Surviving the Character Crisis – Week 1: Ryu

Welcome back, folks.

As you may recall from last time, I’m currently trying to resolve the character crisis I’m experiencing within Street Fighter 6. The short version of the story is that I’m no longer finding Manon as fun to play because I feel like I need to constantly take risks with her in order to play effectively. How true that statement actually is might be up for debate, but my feelings on the matter aren’t. Ergo, I’m trying out a subset of the remaining cast members to see if someone else gels better with me.

After identifying that I was going through a character crisis, the plan to move forward was simple: I’d spend a week (or more) playing Ryu, Marisa, Honda, and Cammy. Those 4 characters were chosen by folks from my local FGC scene as potential replacements for Manon based on the aspects of characters I’ve previously played that I enjoyed. Now all that remains is for me to actually put the time in.

To kick off my journey, I decided to begin with Ryu. He was the poster boy of Street Fighter from the second game until the most recent where Luke has replaced him. Regardless, Ryu is an icon of the franchise. He’s a no nonsense character that focuses purely on your fundamental understanding of whichever iteration of Street Fighter you happen to be playing him in. 

I’d like to think my understanding of Street Fighter 6’s fundamentals is OK given I’ve played 300 hours of the game, but I still wasn’t sure where to start with Ryu. The easiest place seemed to be popping into training mode, so I could get a feel for all of his normals, and special attacks. I obviously knew some of his attacks already thanks to the overwhelming volume of Ryu players I’ve fought online, but I’m not naive enough to assume I knew everything about him.

As it would turn out, my assumption that I didn’t know everything about Ryu was very correct. He has a much wider selection of tools than I anticipated. There are certain properties of his moves that never come up while fighting Manon, so I was never made aware of them. For example, Ryu’s Tatsu (214K) has projectile invulnerability. Obviously, this never came up while I was fighting him with Manon because she doesn’t have a projectile attack, though it’d be really funny if she did.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that Ryu has a lot of tools. In fact, I’d argue that Ryu has a straight-forward answer to every single potential problem that a player can encounter within Street Fighter 6. This was the first thing that really stood out to me about the character, even though it seems obvious in hindsight. Ryu was the face of Street Fighter for almost 4 decades. Typically characters with that level of notoriety are used as the bedrock from which the rest of the game is built. Then everyone else is added, and tweaked after the fact.

However, nothing about Ryu felt particularly exceptional, despite the variety of tools at his disposal. He really epitomizes the phrase “a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.” On one hand, I liked how I was able to repeatedly solve problems with Ryu on the fly. However, the whole thing felt very clinical. It was very 1 + 1 = 2, if that makes any sense. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it meant that a lot of my matches with Ryu weren’t particularly exciting.

Speaking of playing matches: yes, I did end up playing other players with Ryu. I could barely do any combos, but I played Ryu across 100 (or more – I wasn’t counting) games. Most of these were casual sets online, or at my local scene during our weekly meet-ups. The results were very mixed. Obviously, I could barely do combos after only a week of practice, which was a little frustrating if I’m being honest. However, I absolutely curb stomped some players despite my execution inability. It turns out, there’s no replacement for fundamentals, so I won a lot despite only being able to do 2 punches and a kick.

Before we continue, I actually want to expand on that frustration that I felt with combo execution because it absolutely affected my view of Ryu. I’ll be the first to tell anyone that I’m not a big combo execution guy when it comes to fighting games. I have to spend weeks, if not months, learning new combos through rote memorization. I like actually doing the combos, I just find the process of learning them through mindless repetition to be very…repetitive. Go figure.

Obviously my inability to internalize combos quickly does act as a bit of an impediment to this whole fiasco. I tried to be mindful of that, and remind myself that I couldn’t be expected to master Ryu in the span of a week. However, it still stung every single time I dropped a combo.

And boy did I drop a LOT of combos with Ryu.

The short version of this story is that Ryu’s attacks lend to a completely different combo structure from Manon. This kind of broke my brain as I kept trying to confirm, and combo using Ryu’s short-range medium punch, as opposed to his heavy punch. This would lead to less damage overall when it worked, or it’d just outright drop stuff when it didn’t. Either way, I wasn’t having a great time as I kept tripping over myself while trying to do combos, and that added a lot of unneeded friction to my week.

However, when I did actually manage to land a full combo with Ryu – my god – he dealt so much damage. Most of Ryu’s heavy buttons can be chained together for some wicked high damage whenever your opponent makes a critical mistake. For example, there was a sub-optimal combo route, which mirrored one of the routes I use with Manon, and this did almost 12% more damage with Ryu than it does with Manon. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the amount of games that I’ve lost while my opponent sat on a sliver of health because I couldn’t decisively close out the round while using that aforementioned combo. That’s all to say that there’s a practical advantage to Ryu’s high damage output.

Writing good transitions is hard, and I couldn’t think of one for this final point: Ryu’s attacks are kind of stubby, and I didn’t like that about him. Obviously he has less range than Manon. She’s a giraffe in disguise with huge, but slow attacks. By comparison, Ryu’s normals are faster, but cover less space. In most cases this was fine, but I noticed a few scenarios where I couldn’t properly punish my opponents, or keep them where I wanted because I couldn’t quite reach them. This was most noticeable while fighting Akuma, and Ken, the 2 other generalist characters, which really compounded the issue for me.

So, after learning what tools Ryu has, practicing some combos, and flailing like a cat with an American single stuck to its back, we come to the question that this entire article was meant to answer: did I enjoy playing Ryu?

Not exactly. And I don’t really feel as though I have a great reason for ultimately coming to that conclusion either.

I’m not really sure how to articulate it, but I just wasn’t vibing with Ryu. He’s fun enough, but there wasn’t anything that made me go, “wow, I really want to keep playing this character.” Having a simple answer to everything that Street Fighter 6 can throw at you is nice, but that’s not the sort of thing that lights a fire in me. It won’t keep me motivated through the weeks of rote memorization that I’ll need to learn new combos. I know I’m in the minority here as Ryu is one of the most popular characters in the entirety of Street Fighter 6. However, I don’t know that he’s the best fit for me.

Regardless of my personal feelings, I’d rate my experience with Ryu as being positive overall. There might even be value in occasionally playing him just to refine my existing knowledge, and execution of Street Fighter 6’s core mechanics. I just can’t see a future where I seriously play this character for a protracted period.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my week-long stint playing Ryu, and I’ll see you in the next one where I’ll discuss how playing Marisa went.