Now that we know what Season 3 has to bring us in Street Fighter 6 — Sagat, C. Viper, Alex and Ingrid — it’s a perfect opportunity to look into the characters of the past and how they may translate to Street Fighter 6.
Anyone who knows me is aware that I couldn’t be happier. Alex is my favorite Street Fighter character and was the main reason that kept me playing Street Fighter 5 for as long as I did, so his return to Street Fighter 6 is amazing news for me and any other members of the Alex nation. So what can we likely expect from the wrestler powerhouse when he comes out next Spring?
The absolute core tenet of Alex as a character is that he’s supposed to be an all-rounder. Much like Ryu before him, Alex was the protagonist in Street Fighter 3 and as such the plan was for him to have a little bit of everything.
That’s why he, despite being a wrestler, isn’t really a grappler as much as something of a brawler. He has motion inputs, charge inputs and a command grab at his disposal. Although he’s usually not a particularly strong character tier-wise, the idea of him is that he can do a lot of things, but not better than the ones who specialize in it.
It’s highly unlikely that they’ll shift from this philosophy for him in Street Fighter 6, especially given the nature of having every character so far possessing most of their old moves and even sometimes a few new ones, so we’ll likely see Alex come equipped with most of everything you remember from Street Fighter 3 and Street Fighter 5.
Of course, one of the main things about Street Fighter 6 as a game is that the core mechanics are extremely strong, so in a lot of cases the particular abilities of your individual character matter less than how they use the system mechanics.
One thing which people often say is an absolute must for being a good character in Street Fighter 6 is a cancellable crouching medium kick, since that allows you to have a long poke which you can Drive Rush cancel from leading to good damage and positioning.
While they obviously could shift things around for Alex, his crouching medium pick has typically just been a poke move and not a particularly fast one at that. In Street Fighter 5, he could cancel it to his V-Trigger 2 move DDT, but not to regular specials, so most likely that’ll stay true in Street Fighter 6 as well.
But all hope is not lost — even if a crouching medium kick to Drive Rush tends to be seen as the great equalizer in Street Fighter 6, one thing which Alex actually does have which was one of his best strengths in Street Fighter 5 was far-reaching normals which were good at stuffing the opponent’s approach.
Both his crouching medium punch and crouching medium kick were very efficient in this regard, so what they lacked in startup they made up for in being good tools to wall your opponent off with and making it difficult for them to approach. What that means is, these buttons could potentially be very good for stuffing Drive Rushes as well.
Even if he doesn’t get a huge amount off of them, it would still be high value if they can serve as a deterrent to opponents raw Drive Rushes since it’d make your footsie game a lot stronger, hopefully meaning that opponents will have to be much more careful throwing out even their cancellable normals.
Another aspect of Alex which is central to him is, because of the variety of moves at his disposal, he tends to be something of a mixup machine who keeps you guessing. While his options typically aren’t all overly strong, the sheer wealth of them means you can keep your opponents on their toes.
The way Alex’s command grabs were balanced in Street Fighter 5 compared to grappler characters like Zangief and Abigail who tended to have a harder time getting in was that Alex’s Power Bomb did less damage than the beefier characters’ command grabs, but more importantly, he wasn’t able to start any okizeme after them because he ended up too far away.
In Street Fighter 6, this is already the case for a grappler character like Zangief, though in exchange his damage has been significantly heightened.
Most likely they’ll just tone down Alex’s command grab damage in general and keep the lack of okizeme, but honestly, given the prevalence of parrying in the game and throws getting a bonus on Punish Counter, there’s a big chance that even with the weakness of no oki, the relative nimbleness of Alex coupled with having a command grab at all will prove a significant threat in pressure situations.
One area I’m most interested in seeing is how they handle his supers. Since Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike has three supers already, it’s likely that they’ll use those specifically for Alex, but it’ll be interesting to see which one goes where and how they’re implemented.
It seems likely that to give him an extra threat factor they’ll put the Hyper Bomb as his level 3 to give him a really big move to threaten with once he’s fully loaded and that he, similarly to Zangief, can still combo into it for those finisher combo situations.
Stun Gun Headbutt is an interesting one, because it’s a super in Street Fighter 3 which got made into a regular special move in Street Fighter 5, though obviously much weaker.
We could definitely see them including both the special move and the super for Street Fighter 6, considering the super version is multiple headbutts in a row and way more brutal.
The Stun Gun Headbutt super is also a perfect candidate for level 2 since it’d be an optimal anti-projectile super, so I think it makes sense to imagine that’s what Capcom might do.
This would leave his by far most utilized super, Boomerang Raid, as his level 1. It makes sense, it isn’t an overly flashy move and anyone who’s played Street Fighter for a decent amount of time has seen it more than enough times to be kind of done with it already.
In my mind, the basic gist is that Alex is unlikely to use the system mechanics to their full potential. His drive rush is probably not going to be overly oppressive since he’s only nimble in comparison to other command grab characters and his long-reaching normals are rarely cancellable so he probably won’t be able to utilize that part.
However, Alex tends to have a tool for every situation even if it isn’t always the very best tool. Between his approaching specials like Slash Elbow and Air Stampede, his command grab Power Bomb, anti-air Air Knee Smash and his combo-efficient Flash Chop and Spiral D.D.T. (assuming it’s more like Street Fighter 5 than Street Fighter 3), his variety of options are going to give him a lot of wiggle room.
That’s without even considering what new things they might give him as well — most characters in the game have gotten new tools to play with as well, so it’s entirely possible that some of Alex’s old moves may have new functionalities or that they give him something entirely new on top of everything.
One more point I want to focus on is that while Alex’s Drive Rush itself probably won’t be too special, the moves he’ll let out from the Drive Rush have potential to be extremely scary. The very fact that he’s a command grab character makes his normals a lot more scary when they can become positive on block.
He also has an overhead and most of his moves tend to have pretty good range, so he might be able to do very short drive rushes and still reach with far normals like his standing heavy kick to start scary situations that way.
Finally, despite not being that strong in Street Fighter 5 (or Street Fighter 3 for that matter), I consider his Lariat to be one of the absolute strongest buttons in all of Street Fighter 5.
Given that normals are rarely plus on their own in Street Fighter 6, plus with no Crush Counter in the game, it’s unlikely it’ll pack the same punch here but from Drive Rush? The Lariat might be making a comeback as an absolute menace move once more.
All in all, I’m excited to see Alex once his turn rolls around, likely about 9 months from now.
He has enough tools where he could carve out a different niche of strong character even if he won’t fit the typical criteria for what makes a Street Fighter 6 character good, it all just comes down to how everything fits together.
More importantly than that… He’ll probably be a lot of fun. That’s all I really want, at the end of the day.