Up until about two weeks ago it was widely accepted that Ken Masters was decidedly one of the top three characters in Street Fighter 6, but these have suddenly become quite murky waters as a handful of the world’s strongest and most storied competitors have begun arguing otherwise.
While attending FAV Cup 2023 in Japan 00|Phenom has been asking some of the country’s strongest players their personal opinions on the game’s top five characters. We’ve seen a handful of these mini interviews now, all placing Ken outside of the top five (save for Rohto|Tokido, who placed him fifth) and are sharing the final as Phenom posed the same question to Hibiki, the world’s strongest Lily player.
A number of the players claiming Ken isn’t all he’s cracked up to be are indeed themselves Ken users, and when this is the case it’s all but certain that the rest of the community will take it with a grain of salt as no one is likely to shed all their biases surrounding the character they main.
Still, players such as GyoGun|Moke who uses Chun-Li, Marisa main Saishunkan|Shuto, or JP player FAV|Ryusei all share the opinion that Ken isn’t among the game’s top five.
We now get a perspective from someone who uses Lily, a character widely accepted to be amid the bottom of the barrel.
The Native American grappler who plays as an obvious evolution of T. Hawk has a relatively hard time getting the party started and keeping the damage going compared to fighters like Ken, but will this play into Hibiki’s opinion of the fiery shoto?
Give a listen to his top five and let us know what you think in the comments afterwards:
HibikiTheBeast, the best Lily player in the world, gives us his top 5 strongest characters in Street Fighter 6 pic.twitter.com/tuhSnUe1Zw
— Arman Hanjani (@PhenomSF) January 4, 2024
We spoke about this direct topic on this week’s episode of Talk and Block, which you can listen to right here if you’re interested in diving deeper into the discussion: