Not a fan of 2D fighting games but Street Fighter V's gameplay impressed me to some extent.

The game feels very floaty in a good way, the controls are simple and the combos are quite easy to do.

Most of the characters look pretty cool even though I'm not a big fan of the art-style.

As for the story mode, it's just painfully average and generic, not worth playing through.

What killed my fun with the game is the lack of gamemodes.
If you're playing for the single player content, then there's almost nothing exciting to do.

Final Rating: "Decent" ~ 6/10.

Fun with fairly strong aesthetics and a banger soundtrack.
Tons of characters and lots of returning faces from Alpha, my personal favourite. Old classic Rival Schools is also very prominent with Akira and plenty of stage cameos.

While the game is very pretty this entry still doesn't translate well from the classic pixel art - the oversized palms and feet looks awkward on some characters and hair is mostly a mess - crazy anime hair doesn't really translate well, designs like Charlie and Rose looked good in 2d but are a bit harder to take seriously here, not that the game cares much for serious.

Story mode is a silly Power Rangers plot with little coherence. It's an impressive attempt at a cinematic approach but the mystique is gone. When the story bits were short and rare in earlier game there was a lot of room for imagination to fill in gaps, and now I feel this fairly lengthy story mode doesn't really say more than the minimal lines Alpha had for example.
Difficualy wise I couldn't tell if there were massive spikes in the last parts or it was just being forced to play characters I'm less comfortable with.
I feel those were spikes that my casual ass had a lot of trouble dealing with near perfect defence and punishment. Sometimes I treated those as an actual training grounds, but some I eventually just skipped after several tries.
The characters screen time is whack as well, poster boy Ryu literally only appears in the opening and closing acts and doesn't do much.

There's also a silly little personal story for each characters. They had varying quality but I liked those as they focused on slice of life rather than world ending drama. The art in this mod takes a while to get used to but it works.

The stage lights disco ball look for the pre fights looks great and I've never seen a direction like that before.

Main menu is an ugly messy sin, filled with buttons and store fronts, timed missions that you need to purchase tickets for with slowly acquired currency. It's not as bad as the nonsense I've seen in Injustice 2 earlier this year but this still has no place in a fighting game.

You can see some seeds for 6 - splashes of colour appear during certain combos and you get to fight normal people like OLD COP.

Street Fighter 5, six years in, is very fun and if the sequel wasn't so well received I might have tried to actually get good in it.

Sf5 very much the most average entry of the franchise. 2016 when I was not even playing any games, SF was released to lukewarm to outraged audience perception.

The game released with barebones features, peak ugly 3d graphics, underwhelming and small cast of characters.

To top it off, a free to play style of unlocking characters in a game that you have to pay for. Yikes

However over the years, people somewhat warmed up to SF5 as people have tended to do for most entries in the franchise.

For myself the crush counter system made SF5 a very turtlely and defensive experience(something many offense obsessed fighting game fans hated). It's quite a slow paced game really.

However the game has a more robust and fleshed out combo system than SF4 which was quite barebones in comparison. Overall it was a step forward and back for the franchise.

street fighter 5 is a notoriously misunderstood game that, in its final patch, i can easily consider my favourite fighting game of all time. months after sf6's release and i still just think this game got so many things right by the end of it all, and i think sf6 should slowly steer its way to a similar path in terms of balance and roster. a huge variety of characters with interesting tools, strong defensive mechanics that shut down autopilot offense, an overall emphasis on interactive neutral play... if this game came out in the state that it ended up in, i think its reputation would be extremely different. or maybe it wouldn't because maybe people don't actually like interaction in fighting games and just want to play guilty gear and flowchart strings, idk

anyway, wish i spent more time playing this online before 6 came out. god bless this game