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The story
A thread titled “Take a look at the current character usage rates in Street Fighter 6” popped up on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G (Anything Goes Live) board, and posters had a field day dissecting the numbers. The thread lit up with surprise that Zangief — long an unpopular pick throughout the series — is ranking near the top again this time, plus a fun bit of trivia: Terry, famous from KOF, actually originated as a Street Fighter 1 character.
What people said
He's been buffed little by little — not the best in the game, but he's high-spec now.
He's actually in the running for best character right now.
Say what you want, but he's always near the top of the usage charts.
Did Zangief's popularity start with SF4? I feel like he used to be in the unpopular tier.
He got nerfed a bit but he's still top-tier. Honestly there aren't any weak characters in this game to begin with.
Terry's top tier right now.
Ryu's usage rate stays near the top even when he's weak, though it depends on the rank bracket.
Well, those characters belong to a different company.
He was originally a Street Fighter character who ended up moonlighting at "the gallery" (画廊, a pun on 餓狼/Garou, aka Fatal Fury).
In SF2, Ryu and Ken were like the second-weakest after Zangief.
There's never been an era across the whole series where Ryu counted as meta-defining, must-pick material.
No way!? Terry wasn't even in the first game, was he?
Apparently this guy who only shows up on the title screen is Terry's original design. He wasn't properly implemented as a playable character until Fatal Fury.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GVUZpIwagAApMEz.jpg
I can never really tell the difference between that and KOF. Who's even the main character in KOF again?
Isn't it Kyo?
Come on, everyone knows Kyo Kusanagi.
"Heh, bet that lit you up." (his famous catchphrase)
For KOF, I'd say Kyo and Iori are basically the main characters. But the game itself is an SNK all-star crossover, so all kinds of SNK characters show up.
He's not actually strong. He's just got a huge fanbase of diehards who play him no matter what.
He came back in Capcom vs. SNK 2, though.
You don't know about Zero 3 Upper?
She's popular across the board, regardless of gender.
Blanka's a strong character but nobody wants to play him 🥲
Cross-company character collabs are the big trend in fighting games right now.
Then where does that leave Lily and Kimberly, who look even younger?
Cammy looks like she has a lot of freedom, but once you actually play her she feels stifling and weak.
Background and Key Points
Zangief has been Street Fighter’s designated joke pick since the earliest games — a slow, no-projectile grappler whose entire kit is built around eating chip damage to land a command grab, and for most of the series’ 35-plus-year history he sat at or near the bottom of tournament tier lists precisely because that playstyle punishes any mistake severely while offering little reward against a competent opponent who just runs away. Street Fighter 6, released by Capcom in 2023, changed the equation with its Drive system and rebalanced grapple mechanics, and Zangief has consistently shown up near the top of the game’s usage-rate charts ever since — a genuine reversal that surprised even longtime players in the thread.
The actual disagreement in the thread wasn’t about whether Zangief’s numbers are real — nobody disputed the data — but about what the numbers mean. One camp (post 67) argued high usage doesn’t equal high strength: Zangief simply has an unusually loyal fanbase that keeps picking him regardless of win rate, so usage rate is measuring devotion, not power. Nobody in the thread offered hard win-rate data to settle it either way, so the thread ends in disagreement rather than resolution.
What’s likely to trip up readers unfamiliar with Capcom’s roster history is the Terry Bogard tangent: he did not originate in Street Fighter as a playable fighter. The “Street Fighter 1 Terry” claim refers to an unused/background design sketch that only appears on a title screen, later repurposed when SNK built Fatal Fury (Garou Densetsu) as a spin-off using Capcom’s leftover concept art — a well-known but easily garbled piece of trivia, and the thread’s discussion of it (posts 53, 71) already contains some confusion between “concept origin” and “he was a cut playable character.”
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Good News] Take a Look at the Current Street Fighter 6 Character Usage Rates.”
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