Every time I hop into a lobby in Street Fighter 6, it feels like I’m one of the only people who has an avatar that looks just like a regular guy. This game’s character creator is wild, folks. You can create near-perfect recreations of just about anyone, or you can make some weird little guy, and if I’ve learned anything in the past few weeks of playing this game, it’s that Street Fighter 6 fans love a little freak and sowing chaos within the lobbies.
In Street Fighter 6’s e World Tour story mode, you can use signature attacks within the lobbies, meaning you’ll have people shoryukening and hadokening with their friends as they search for and wait for an arcade cabinet where you queue up for fights to open up. But you can also do Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick attack, which has your character spin on their head and propel forward. It’s hilarious to watch, and it also is kind of required to progress in World Tour at one point because you have to use it to cross a gap and have no other means of jumping across a chasm. Because it’s so silly, some fans have taken to using it to get around in the lobbies.
YouTuber Majin Obama coordinated a lobby-wide group spinning bird kick off a balcony, and it was pure, unbridled mayhem. This is the kind of nonsense Street Fighter 6 lets you get into between powering through your opponent’s drive impact at the arcade cabinet, and it’s delightful.
Even when players aren’t running around and attacking the air, the wild monstrosities people are making stand out. Street Fighter 6’s avatar creator is so thorough you can pretty much make anyone you want. Its powers can be used for good, because no matter your body type you can make a character that looks like you as there’s not a lot of limits on your options. But it can also be used for evil, and my god, people are doing that. Videogamedunkey has a video on it, and I cannot focus on a thing that was said because I’m so distracted by the proportions of his created character. Go off, Street Fighter 6 community. Keep making weirdos to punch and kick NPCs with.
Honestly, the lobby antics are some of the best uses of the avatars in Street Fighter 6, because as we talked about in our review, the World Tour mode has a lot of neat ideas and some excellent social elements with the main cast, but gets caught up in a weird RPG grind that doesn’t highlight just how strong the core fighting game fundamentals are in this game. It’s entertaining but becomes one of the weaker aspects of the game as it goes on. But it did give us all this nonsense and let me thirst-text Ryu, and for that, it was worth it.