Street Fighter 6: Elena’s Updated Moveset Breakdown

The question on everybody’s mind when Capcom announced Elena for Street Fighter 6 is, “Will she have healing again?”. In Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and most notably in Street Fighter 4, she could heal small amounts of her health. She was particularly good at being able to do this in Street Fighter 4, where she could heal almost any time she scored a knockdown.

This made many players have to learn to either beat her or join her, centralizing the SF4 meta around her release. To go ahead and address the issue up front, they didn’t show us much. The trailer showed Elena kneeling and using a healing ability as part of her superpower. While that does confirm healing, Elena touches the ground, and as the grass and flowers below her illuminate, she shouts the word “Healing!”. However, players still don’t know how much health or any of the fine details at this time.

The Capoeira Queen of High-Low Mixups

Elena is a master of the real-life martial arts style, Capoeira. This style is exciting to watch as it mixes dance with side-to-side movement to attack opponents from unexpected angles and at unorthodox rhythms. The challenge behind creating this character for Street Fighter has always been that Street Fighter is a 2D fighting game. So to incorporate elements of her unorthodox fighting style into the game, they had to come up with some creative methods. She has always been the queen of quick high-low mixups, using her long legs to strike opponents from outside of their effective range.

Her design in Street Fighter 6 takes this concept to the extreme. Elena has no punching attacks in the game outside of her cinematic super arts. She uses her legs exclusively to be able to keep opponents on their toes, guessing whether she will sweep low from a distance or move in and attack with one of her brutally fast overheads.

Final Thoughts

The gameplay trailer released by Capcom doesn’t show every input in her moveset and what button corresponds to which attack just yet, but game experts have been able to deduce a lot from what has been shown. She has a movement command of some sort where she rotates her body and moves forward on the screen in a fluid motion, dodging any projectiles that would have hit her during this movement. She has anti-air options, which appear to lead into combos.

All of these tools, along with the aforementioned range and speedy overheads, make her look like a speedy hit-and-run style character as of now. We will quickly see on June 6 what impact this new character will have on the online Street Fighter meta.