(edit from the future: click here for initial impressions 2.)
breaking this into multiple categories: general game stuff (including feel, UI/UX), drive system talk, and lol juritime
hiding the rest under a cut because it's a LOT of words but basically this is where it's at: game's good, I like it a lot.
general game feel:
- the sound design is great. like really great. things sound like they hurt when they hit, and that does a lot for experience overall.
- music is a++ too.
- the character creator is pretty clutch, too. at least a middling selection of black hairstyles, a LOT of variety in body builds available.
- a lot of characters feel like they have a good variety of cancelable normals and that's really good for reasons relating to the drive system (will talk about that later) but also for just letting characters do things.
- movement speeds are just about right, too. getting into and out of range (esp. as juri) feels nice by street fighter standards.
drive system:
- now that i've gotten to play with it directly, i can say that starting the round with your drive meter full & linking EX moves to it is also contributing to the "let characters do things" vibes, and i like the decision a lot. the main thing with SFV was that you had to walk a tight economy between doing EXs or cashing out for critical art; that's an understandable constraint but one that you can definitely feel pulling hard on you in pinch situations, and a lot of characters only got things to do with V-Trigger. now, though, we can just go in and do vibes from round start, and that feels powerful & a big change from SFV. very, VERY good.
- it's funny that i picked up sin kiske in guilty gear strive when sf6 gave every character in this game gazelle step lol. more seriously though, drive rush is a major reason why i was talking happily about cancelable normals, because you can drive rush out of the ones that can be special canceled, and you can do it out of a parry as well. a very good gap closer, and as sin himself has proved, a great way to extend pressure with the right setups.
- i also think it was pretty slick to condense the stun system into the drive meter AND to make stun only applicable under extremely specific circumstances. previous street fighter games either hid it entirely or made it an individual value per character--now it's visible, still partially affected by the hits you're taking over the course of the match, and generally most heavily affected largely by your own actions--if you're pressing too hard on your drive actions, then you're going to put yourself at risk of burnout faster, and then if you get cornered by a drive impact during burnout, that's when you get stunned. it does make me wonder how they're going to deal with characters that've generally had their fragility represented by lower health and stun values in the past (i have no idea if characters have universal health values), but we'll have to see about that.
juri juri juri time
- ok big one here. this game feels like it's really nailed the general idea of "juri needs prep of (something) to get her game going" without going over into "juri cannot do anything of note if she doesn't have prep of (something)". street fighter 4 was pretty flexible on this front, sf5 was not, and sf6 seems to have split the difference. she still uses her axe kicks to gain fuha stocks, but rather than each stock enabling her to use a specific move, fuha stocks just make certain moves better (and having at least one fuha stock lets you tack some extra damage onto her super art 1). this really ties into the theme i mentioned of "let characters do things" because juri very much couldn't without serious investment. and now lacking that doesn't completely shut down her cool stuff (because the drive system's super flexible).
- related to this point, the rework of her fuha charge kicks (QCB/214+any kick) has been done in a way that makes "starting her engine" a lot easier and lets her maintain an even balance spend on keeping fuha stocks if you know how to spend them; there's a step in on 214MK that lets you convert from most medium buttons, so you have a very straight forward combo structure if you already have a fuha stock: 5MK(1) or 5HP/2HP xx 236MK, then link into 2MP/2MK xx 214MK to get back the fuha stock you spent; ex Fuha charge is a launcher that lets you go into super art 1 AND do the powered up version at the same time. it's super elegant with the right starters.
- of juri's 3 command normals, two are special cancelable. they become incredibly useful for fuha charges as a result, but also make great drive rush starters if you need them. this gets even wilder when using juri's super art 2, as it makes a number of her normals that weren't cancelable, cancelable--and that means that she gets drive rushes off of many more things during super art 2. this is exactly the kind of universal system strengthening that a good universal system should provide, and character kits should supplement in some way when possible. everyone should be able to benefit from a universal system in a fighting game without being completely dependent on it.
i'm gonna play the hell out of it tonight and tomorrow though. more results later o7