Street Fighter V is loaded with meaningful changes and improvements to Street Fighter’s divine infrastructure. As a game—a package sold under the assumption of a finished product—Street Fighter V is destitute and disappointing. Its value and service will expand and evolve someday, though one has to question the wisdom and motive of releasing Street Fighter V in its present condition.
It’s difficult to find a fighting game with as much cultural cachet as Street Fighter. Controversial decisions have left certain entries unloved (or unappreciated) in their respective times, but the series is free of the grisly mistakes that haunt past and present peers. Street Fighter V doesn’t need an insane advertising campaign projecting it as the future of e-sports because that position is already assumed. Street Fighter V is an expected heir to an untouchable throne.
In order to function in 2016 (and beyond), Street Fighter V needs to be a modern commentary on the state of fighting games and the implicit rules of Street Fighter. Under this measure Street Fighter V is an unmitigated success. Sixteen fighters—eight returning from Street Fighter 4, four returning from past games, and four newcomers—round out a cast that feels as balanced and asymmetrical as any in the series.
Definition is what makes Street Fighter V’s characters function but attention paid to frame-specific minutia allows them to shine. Street Fighter commands a lineage of mechanics that have been pulverized and beaten into a flat surface and, while balance changes are inevitably in order once the game is subjected to a mass audience, the time and care that went into its conception is palpable in every frame of Street Fighter V’s animation. Built for professionals but appreciable by anyone, Street Fighter V’s fighting system is among the best and brightest of its namesake.
The titular V-system is primary adjustment to Street Fighter’s framework. The most relatable of which are V-Skills, which function as unique special moves for each character. Execution isn’t difficult; there is no cost, and engagement is as simple as pushing both medium attacks simultaneously. Ryu’s V-Skill, for example, reprises his Street Fighter III ability to parry incoming attacks and Rashid gets a projectile-evading ground roll. Executing V-Skills feeds the V-Gauge, another meter that can be consumed to temporarily power-up your fighter. The V-Gauge can be tapped to unleash a V-Trigger, which either greatly powers up your existing moves or, in the case of R. Mika and her tag-team partner Nadeshiko, unleashes a single super move.
Before Street Fighter V, I hadn’t spent a serious amount of time with Street Fighter since losing a few months to the Genesis version of Super Street Fighter II in 1995. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, but it was around that time that Tekken, Virtual On, and Virtua Fighter started to get in the way. 3D fighters stole my heart, but retained an appreciation for what Street Fighter continued to do. With that in mind, I can infer that Street Fighter V’s mechanics and general flow feels battle-tested for the professional enthusiast and even the most ardent members of the fighting game community. I’ll probably never keep pace with the frame-specific attention to detail demanded by a few of my friends, but I’ll know enough to have fun with others at my skill level.
What’s harder to forgive and understand is Street Fighter V’s reluctance to engage anyone other than a specific portion of its potential audience. Street Fighter V’s story mode is composed of regrettably acted vignettes peppered between three or four single-round battles with each character. You can blaze through all sixteen characters in less than two hours, and the material on display isn’t especially compelling. It feels like a preamble to a proper story mode, which is probably the intention considering that feature is slated to arrive later this summer.
Failure to include a fully-featured story mode isn’t as bad as it seems. As many inroads as Mortal Kombat made with its last two entries, the last thing a fighting game needs is an exhibition of dialogue and plot. What I was expecting, however, was the standard arcade mode that’s lined every fighting game for over two decades. I want to face ten or whatever people in a row under a proper set of matches and rules and Street Fighter V, for some baffling reason, isn’t interested in doing this. Out of the box, right now, there’s no way to fight a normal first-to-two match against a computer-controlled character.
Other single player content is present. Three different difficulties outline the Survival Mode, which progressively increase the number of successive battles you have to fight with the same health bar. There’s a fairly helpful practice mode, though I wish someone, somewhere would think of a way to teach the theory and nuance behind Street Fighter V’s deeper mechanics rather than just refine execution. Daily Challenges are set in place in the future, but they’re absent from the present version of Street Fighter V. When you start tabulating existing content against unrealized or unfinished features the scales start to tip toward the latter.
Fight Money is Capcom’s solution to fostering a long term relationship with Street Fighter V. Earned by either completing challenges or competing online, Fight Money is an in-game currency intended to be used to purchase downloadable content in the form of (presumably) costumes, stages, and additional characters. This is a workable alternative from releasing four different boxed retail products and keeping up with a litany of patches and downloadable content. How aggressively characters and stages are priced (soon you’ll also be able to exchange real money for these same items) may affect how well this model is received. As of right now none of this is available and the store itself isn’t active until March.
A caveat with Fight Money; even in single player modes, you have to be connected online to earn it. This is especially difficult when notices like these appear when the game is started. Launches are tough and these things will likely be ironed out over time. Battling people online, when it connected appeared to fare a little bit better, avoiding the lethal amount of latency expected from the uncharted waters of cross-platform play. Regarding my performance; I got worked. Repeatedly. Because I am terrible at Street Fighter V, but functionally online play felt like it was in order.
Does Street Fighter V want to succeed as a game or embody the competitive spirit that’s expected to carry through the next decade? As a product it feels woefully inadequate, and almost insulting with its missing or unavailable features and cash-hungry content model. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, Killer Instinct, seems to be doing well enough, but the machinations driving this content feel disingenuous inside Street Fighter V. This is neither free-to-play nor is it early access. It is a $60 retail product. It’s egregious that Street Fighter V presumes to live in a world where it can be all three.
At the same time, the lifeblood of Street Fighter V—fans added and ingrained with each iteration—may not care about any of this. They won’t need online play, ancillary single-player content, training modes, or other distractions. Part of being a commentary on the state of fighting games includes Street Fighter V’s place at fighting game tournaments and on the couches of friends old and new. For that direction—that very specific purpose—Street Fighter V is an ideal fighting game. If only it hadn’t come at the cost of everything else.
