Street Fighter V E3 2015 Preview
The first thing you are going to have to do to effectively play SFV is to throw everything you know about Street Fighter out the window, especially everything you know about Street Fighter IV . This game is faster, hits harder, and has completely different mechanics. Unless you are playing the simplest of low forward fireball Ryus, you are going to have to relearn your favorite characters from the ground up.
We have already been over the basic mechanics of Street Fighter V in some previous news stories, so here is a quick rundown. Characters have two meters, super and v-gauge. Super meters are three stocks long and allow you to use EX moves and a critical art when it is full. V-gauge, on the other hand, can be several different lengths with multiple different stocks and only fills when you take damage. You can spend a stock of the v-gauge to do a v-reversal, a counter attack out of block stun, or wait until it’s full to go into a v-trigger power up. Every character’s v-trigger is different, and every character can use a v-skill to help build the v-gauge without taking damage.
That much we already know, so let’s get into the nitty gritty. Like SFIV , certain normals can cancel into special moves. However, unlike SFIV , normals that are part of target combos can also be canceled into specials. A new “combo assistance buffer” makes combos easier to do, by adding 2 frames of leniency in either direction. This turns one frame links into, effectively, five frame links. Landing a counter hit adds even more hit-stun and landing a counter hit with a slow move, like a fierce, causes a crush counter which does even more.
While the combo buffer makes landing combos much easier, many professional combo execution skills have become obsolete. You can’t plink buttons to increase your link window, for example. Even double tapping buttons only seems to register a single button press. While input shortcuts, like mashing diagonal down toward for a dragon punch, are still there, combos that utilize them, like pressing df+mk df+lp to get a low forward to dragon punch combo, have been taken out. Certain moves can be done two ways, like Chun-Li’s lightning legs. You can either do them with a quarter circle or with rapid taps, but specific combos that utilized their nature as a multiple tap move no longer work. Essentially, there are no system exploits – or at least Capcom is attempting to remove them all. It’s all about timing this time around, even if that timing is more lenient.
Stun makes a return from Street Fighter IV , but you can see it represented as a stun bar underneath your health, like Street Fighter III . Stun also lowers much slower than it did in SFIV , so do your best stay out of pressure to avoid going dizzy.
There are very few things in the game that cause a hard knockdown. Even sweeps and throws allow you to choose between a quick or delayed wakeup. This makes it much harder to set up vortexes or pseudo unblockables. Only very specific super arts and special moves cause a hard knockdown, like command throws, so those will become staple additions to any character’s move set.
It’s worth it to mention that normals in Street Fighter V are vastly simplified. You don’t get close and far range normal moves anymore, nor do you get jumping neutral and jumping diagonal moves. All air buttons are the same, as are all standing ground buttons.
It’s also worth noting that normals now do chip damage, but recoverable chip damage. Essentially, all damage gained while blocking can be recovered if you go on the offensive. You cannot kill an opponent with chip damage however, unless you are using a critical art.
Specials are, strangely, all very slow in this game. They have a ton of start-up , though they have a lot less recovery than normal. This shifts the focus on the game to normal and combos, rather than fireball wars and special battles. Nearly every special in the game, with the exception of the Shoryuken, can be broken by someone simply mashing on jab.
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