SF6’s World Tour is a game mode in which you make your own custom fighter—in a surprisingly robust character creator—and take that avatar gallivanting around the Street Fighter world for a martial arts RPG adventure. It serves as the main story mode of SF6, introducing new fighters to the players, as well as bringing you up to speed with where your favorite returning characters are now. Canonical this game finally takes the timeline beyond SFIII: Third Strike, so Ryu & Co. are older and wiser than in their past game appearances.

Through your avatar, you will train under martial arts masters, fight in the occasional tournament, play various minigames, acquire/wear a huge range of clothing options (which can imbue specific battle effects), pick up various items, eat various foods, and build your avatar’s stats through the experience points you gain along the way. But you primarily spend your time fighting in the streets, which after so many iterations finally makes the “Street Fighter” title literally applicable to the game. We got there, folks!

As a huge fan of Shenmue, which started out as a Virtua Fighter RPG, I was personally quite pumped for this World Tour mode. However, given how SFV’s story mode was just utterly awful—like truly, irredeemably bad—I decided to keep my expectations for World Tour mode (and SF6 in general) fairly low. Sure it looks fun, but just how bad is the storytelling this time around? After all, outside of the custom character creation and customizing your fighter’s fighting style with classic special moves, I didn’t see too much in previews to get overly hyped about.

And yet, to my surprise, I found myself really enjoying World Tour mode in SF6 quite a lot. It’s no Street Fighter Shenmue, that’s for sure. The story is quite silly and frankly idiotic in places. At one point an NPC literally comments on how stupid your avatar has to be. But it’s a lighthearted adventure and game scenarios lean into the fun side of things whenever possible. It also features some incredibly cool interactions with SF characters, particularly the classic SF2 World Warriors.

The main reason to like SF6’s World Tour mode is that it is, in fact, a Fight Fight game. The story mainly takes place in Metro City, the Mad Gear gang plays a prominent role in the plot, and multiple characters from the belt-action brawler make appearances throughout. Truly this is a new Final Fight game posing as a Street Fighter RPG. And that’s awesome, because we all love Final Fight.

Training under Street Fighters as your martial arts masters is a genuinely cool idea, and I am happy to report that it’s executed incredibly well. Personally I was extremely hyped to train under Ryu, and was not at all disappointed. But training with other classic characters was surprisingly fun as well, particularly Chun Li, Dhalsim, Ken, and Zangief.

Increasing your “bond” with each martial arts master is a fun way for the game to deliver more story and character-building for specific fighters. And since it’s mostly optional, you can spend your time getting to know the fighters you care about, and just ignore the ones you don’t. (Sorry Blanka, if you stopped being funny 20 years ago.)

Regarding the game world, Metro City is a pretty huge environment, as is the fictional Asian nation (citystate?) of Nayshall. But those two are the only fully explorable locations in the game. All other locations you can travel to are simply SF6’s background stages, with only the visible area from a regular 1-on-1 match available for your traversal. I genuinely wish Ryu’s stage, Genbu Temple, had been more fully fleshed out for free exploration. Because it has a turtle pond and that rules.

Since World Tour is where the bulk of SF6’s storytelling happens, it is chock full of nods, homages, and deepcut references to games of Capcom’s past. And it’s not just past Street Fighter and Final Fight games either, plenty of other titles get referenced here and there.

Multiple NPCs appear to be references to the Breath of Fire RPG series, including your rival Bosch and his sister Yua. Fellow Nayshallians named Njomo, Stoll, Rwolf, and Rasso are from Breath of Fire as well. I particularly like how you get to face-off with some long forgotten characters, such as Retsu from the original Street Fighter, Carlos Miyamoto from Final Fight 2, and several members of the Andore Family—though not Hugo—who are recognizable enemies from Final Fight.

World Tour mode was built with Modern Controls in mind and—while I don’t mind the effort to make the game as accessible as possible—the number of special moves your avatar can employ at one time is extra limited as a result. This happens because Modern Controls don’t differentiate between Punches and Kicks; it has just low, medium, heavy attacks and a special move button. So you can’t select a Quarter Circle Forward + Punch special and Quarter Circle Forward + Kick special at the same time, because the game tells you they share the same input. Unfortunately this means your avatar often won’t be able to use all available special moves from one fighter, because their techniques will use the same motion input for different moves; one using Punch and another using Kick.

I immediately ran into this issue with Ryu’s Hadouken and High Blade Kick because they are input with a Quarter Circle Forward + Punch & Kick respectively. My preference would be to execute projectile attacks with the classic Quarter Circle Forward input, but not if it means I can’t use the absolutely badass High Blade Kick. That Donkey Kick is my favorite special move of all time and must be in my avatar’s moveset. Luckily Guile, Chun Li, and DeeJay each have charge-input projectiles, so there are alternative options for throwing fireballs.

Jamie’s style of drunken boxing is legitimately cool.

I also find it annoying that in World Tour battles L1 + R1 is hardcoded to call in backup from your martial arts masters. This would be fine if you’re using Modern Controls, but is fairly likely to cause problems if you use Classic. In my case, I have L1 and R1 mapped to LK and LP respectively, the two buttons used to input a throw. So pretty much anytime I have super meter available and I try to grab an opponent, one of my SF buddies will jump in and clobber them. That’s a funny surprise every once in while, it’s gets old pretty fast—especially when I plan to unleash a super move but never get the chance.

Additionally there are some specific challenges (side-quests?) which require using Modern Controls to complete. I guess that means I’ll never 100% complete the game, because I don’t actually plan to ever play them.

Another negative aspect of World Tour mode is the non-human enemies that you encounter. There are flying drones, floorbound roombas (autonomous vacuum cleaner robots), and ill-tempered sentient refrigerators. Not to mention the “Self-Propelled Servers”, which are just more refrigerator enemies going by a different name. These robot designs are intentionally stupid and every fight with them is incredibly tedious. They show up multiple times in main story missions as well, so they can’t be avoided.

Now I understand what the devs were going for with their robots. The drone enemies are always flying so they force the player to practice their anti-air special moves (Dragon Punch, Flashkick, etc.) The roombas skitter along the floor, so you get to practice timing your low attacks. And the fridges are…uh…big lumbering targets for projectile attacks? Plus it certainly adds some outlandish variety to the enemy-types you face in a fighting game. However, battling home appliances is simply not fun. Also, even if you thought the robots were funny at first—and I didn’t—that joke wears out fast when you encounter these things so often. It probably would’ve been best to use the robots one time as a joke, and then never see them again.

Accending Mount Vashal. This is the good stuff!

By the end of Word Tour mode, it definitely represented the bulk of my 40-hour playtime with SF6, and I had genuinely enjoyed the experience. I felt that the story was silly and serviceable, though certainly not amazing. There were a few memorable beats, and areas like Mount Vashal were just legitimately cool, perfectly hitting the world traveling martial artist aesthetic. I also really liked the setup of your avatar having their own rival in Bosch, and the pair exuding their own Ryu and Ken style bromance.

In terms of the narrative though, I felt there were some major tonal clashes, as if Capcom couldn’t decide how silly or serious they wanted the story to be. For example, one minute you’re fighting cartoonish street gangs with literal cardboard boxes on their heads (a look that is just so dumb), and the next you are helping terrorists advance their suicide bombing plot. Most interactions with the Mad Gear gang felt lighthearted, but almost everything related to Bosch felt deadly serious. Which is not to say that the story didn’t work at all, but it sure felt disjointed and just all over the place.

(Light) Spoiler Warning: In the story’s climatic martial arts tournament, you end up facing your old friend Bosch in the final match. His moves are suddenly supercharged and overpowered, so it kind of feels like a fight you cannot win. And sure enough, when you lose to Bosch the story will progress to the award ceremony cutscene. As it turns out, you are able to actually beat Bosch in that last fight. If you manage to do so, however, the only thing that changes is where you both stand on the winners' podium (1st place vs 2nd place); the story doesn’t actually change in any way.

All in all, World Tour mode was great, definitely worth the price of admission. But SF6 doesn’t disappoint outside of the single-player story either.

Mike and I spent an afternoon diving into the versus mode, trying out various fighters and getting a handle on SF6’s gameplay mechanics. It was incredibly fresh and fun, harkening back to SF game sessions of old. In fact, this was the first time since 3rd Strike that both of us had gotten truly absorbed in a fighting game. Mike didn’t care much for SFIV and neither of us liked SFV. It really helped that the new cast of fighters is so strong this time around. The joy of discovering how to play a new character, or learning a fun new mechanic, just hasn’t felt this effortless in a long time. Playing this one, it really feels like Street Fighter is back.

So yeah, Street Fighter 6 is the complete package. Cool new characters, fun gameplay mechanics, excellent visual aesthetics, incredible music—seriously these tracks are incredible!—and on top of all that, an extensive single-player experience with its own full story and world to explore.

If you’re looking for a new fighting game to get into, SF6 is it, without a doubt.