice more damaging combo routes when confirming into Passing Sway on hit, and the benefits for doing so seem not only non-existent, but detrimental in certain cases. In a game that’s been heralded for showing more intention in individual moves than virtually any of its predecessors, the case of Passing Sway in SF6 feels fairly bizarre.
Watch as Broski puts this all under the microscope and then let us know in the comments if you’ve found the apparently elusive method to the madness of Passing Sway afterwards.