Fighting gamers are eating good: I've never been so happy to see the genre flourishing during Summer Game Fest

GamesFightingStreet Fighter 6Fighting gamers are eating good: I’ve never been so happy to see the genre flourishing during Summer Game FestWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Capcom)

Street Fighter 6�s Year 2 pass reveal with Mai Shiranui, Terry Bogard, M. Bison and Elena

We’re truly in the next generation of cool-ass fighting games, folks. It’s been just over a year since Street Fighter 6’s launch kicked things off, and the 12 months since then have been a real sweet time for fighting game fans.

Despite that, I was surprisingly giddy to see just how packed the first 30 minutes of tonight’s Summer Game Fest presentation was with hot fighting game news. Street Fighter 6 came barrelling in with a fantastic anime cutscene of Luke and Jamie before we got a shock SNK season pass reveal with both Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui joining the Year 2 DLC roster. We were then smacked with capo fighter Elena, which is fitting considering Tekken’s Eddy has recently joined the fray, before M. Bison was given a spectacularly badass reveal. They just can’t keep a dead man down, huh?

(Image credit: SNK)

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

Then finally, at the 35-minute mark, we were greeted with a trailer for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, the first new entry in the Fatal Fury series in26 freakin' years.That’s almost as old as me! We got an awesome reveal of pirate B. Jenet, a woman I most definitely did not have a tiny crush on when I first witnessed her in King of Fighters Maximum Impact 2 (okay, maybe a little bit.)

The trailer was snappy, colourful, and filled with enough hype to carry my excitement for what I felt was a rather tepid remainder of the showcase. The funny thing is, these are all games that are already out, or that we already knew about. Yet I couldn’t help but feel a weird sense of pride at just how much these three reveals gave Summer Game Fest an uplifting start, at least for me.

Yet they still repeatedly fail to break ground in a more meaningful way, though things certainly have been changing betweenCapcom’s $1 million prize potfor Street Fighter 6 and Esports World Cup offering the samefor its own fighting game tournaments.

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(Image credit: Spike Chunsoft)

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero

Ultimately, I feel like it all goes towards bringing fighting games back to the forefront. We’re eating damn good with these trailers, after all. Terry and Mai are excellent crossover picks for Street Fighter, and the Year 2 passseems to be going down pretty damn wellwith fans over on Twitter. Although there’s still a lot of classic Street Fighter characters absent from the roster, it’s nice to see M. Bison return, and I’m sure there are some Elena enjoyers out there too.

Sparking Zero and Fatal Fury are looking incredible in their own right, too. With both serving as the return of long-absent series, I hope it encourages more fighting game developers to dig into their back catalogue and bring back some old favourites. Also, I know it’s only been six years, but I think this all leads to the perfect time for a Soulcalibur 7 reveal. Please Bandai? Well, a girl can dream.

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