A true fighting evolution, and this time everyone’s invited
Capcom could have simply refreshed the fighting roster and polished up the visuals. That, for many, would have been enough. Capcom could have just added some new moves and tuned up the overall gameplay. That too, for a lot of players, would have been enough. But for a developer like Capcom – one that, if it didn’t invent the one-on-one fighting game, certainly honed its execution into an art form – that wouldn’t have been good enough. Not even close.
And so Street Fighter V isn’t an incremental update, or a polished improvement. It’s an exhilarating, across-the-board clean sweep, which resets, rebuilds and revitalises everything you thought you knew about modern Street Fighter. And, rather wonderfully, everything you thought you knew about Capcom, too.
High-voltage action
The difference is immediately obvious, long before you start plumbing its unfathomable depths, and before you begin to discover and experiment. Without even knowing the giddy delights of the game’s new, overarching systems, Street Fighter V feels fresh. Even picking up series stalwart – and oft-undervalued all-rounder – Ryu sends an immediate shock through the fingers and right up into the brain. He’s faster, more aggressive and yet easier to handle.
He just flows around the screen, his slicker movement and friendlier, more accommodating combo timings dropping out lightning-fast barrages of beautifully animated, seamless abuse via a consummate ease-ofuse. Sometimes it feels as if he’s translating your will directly into on-screen action before you’ve realised it yourself. Street Fighter V is a relentlessly responsive fighting game, as delicate in its handling as it is robust, as clear and communicative in its feedback as it is spectacular to behold.
But before long, that lightning speed will become literal, as you discover the first of many bold, brave changes that make Street Fighter V the most radical evolution the series has undergone since Street Fighter II begat the glorious complexity of SFIII’s Super moves, parries and dashes. But while Street Fighter III, for all of its brilliance, is the game that pushed Street Fighter away from the mainstream, making it the preserve of the hardcore only, Street Fighter V’s ethos seems pitched only toward a triumphant bid for accessibility.
That ‘literal’ lightning? Hit both strong attack buttons as Ryu, and if you have your V-Gauge filled – one of two new meters in Street Fighter V, which fill, as normal, while combat actions are carried out – he’ll suddenly burst with electricity, fists aglow with crackling intent. In this timelimited ‘V-Trigger’ state, his key moves will change. His fireball will become heavy artillery, capable of crushing an opponent’s block if charged-up before unleashing. His Dragon Punch will become more damaging and push the owner of the jaw it crushes further towards a deadly stun-state.
But let’s not get too granular, too soon. While it would be easy to blind you with details, with nitty-gritty talk of move properties and precise status changes, the specifics of what the V-Trigger does – which are radically different for every fighter in the roster, from power boosts, to standalone moves, to brand new movesets – aren’t ultimately what really matters.
What really matters is what the V-Trigger represents. Like all of Street Fighter V’s new systems, it feels built with the specific intent of throwing the game’s depth and versatility wide open to all, through ease of activation, clarity of purpose and immediate gratification. A door to a vast, sprawling realm of possibility, with a very easy-to-turn key. And once through, you’re free to explore exactly as far as you find fun.
A brand new focus
This open, democratic approach to Street Fighter is most immediately evident in the death of Street Fighter IV’s Focus Attack. Previously activated by tapping both medium attack buttons, the Focus’ ability to absorb and nullify any incoming hit – not to mention the way it could cancel animations to create otherwise impossible combos – was supposed to be the game-changer that overhauled Street Fighter’s back-and-forth game. And for some, it absolutely was. The problem was that the Focus, if used to its real potential, demanded serious work and no small amount of high-level skill and dexterity.
As the only portal to some of Street Fighter IV’s most showboating techniques, that made it somewhat of a bottleneck – the sticking point at which the less hardcore players were separated from the elite and forced to watch on as others enjoyed parts of the game that they could not.
In Street Fighter V, the Focus Attack is conspicuously absent. In its place, both literally and figuratively, is the V-Skill. Activated via the exact same button press, this is the philosophical opposite of its predecessor, designed to open up swathes of deliriously varied, anarchically asymmetric possibilities where its precursor mandated strict adherence to certain universal rules.
Think of it as an instant, one-press special move for each character. Tap the buttons and out it comes. No stick-waggles or bar charging required. No barrier to entry. Your granny could activate it. But the best bit is that the V-Skill does something completely different – and very powerful – for every fighter, delivering moves and tricks so disparate that they often feel pulled from completely separate games.
Ryu, for instance, gets a Street Fighter III-style parry, able to quickly deflect and retaliate against any number of incoming hits you have the dexterity to thwart. M Bison? He’s slower and heavier now, but that doesn’t matter, because he can catch fireballs and throw them straight back. Chun-Li can jump at bizarre angles on command, making her aerial game even more deadly and fiendishly unpredictable. Vega has a spinning dodge and counter-attack. Ken can outright sprint at his opponent, closing distance unexpectedly to start a combo out of nowhere. Heck, he can even dash during a combo, reducing the gap from a medium-range hit to deliver otherwise infeasibly close-ranged follow-ups.
Suddenly, Street Fighter V can shock, surprise and utterly disrupt the expected flow of play at any moment, and all it takes is a tap of two buttons. Street Fighter V wants everyone to have the best that it has to offer, so it hands it to you gift-wrapped from the off.
Critical changes
This all hits a dizzying crescendo when we reach the Critical Arts. The SFV replacement for Street Fighter IV’s Ultra Combos, these spectacular, ultimate attacks – again, activated once a gauge is full – look superficially similar to their precursors, but come with one fundamental difference. They’re comparatively very simple to pull off, and can be tagged onto the end of combos with ease.
Where Street Fighter IV tempered its big finishes with crippling start-up times, making them all but impossible to cancel into without mastering the arcana of the Focus Attack, launching Critical Arts is usually just a simple case of slipping in a couple of extra stick-flicks as you hammer home a combo. In fact, they’re so accommodating that during your early mashing sessions with the game, you’ll often add staggering Critical finishers to smooth, flowing hit-chains by accident (before you realise what you did and reverse-engineer your process for your next match).
Again, Street Fighter V is laying it all out for you, giving you every tool it has to dish out punishment, look cool and above all, have fun, right from the start. It knows that play is the most effective form of learning, so it wants you to be able to play with everything, so that you can start learning fast.
The result is a game that, whatever your level of fighting game experience and skill, is immediately enjoyable and exciting. In fact, scratch that. It’s an instant, blistering hoot of an experience, and one that feels like it wants you to have the best time you can have at any given moment. The quality of that time will, of course, only grow as you come to understand and master more nuances, techniques and strategies. This is still an immensely deep rabbit hole.
Even after countless hours, we’re still discovering radically new ways to play just with our one main, chosen character, and we know we’re only tickling the surface of getting started. But more than in any other fighting game in recent memory, that process of understanding and mastering begins almost instantly, and evolves exponentially with near each and every fight.
Prize fighters
Speaking of evolution, Street Fighter V itself is going to grow in a very different way from before. Forget Turbo Editions. Forget Super Editions. Forget big DLC. They’re gone. They’re the past. On PS4, there is only, and will only be, Street Fighter V. Because that’s all you’ll ever need.
Its starting roster of 16 characters is smaller than SFIV’s initial 19, but it’s designed with purpose, every character different, every one with clear intent and function. But there will be more. Probably many more as Street Fighter V grows over the course of the generation. And you won’t have to pay for a single one of them.
Reviving retro fighters’ spirit of unlockable fun, each of SFV’s new roster additions – there will be six dropped in throughout the first year alone – will be up for sale on their day of release, but will also come 100% gratis if you have the sufficient amount of in-game currency (called Fight Money, though anyone who’s seen the movie knows it should be Bison Dollars) to hand.
Earned through gameplay, Fight Money should mean that those dedicated enough to crave regular new additions can get them for free, while the newly relaxed, drip-feed approach to roster updates will take the pressure off and keep the community together. Where big, infrequent, SuperHyper-Mega-Ultra Editions used to force players to upgrade wholesale or be left behind, now there’s no rush. Not into the new fighter? Don’t buy them. You’re still playing the same game as everyone else. Can’t afford them? Save up some Fight Money and get them later. You’re still playing the same game as everyone else.
Friendly Fire
And this caring, sharing, spirit of friendship and community (forged by smashing each other in the face) culminates in Capcom’s most impressive and ambitious online offering to date. Street Fighter V’s online multiplayer hub, the Capcom Fighters Network, offers a live, global heatmap of current throwdowns, agonisingly detailed player stats (how did they win? How many jabs did they throw? Who’s their favourite character and their preferred techniques?), friends lists, and the opportunity to formalise, track and challenge rivals in real-time, wherever and whenever they’re fighting.
With match replays and a news feed in there as well, it has more useful social functionality than Facebook, and makes even heavyweights such as DICE’s Battlelog and, dare we say it, PC’s Steam, feel a little pedestrian.
But in Street Fighter V, as with all things in SFV, it just makes sense. It feels necessary. It feels like the only approach that’s good enough. Because Street Fighter V isn’t just another fighting game. It isn’t just an improvement. It’s the most exciting, fresh, vital fighting game in years, and one that wants everyone to enjoy it, together, in any way they want, for a very long time to come. PS4 exclusives don’t get much bigger than this.