Street Fighter V

I got this early on as a rental and played through the story mode and a few other modes, and frankly found the game embarrasingly bad. Not that it was terrible in its own right, but there was no content. There was no way to actually play a regular Street Fighter match-up, for instance, and there weren't very many characters at all. And, in fact, some of the ones that they did have looked embarrassingly bad. What in the world happened to Ken's face and hair on the character select screen, for instance? That didn't even look like the same character at all.

(As an aside on Ken, I've been amused noticing recently that in Street Fighter IV, Ken's animated intro and ending in arcade mode consistently shows him with brown eyes, but literally every character model, including all colors and all alternate costumes, has him with blue eyes. The shade of blue varies a bit from bright blue to turquoise leaning into green, but it's still always blue. In Street Fighter V, on the other hand, Ken's Story Mode cutscenes and artwork invariably show him with blue eyes, but all of his character models have brown eyes. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but it amuses me nonetheless.)

Anyway, Street Fighter V was a major bust with me, and if what I see online is any indication, fans generally didn't react super well. Nonetheless, as more and more content started being added, and issues with the gameplay were tweaked and addressed, in general, the game seems to have warmed up to the fans a bit more. In February 2020, it released a Champion Edition of the game, and I bought it a few months later at a discounted price as soon as I heard about it. The general consensus seems to be that this is the game Street Fighter V always should have been, but sadly the franchise had damaged their brand and reputation by having such a badly botched roll-out and taking so long to fix it--four years, in fact, between launch and the Champion Edition update. The good news is that the Champion Edition had a good enough reaction from the fans that what was considered a dead game is now scheduled to get another season of DLC content, including at least three new stages and five new characters. Which means that I probably sprang a little bit too soon after all, but that's OK. I can no doubt get that stuff added at a reasonably reasonable price and overwrite my game to whatever final version it ends up being. Today Street Fighter V has 40 characters, four short of Street Fighter IV's total, but with five more coming, it will inch just barely past that mark when it's all done.

As I said on another page, although obviously the hardware is better on the PS4 than the PS3, its arguable if the game looks better than its predecessor. Gone is the comic book animation style with a more "realistic" look, that actually ends up looking really plastic and chunky in most cases, and has really bad clipping and other issues of that sort. But in spite of the different art direction approach, I don't think it necessarily looks worse in most cases, except for the really badly designed characters like Ken, who seems to have been hit with some kind of ugly stick over and over again by a designer who hates him. Too bad; for Street Fighter V they finally updated the default look for most of the characters, mostly by creating new outfits and/or hairstyles and making that the default, with the defaults of the past being relegated to "story" outfits or "nostalgia" outfits. But that was hit or miss. Notably, they didn't update Ryu's look, even though the "battle" outfit, dubbed by the fans "Hot Ryu" without a shirt and with a beard really should have been the natural evolution of the character. Given that Ryu's been in a number of games over the years, spanning years of in-game time too for that matter, the "Hot Ryu" look just seems what a character getting closer to 30 or even older by this time should look like. In spite of Ken's supremely ugly facial model, his new default costume is an improvement; the red karate top that he wears is now hanging loose around his waist and he's got a black compression shirt on. Akuma was also hit by some designer who obviously hated him; his traditional look being turned into what looks like a flower with an ugly pseudo-human face in the center of it. Seriously; what was that designer smoking? Luckily, his "nostalgia" outfit, or whatever exactly they call it, looks like his traditional one, but many of the really cool iterations he had in Street Fighter IV weren't tapped. Bison's hair has gotten white, Dhalsim has grown a long white beard and now keeps a turban on, etc. Sadly, the updates are a mixed bag of good and terrible ideas.

As with every other new title, they've picked a number of classic characters, hoping to catch most of the fan favorites, but also introducing a bunch of new ones; either whole cloth new, or new to the series as playable characters after having a history in some other game in the past (Final Fight sub-boss Abigail being a great example of the latter.) But they also mixed up a bit who carried forward; for example, Birdie makes his reappearance (now turned into comically fat comic relief. If you think that that's comedy, I guess.) while Adon and Gen, the Street Fighter I characters from Street Fighter IV do not. The Final Fight and Alpha characters are also shuffled a bit, including some that are new, as mentioned just above, and its the first game other than the odd roster of Street Fighter III that is missing a few of the Street Fighter II characters (it does have all of the original characters and bosses; it's New Challengers that are missing, specifically T. Hawk, Fei Long and Dee Jay.) Some of the new characters are pretty cool, but some are just comically bad, especially F.A.N.G., who've they've tried to position as the newest big villain and right hand man to Bison himself. Although the personality of a greasy suck-up with a tremendous yet brittle ego is, sadly, a personality that I think everyone has met before, which gives his presence a kind of realistic pathos that is extraordinary. Especially considering that most of the rest of the story is really pretty hoaky. Others are only technically new; Kage, for example, hardly seems to be a different character from Evil Ryu of the past, differing only in the fact that Evil Ryu was a "dream," what-if character, and Kage is the actual separation of the dark side of the Force from Ryu into what is supposed to be an actual new mirror character, not merely a what-if.

The stages all look great too, although there are fewer of them still. Like Street Fighter IV, there no longer is a total correlation between a character and a specific stage; or at least not an obligatory correlation, and even when there is some kind of correlation, most stages are shared by more than one character. Of course, that depends on which version of the arcade mode you're playing (see below). Many of the stages are actually 3D remakes of various classic stages; in fact, half of the Street Fighter II stages are adapted almost exactly as they were. It would be nice if these stages had different lighting effects to represent the different times of day that color swaps in the past came out with. If you look at the original Street Fighter II title and the subsequent offerings, you'll notice that many of them had more than one time of day, or other pallette swap options. In this game, I think only Ryu's original Street Fighter II stage has this feature, unfortunately. These weren't necessarly exact replicas too, though--while Guile's stage in Street Fighter II had an F-16, which was a current Air Force craft at the time, the Street Fighter V version has an F-18, for example. Some other classic stages were adopted here and there, such as Sakura's Street Fighter Alpha 2 stage and the thunderstorm field also from Street Fighter Alpha 2. (Come to think of it, only the latter is "classic" although the former is, at least, old. They should have had the waterfall stage from Alpha 2 if they wanted to truly have a classic stage.) The rest of the stages are new, and many of the new ones feature the potential for special knockout finishes where the knocked out character will go out of the ring and hit something. This is actually something that a number of Fatal Fury games had done in the past, although obviously it looks better here. It also means sometimes that if you do a special knockout but there are still additional rounds before the whole thing is over that you might fight on a substage; for example in China if you get knocked into the restaurant, you then start the next round in the restaurant instead of out in the street. Like many past stages, there are a great number of character cameos in the stages; the Ring of Justice stage, for instance has a whole bunch of Final Fight characters, even including Belger himself. Who I supposed survived the fall from his penthouse window. Puts him in good company along with Geese Howard, I suppose.

The gameplay has also turned into something that works fairly well. Critical Arts replace super combos, and work much as they did in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, although not quite as powerful and they charge a little more quickly. There are three levels, but you can only do your super when all three are charged; the division is to enable EX versions of special moves; a rather neat innovation of the Street Fighter III games which have carried forward since then. The V-skill and V-trigger moves are a variety of new moves or power-ups that are added to the game and work differently for every character. You have to pick them, like you do Ultra Combos in Street Fighter IV, although they are considerably toned down relative to Ultra Combos. In earlier iterations of the game, some of the V-triggers in particular were considerably overpowered in the hands of people who really knew how to use them and chain them with other moves into unblockable combos, but by now they work considerably better. Although Street Fighter IV was meant to hearken back to classic Street Fighter II gameplay in many respects, relative to what had come before, Street Fighter V makes the same claim relative to Street Fighter IV. I don't know that this is necessarily a good or a bad thing in either case; before Street Fighter IV came out, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was my favorite game in the franchise. And just because they say that doesn't mean that that's necessarily what the players will think or feel about the gameplay either, for that matter.

Although the game started lacking all kinds of modes, it now has quite a few including a very robust Arcade Mode, in which you can pick an arcade mode that mimics each of the subseries in the franchise. Mostly what this means is how many fights you have to fight before you get to the boss, who the boss is, and who the characters are that you'll be able to pick and end up facing off against. Street Fighter I Arcade Mode, for instance, couldn't do a lot of the original Street Fighter I characters, because besides Ken and Ryu themselves, only Sagat and Birdie are in this game, but they substitute a bunch of Final Fight characters instead since they have more or less the same vintage. There is one bonus stage included in the arcade modes, and it's a variation of the barrel game, not crush the car, unfortunately (of the two, I always preferred crush the car.) All of the Arcade Modes, regardless of which subseries you pick, allow you to pick your next opponent in most matches from two choices, similar to how Street Fighter III was. They do have two different "levels" of presumed difficulty, so you can decide if you want to go for more points, or play it cautiously and pick the allegedly easier of the two opponents offered. There's a bunch of other modes too, most of them fairly predictable, like vs CPU, vs another local player, vs an online player, survival mode, etc. The biggest completely new mode is a Story Mode, complete with loads of voice acting dialogue and other interesting elements, that actually makes following the story much easier than it was in, say Alpha 3 or IV. This is a fun mode to play, although I'm not sure how much replayability it really has. I did it years ago when I rented the game when it was fairly new, and I did it again when I got the game again just recently; I don't know that I'll ever play it again. There are also minor story modes for each character, which just serves to give them some flavor, some character, and show how they fit into the tapestry of the story. Spoiler alert: some of the characters don't, really. There's still no good explanation whatsoever for why Blanka and Honda are in this thing at all, for instance. And some characters have more importance than you'd expect them to have; I thought Karin was kind of a throwaway rival to Sakura; a kind of Ken to her Ryu, that had only had one appearance to date. Somebody involved in the creation of this story mode had her as his favorite character, obviously.

All in all now that it's fully filled out, the game is a contender for one of the better ones in the entire franchise. I still think that I like Street Fighter IV and the Alpha games better, but it has finally decided to step it up and attempt to make a bid for the top spot.