BGM: Ryu Stage - Takenobu Mitsuyoshi Vers.
I wouldn't call myself a big fighting game guy. I'm not one to avoid playing them, but I mostly just pick up the controller and mash. When I was a kid, I'd play Virtua Fighter 2 on Saturn against my dad and he'd pick Lion, who would stand a little lower than other fighters, causing some attacks to innately go over his head and effortlessly stuffing even the most valiant of mashing on my end. Later on we'd get Soulcalibur 2 on Gamecube and I had an entire adventure mode to mash my way through, unlocking weapons for every character that would make my mashing hit harder and faster - What need is there to learn anything else when Link can 3-hit people with the Megaton Hammer? On the 360 I got Dead or Alive 4 for some reason, and that game truly doesn't care how much you mash - Even after struggling through the arcade mode enough times to believe I could go online, I literally never won a match against another human being. I lost so bad I discovered that they put in zero gamerscore achievements for ranking down and going on a 20 game loss streak. Nice folks playing though - People in DOA4 lobbies don't mind if you're the guy they can take a free win off of.
And that was it for a long time - Occasionally a game like Skullgirls would come around, claiming accessibility and a real tutorial, but learning terms didn't do much to help me with struggling to do basic special move inputs and just reverting back to my old habits. It wasn't until many years later, when Dragonball FighterZ was announced, that I suddenly wanted to play a fighting game again. DBFZ won me over entirely on aesthetic - That it was a team-based anime fighter designed as a marginally more accessible Marvel vs Capcom meant nothing to me, because I could play as Trunks and Yamcha and they would do moves lifted straight from the show. I knew the autocombo system was there for guys like me, but I had a hand-me-down fightstick and a chip on my shoulder, I wanted to play a fighting game. So I practiced. Beating my head against every character's trials until the combos came out, and then starting over so I could reach some amount of consistency. I had to learn that trials are decent at teaching concepts but aren't super-practical in actual fights, so I looked up a combo on youtube and spent hours recreating it, even going so far as to leave a comment on the upload saying "hey this doesn't work when I do it" and discovering the mistake was that I was practicing against a short character and against those I had to modify the string a bit. Y'know, just change which buttons I needed to press depending on the situation at hand, that easy thing that we can all do.
And after ninety hours of practicing, playing against AI, playing against friends... Well, I still wasn't very good. But I was better! I could think "I need to do a fireball here" and my hands would do a motion that, most of the time, would produce a fireball. But my friends were moving on as the shine wore off and it became clear that DBFZ not actually the Marvel 4 they all wanted it to be, and I didn't yet have the confidence to get walloped by strangers online. I'd given it an honest shot, but I'd missed my window to learn fighting games when the truly great ones were new and popular, and sometimes that's just how it goes. But this Street Fighter 6 game... I really think it's something special. I'm going to play it a lot. I'm going to post about it a lot. And this post was meant to kick that off, establishing my bona fides as a proper button masher. I'm going to learn how to play SF6, and I believe if I can do that, anybody else can too.