Street Fighter 6 is quickly becoming one of the most highly anticipated games for next year. Not only is it the next entry in Capcom's long-running franchise, it seems like it will be to improve on many things from its predecessor. Early previews for Street Fighter 6 impressed quite a lot of fans and critics, and the announcement of heavily requested features such as rollback netcode and crossplay have gotten fans excited. Street Fighter 6 is also touting something for the single-player-focused crowd of the fighting game space: a new adventure mode known as World Tour.
Street Fighter 6's World Tour mode has the player making their own custom character, which they can use to explore various locales in the Street Fighter universe such as Metro City. The game's director, Takayuki Nakayama, went a little more in-depth about how the World Tour mode would work in a recent interview with IGN Japan. He stated that this was indeed intended for inexperienced or casual players of fighting games who wanted to explore the world of the franchise. Nakayama also made comparisons to Shenmue, another game that had a similar premise of open-world exploration with fighting game combat mechanics.
For the uninitiated, Shenmue had started out as a Virtua Fighter RPG before eventually branching out as its own IP. The game still retained the engine of Virtual Fighter, so any battles that the player would partake in would utilize 3D fighting game mechanics. When the interviewer indirectly brought up Shenmue's similarities to Street Fighter 6, Nakayama stated that while it wasn't a direct influence, it was possible that it was in the back of the team's minds while they worked on the game.
Nakayama notes how influential Shenmue was, stating that it had a "big impact" on him. With the similarities between Shenmue and Street Fighter 6 however, he jokes that the team could have added capsule toys for the player to collect, much like in the former game. Nakayama reiterates that the World Tour mode is going to "defy genre labels" and hopes that the interviewer, who was a big fan of Shenmue, tries it out.
While Street Fighter 6 is looking to be one of 2023's most anticipated fighting games, the Shenmue series has gone mostly dormant aside from an anime adaptation for the game this year. Shenmue 4 doesn't seem to be in the works, according to creator Yu Suzuki. While it's likely Street Fighter 6's World Tour mode can be seen as a spiritual successor to Shenmue, fans will have to wait to see if these comparisons end up holding weight.
Street Fighter 6 releases in 2023 for PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
