I'm not generally big into fighting games but I got to admit the hype around Street Fighter 6 got to me and if the news about the more casual friendly experience and focus on making a compelling story mode is true, i'd say its among my top ten most anticipated games for next year. Street Fighter is a very popular franchise so of course I've had opportunities to play it a little in the past but I wanted to be a bit more familiar with the series before potentially trying to get into it next year.

Street Fighter V did not really help with that at all lmao. Thankfully the next entry just looks that damn good but this game honestly didn't do a whole lot to impress. It was useful for familiarizing me with some characters but just so much of this game feels kinda generic and a bit uninspired. The story mode was okay, not being knowledgeable on the series definitely hurt my enjoyment of it but there is also a bit of convoluted anime bullshit thrown in for good measure. Most of the battles are pretty easy however there's a few that randomly spike in difficulty. You can actually skip any of the fights you want though, I'm not ashamed to say I skipped 2 or 3 of the more annoying ones. I dont have much to say about the combat itself, Im not good at remembering combos so to me its just like any other fighting game. It didn't feel sluggish so that makes it good in my book.

If one thing did stand out about this game for me, it was the characters. Despite some truly awful ones like F.A.N.G and Birdie, the flashy roster of characters kept me interested. Cammy and Guile and Chun Li and Rashid and Vega and Juri and Nash and idk, there's just a lot of very interesting characters and especially during the side stories (mini arcade mode with some story basically) I really enjoyed my time with a lot of the cast. Since fighting games usually dont put much work into their story (if they even have any) and I am not a multiplayer fan at all, the characters are usually a big selling point for me which I think makes this stand out over other games ive played, like Tekken 7, where the only memorable characters are the outlandish ones.

In the end, thats kinda all there is to say about Street Fighter V. I wish i had more to add but if you've ever played a fighting game before you've probably already experienced everything this one has to offer. I'm glad to of been introduced to some characters returning for the sequel, but this isn't gonna be one I'll look back on on its own.

Nancymeter - 64/100
Game Completion #138 of 2022
November Completion #4

The game that started it all

I came up with the username BEAUTIFUL BRUTE the day I vowed to main & stan the one, the only Miss Rainbow Mika
The most beautiful, funny, charismatic brute out there

“There’s a passion that burns in my heart
The passion to realize my dream!
It reverberates into my muscle soul!
With my strength, determination, and spirit, I’ll become as bright as the…RAINBOW!”

an absolute delight. i think we’d be best friends <3

I was gifted the "complete" edition of Street Fighter V: Champion Edition while it was on sale for like, 35 bucks. The game itself I don't have much to say on, it's fun, it's gorgeous, it has a lot of depth in it's mechanics, it's Street Fighter. There's not much I can say other than that the core gameplay itself still shows why this series is the king of the fighting game genre.

What I wanted to speak on more is what surrounds the game, because Oh My God. It's almost despicable how much advertising, and marketing, and penny and nickeling this game has bleeding through all it's edges. Half of the main menu is taken up by a giant ad for getting more SFV content and costumes, before every match starts it flashes an ad for a Capcom tourney or more additional content, you get told almost constantly that theres more you can buy. It's ridiculous. If it's trying to feel like a sporting event, it certainly achieves it with the amount of blatant advertising it throws at me wherever I look. There's definitely examples worse than this, but out of all the games I've played (that aren't free-to-play) I've never seen any that pushes you to buy and buy more this constantly.

If rated on the core gameplay itself, I would've given it 4 stars, but the core isn't the entire game. It's like a pretty gem encrusted around mounds and mounds of shit you just can't seem to get off.

Garish collection of loud, blaring advertisements and clickbait blurbs thinly disguised as an ugly Street Fighter game. The moment you boot up the game you are assaulted with capitalism and it's frankly disgusting, albeit the logical conclusion to the whole "tryhard esports aesthetica" this game tries to shoot for. Loading screens have ads. Fucking loading screens have advertisements! Mark my words, SFV's gonna do NFTs some day. It's only a matter of time.

Behind the figurative and literal iron paywall of phosphorescent nightmare capitalism, you have a middling SF game where over half the cast is DLC-exclusive. You have to jump over a metaphorical paywall only to find yourself faced with a literal one. You cannot play as most of the cast without coughing up even more money. What the fuck is this? Why is fucking E. HONDA a DLC character?? What's-- what's exclusive and elite about E. Honda, a character that approximately only six people care about ironically? What made the devs think "yeah E. Honda's hot, E. Honda's what the real gamers are willing to shill out money for?" Sure, he's always been in the series, but that's because he just kinda has to be, privileges of seniority and legacy and all that. To hide his presence behind a paywall is confusing. That's like making fucking Young Link DLC for Smash Bros. No one's gonna pay money for Young Link, Capcom!

The single-player modes are brief as hell and boring, the tutorials are garbage, command lists are hellish to look at, and this game looks fucking ugly. Fucking no one looks good in this game. Everyone looks sweaty and lubricated and greasy at all times, and there's an uncanny attempt at realism in the game's artstyle that clashes hard with the super stylized anime-esque designs. Putrid. SF4 was better-looking. With over half the fucking cast locked behind a paywall, you have to wonder: what's the point of even playing this game when there's so many better Street Fighter alternatives?

1/5. Saved from being a 0.5 because it has Chun-Li. Love her.

Game takes forever to boot up. When it finally does I'm greeted with like thirty or however many blurbs about all the new features, and daily quests, and pro tour something something. (This is borderline malpractice. Who the hell is going to able to remember all this information? The messages ought to have been spread it out over a period of time, or failing that, just omitted entirely.)

Story mode is one round per battle (lame) so you get 15 seconds of gameplay per 2-5 minutes of dragged out comic book sequences, that are needless hard to skip. I'm sitting there mashing buttons and only after a while the "press Options to skip" prompt finally appears, even though I've been hitting Options like crazy the entire time.

Command lists are really sloppily done. Command lists aren't even the first or last item on the pause menu, they're right in the middle, so you have to hit dpad down a specific number of times each time you want to look at the command lists. On top of that it makes you select the character you want to see command lists for, which is something Super Street Fighter IV also did and something I'm completely baffled by. How often would you really need to see the command lists of a character you're NOT playing as that it would worth having to go through that extra step every single time? Anyway, once you do finally get to the command lists, it's this hastily put together mish mash of commands and text, like someone looked up a walkthrough of the the game and hastily typed in what they saw.

Pre fight loading screens have ads.

I bought the base game, but it still says Champion Edition. Imagine if you decided to buy New Generation, and ended up with Third Strike with a bunch of characters greyed out.

Did I mention the loading screens have ads?? They put ads on the loading screen, for fucks sake. Way to take me out of the game.

I don't normally play fighting games but the Mortal Kombat movie got me playing MK11, and then I saw Street Fighter V on sale for nine bucks so I thought why not?

I guess it's fine. I really don't like this art style. It feels close to something cool and interesting but it leans too far into caricature, stereotypes, and sexualizing the women to actually have good looking characters.

The fighting is pretty fun, though it lacks a good tutorial system or move list like MK11 does. I like that it's much faster paced than MK11 and is more about spacing and distance before unleashing your moves.

I also don't like online multiplayer so I just stuck to the single player modes and they are extremely lacking compared to MK11.

So yeah it's fine or whatever but I think what I really want is to try Street Fighter 2.

Enjoyment - 7/10
Difficulty - 4/10

This was hot garbage on release. It has since seen many updates and well needed improvements. More content, balanced cast, satisfying metagame. Online is still competitive. This is a good game to start with until Street Fighter 6!
🏆

Traditional Fighting Games make almost no sense to my puny brain and SFV feels very much not beginner friendly. The tutorials are pretty awful, but could easily be fixed by allowing you to implement aspects of training mode into them. As it stands, they did not help me learn any aspect of the game and this game was not fun to play as a result. Also, none of the characters appealed to me which made this even harder to get into. Despite being absolute trash at these kinds of games, ones like Guilty Gear, Skullgirls, and MvC at least have characters I think are cool and want to attempt to learn. SFV had just about nothing and didn't explain any of the mechanics, so I would say to avoid this one if it's your first rodeo unfortunately.