Mai in Street Fighter 6 isn't just good—she has me howling for Capcom vs. SNK 3

Capcom has pulled off a hell of a feat with Street Fighter 6. First, it made that's both proudly trying new things and reverently faithful to its history. And now it's taken two fighting game legends from its '90s rival SNK and integrated them so lovingly, I'm tempted to say they're better here than they've ever been in their own games.

I won't say that, because someone who loves SNK's King of Fighters more than life itself would no doubt smash me in the face with some definitive proof that actually Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui are stronger in 1996's Real Bout Fatal Fury. But at least to my eye as a casual player of these games for more than 20 years, Street Fighter 6's second guest character plays brilliantly.

I spent about 45 minutes last week at a Capcom preview session playing as Mai [[link]] ahead of her launch on February 5 and had a blast. I'm rusty at the game—I haven't had the time to play much Street Fighter 6 since launch—so I'll leave it to the Maximilian Doods of the world to deeply analyze Mai's capabilities. But anecdotally, she seems very strong. I jumped into a half dozen matches playing as Mai and was able to take on mid-level CPUs without too much difficulty until I faced off against another Mai. She cleaned my clock.

Instead of boring anyone with my mediocre skills, I've included a video of level 7 vs. level 7 Mai CPUs fighting each other (that was the strongest CPU Capcom would allow me to record) and another of her facing off against Terry.

The last time Capcom's developers got to handle this character was nearly 25 years ago, in the great Capcom vs. SNK 2. It remains the high bar of crossover fighters to me—packed with a wild number of characters, full of different fighting systems that would change how each of them played, deep enough for the pros to tell you all the ways it's broken but juicy enough to still be a blast if you're mashing buttons and watching cool stuff happen. Now that a new generation of Street Fighter developers are here—ones who grew up playing the fighting games that Capcom vs. SNK 2 was a sort of swan song for—Terry and Mai strike me as proof that they could do a new crossover justice.

Capcom and SNK were once major competitors in the lucrative arcade business, so it was remarkable to see their characters face off against each other. But since then SNK has died and been reborn, all the money has moved to consoles and PC with online play, and fighting games have been recontextualized as a small but vibrant corner of a much, much bigger industry. Instead of competing against each other, it seems like it's in [[link]] both Capcom's and SNK's interest to champion one another's games—the more converts to fighting games, the merrier.

I think what I most appreciate about how carefully Capcom has handled bringing these two SNK brawlers into Street Fighter 6 is that they're still fighting game characters. They had to study decades of reference material to make them feel authentic, and by doing so they've slipped into the roster so naturally it's as though they've always belonged. That's actually kind of amazing in an era of gaming that has made "guest characters" feel creatively bankrupt.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was the first and last game to get away with stuffing a metaverse's worth of characters into a single arena without me rolling my eyes. Its tagline "Everyone is here" was the culmination of two decades of accumulating prestige for a game series that started out with blocky little version of Nintendo characters thwomping each other. Since then movies, TV and tech companies have gotten metaverse obsessed, while more and more games have diluted their identities by jamming whatever shiny Intellectual Property into them that will either make a buck or let [[link]] the developers play with their favorite toys from the '80s or '90s.

Post-Fortnite, . Mortal Kombat has stuffed so many movie characters into its last three games it feels more like a marketing stunt than an initiative that ever began with the question "How can we make this a better fighting game?" Sorry, NetherRealm—you really lost me with Ghostface from Scream fighting against immortal gods and androids and time witches. That's just Matthew Lillard with a big knife.

None of these other developers have really shown they have the care and restraint to go playing in each other's sandboxes. But unless Capcom wrecks the good thing it has going with Street Fighter 6 by sticking Dominic Toretto or Gumby or whoever into a future DLC, I'm ready to see this team bring back the crossover fighter and show everyone else how to do it right.