One of the wackiest specials from Street Fighter 5 has been revealed by latest trailer to be returning in Street Fighter 6
Zangief, Lily and Cammy were revealed as the final characters for Street Fighter 6's base roster in the latest trailer. The trailer only spanned for a little over three minutes, but we got to see plenty of gameplay from all three revealed fighters.
During the Zangief portion of the trailer, I was honestly surprised to see the return of a certain special move that debuted in Street Fighter 5 — the Tundra Storm. Funnily enough, the Tundra Storm was a move that was added to Street Fighter 5 via the Season 2.5 patch, released in April 2017.
For all intents and purposes, Zangief's Tundra Storm is effectively a counter. The really weird part about this attack is that it's extremely selective about which attacks will trigger the counter effect.
In general, Tundra Storm will only trigger against "horizontally-angled kick attacks." It'd be one thing if this simply worked against kick attacks, but this specification means that it will generally only work against one or two moves within each character's moveset.
Against certain characters, like Balrog (boxer), the Tundra Storm is actually completely useless (except for generating Critical Art gauge from a distance). Since all of Balrog's attacks are punches, there's no attack in Balrog's arsenal that even fits the necessary condition to trigger the counter effect.
It's believed that the Tundra Storm is based on a popular wrestling move known as the "Dragon Screw Legwhip." Reportedly, Takayuki Nakayama has stated before that the inclusion of the Tundra Storm was simply a result of Capcom staff members being fans of the Dragon Screw technique.
To me, I always thought of the Tundra Storm as being a failed experiment. Regardless, it appears to be returning in Street Fighter 6 as it can be spotted during the trailer.
If Balrog or Dudley ever returns in Street Fighter 6, we can probably expect it to be useless in that match up, assuming it retains its condition of only working on horizontally-angled kick attacks.
