I don’t know that I can stress enough the importance of choosing your main character in a fighting game. You’ll learn combos, setups, and system mechanics with them. They’re your partner through the whole process of learning any new game, and that means they’ll have a profound impact on your overall experience with said game. For that reason, it’s imperative that you find a character that meshes with you.

Unfortunately, as I write this, I find myself sitting at a crossroad with my main character in Street Fighter 6. I’ve been playing Manon since the game launched back in June of last year. I’ve had a lot of good times playing as her too. Her fighting style, which is a combination of Judo and Ballet, is very entertaining visually, and I’ll never tire of seeing her dance with her opponents while throwing them.

Using Manon's level 3 super against Cammy in Street Fighter 6.

However, I haven’t found myself enjoying the process of playing Street Fighter 6 as much lately, and I think Manon is part of the problem. In fact, I’d argue she is quite a large part of the problem. I feel like I have to play her in a way where I’m constantly taking huge risks. This was fine while I was playing in the lower rungs of the ranked ladder. Taking a huge gamble, and having it not pan out wasn’t a big deal because you can often afford to make several mistakes while playing in lower ranks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t hold true in the higher ranks of Street Fighter’s online play wherein a single mistake could put you in a game losing situation. And that doesn’t feel great.

On the flip side, it also doesn’t feel great to win by way of gambling constantly. Sure, sometimes you get a really good hard read, and immediately deploy the appropriate hard call out for it. That’s not what I’m doing a lot of the time though. Instead, I’m taking huge risks, and hoping they pay off. Manon’s kit feels like it heavily encourages, and rewards this type of play, which is why I’ve fallen into piloting her this way. However, I don’t find it as satisfying to win in this way.

As a direct result of these feelings, I’ve found that I’m developing a lot of animosity toward Manon. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this feeling, and I know what it means: I’m having a character crisis. This term commonly refers to when you’re stuck in a line of thinking that you can’t improve at a game with your current character. This will directly impede your ability to meaningfully continue learning, which is just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone when they’re actively interested in playing any kind of competitive game.

So where do we go from here? How do we cure the character crisis?

Well, there are 2 methods. I already tried the less extreme, which was to take a multi-week break from playing Street Fighter 6. The only time I touched the game was during my local FGC’s weekly meetups. Sometimes putting some distance between you and the game can give you some much needed perspective, and help to restore a healthy mindset.

Unfortunately, playing Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak for 3 weeks straight didn’t do much for me. I mean, Sunbreak was fun, but I came back to Street Fighter, and found I was even less impressed with Manon.

Okay, it’s time to exercise the more extreme measure: choosing a new main character.

Admittedly, I was very reluctant to pursue this option, but after some prompting from a few of the folks from my local scene, I felt a lot more confident about it. They asked what type of characters I’d be interested in playing, and what I liked about May from Guilty Gear Strive as she was my main character for that game. With their help we narrowed the 20 something roster of SF6 down to 4 potential candidates: Ryu, Marisa, Cammy, and Honda. Each for slightly different reasons, but this gives me a bit of a range to test the waters with.

Practising combos with Ryu in Street Fighter 6.

Now that we know the whom, let’s talk about the how. The plan from this point forward is to spend a week, or longer depending on how I feel, playing each of the aforementioned characters. I’ll go over their movesets, learn a handful of basic combos, practice said combos, and try my hand at playing them during our weekly meetups. If I feel so inclined, I might even pop into some online ranked sets too. This isn’t rocket science, so I can see how I feel as I work through the process.

Hopefully throughout this whole fiasco, I’ll find a new character that I enjoy playing so much that I won’t want to stop after the week is up. In a worst case scenario where that doesn’t happen, I can re-evaluate how I feel, and see if I’m up for returning to Manon, or if I want to continue trying other characters out. Trying other characters is likely to give me a lot of perspective, which can actually help to cure a character crisis without requiring you to move onto a new main character. Either way, putting forward a little, or a lot of, effort should help to shake me out of the funk that I’ve been in lately.

So that’s my grand plan to cure my Street Fighter 6 character crisis over the next month. 

I also intend to document the whole process, which will be a bit of a new experience for me. Typically I play games, let my thoughts gestate, and then write articles several weeks after the fact. Instead, I hope to capture more unfiltered thoughts, so I have an accurate reflection of my feelings that I can refer back to in future. Plus, it might make for an interesting series of articles. That’s the hope anyway.

As always, thanks for reading, stay safe out there, and I’ll see you in the next one.