Video Game

Street Fighter 6

Art style, typography, and music

Created on
Updated on
Reading Time
2 mins
Word Count
600 approx.

Aside from RPGs, I like 2D-fighting games, especially Street Fighter. “Hadoken!”, “Shoryuken!”—sure you can. It feels like I’m getting old together with Ryu, Ken, and Chun-li. I miss playing Street Fighter II Turbo when I was a kid. I remember playing the game with my siblings at home, and one of our neighbors who lives upstairs joined us.

Those were the days. We played the game even during the exam. I never liked studying books; I read manga and played games when I was a student. We weren’t going to the arcades. Back then, triads, or gangs, ran those places. We were good kids, we didn’t go there.

Art Styles

As I recall, the game runs on DOS. “Why wasn’t there a shortcut icon on the desktop, where I could double-click the game’s icon to play it?”, I asked. Years later, I was old enough to play Street Fighter III 3rd Strike in the arcade. I will never forget the game’s opening sequences for both titles. They were simple, but beautiful. The beats of music matched the animation perfectly. Who needs 3D VFX when 2D animation rocks? I’m still in love with hand-drawn 2D sprites and character art.

Capcom released the Street Fighter 6 opening movie a while back. The theme is street graffiti mixed with hip-hop, where it uses vibrant colours with grunge and bold typography. It looks like the game’s direction returns to the good ole days. It’s so much better than the previous title, where the eSports theme was heavily incorporated to its design. I love the new character’s illustrations and the art style. If there’s an art book, it would be an instant buy for me.

Typography

Each of the character’s names has some typographic treatment that matches the personalities of the characters. The colour scheme also varies based on the character. Some fun facts: there was some controversy over the logo of Street Fighter 6 because it used a modified stock image. They updated the logo later. I kind of took a liking to how they designed the “6”. It’s a hexagon and it could read as “VI” when rotated. Overall, the design feels much more on point than in Street Fighter V.

A hexagon shaped symbol of number “6” with stylized grunge effect and the wordmark Street Fighter overlay on top of it
Capcom updated the logo for Street Fighter 6. Image courtesy of Capcom.

There’s a narrator who voices the message in the opening movie, where it syncs with the visuals. It doesn’t need high-budget 3D rendering, but it achieves a good taste in aesthetics. It reminds me of the time I was doing school projects using After Effects. I wonder if I kept those files around.

Music

I don’t know much about music. I just listen to them if they’re good. There’re some tracks that have very sick beats. Ryu’s Theme—Viator, Chun-Li’s Theme—Not A Little Girl, and Kimberly’s Theme—Ninjastar Pop. There’re indeed very good.

Final Words

I don’t think I’m going to play the game any time soon. Maybe be I’ll hold-off until the super final ultimate version to be released.

One last thing. I really want to share with you how the art in games, the use of typography, colours, design, and music—can be a source of many inspirations. Even if Street Fighter isn’t your cup of tea, still, worth your time to check it out. It might spark some ideas.

This is #Day90 of #100DaysToOffload.

  1. On a family computer given to us by relatives, we played on a pirated version of Windows 98. We had no concept of what a license was at the time. Of course it was wrong, but that was more than 20 years ago. So, please don’t be too harsh on me. ↩︎