Sony and Capcom have collectively been hyping Street Fighter V for what feels like forever, and expectations were through the roof. For the majority of the competitive fighting-game community, of which I consider myself a part, the game delivered in every way; every way that is at all important, anyway. I myself was looking for a fast, beautiful, creative, and deep fighting game that I could spend years mastering and playing competitively. You can tell by my review that I got exactly what I wanted. Many fans are feeling betrayed, though. Anyone out for a memorable single-player experience – or just any kind of single-player experience – will find the game lacking in a huge way.
Do you know how long it will take you to play through story mode using Fang (F.A.N.G.)? About two and a half minutes. His entire story consists of two, single-round fights with M. Bison on extremely easy difficulty settings that can’t be cranked up. If you stick around for every single slide of cut-scene dialogue and don’t skip in text before it’s actually read all the way through by the voice actors, the whole thing can be stretched to about six and a half minutes. It’s pretty pathetic, and that’s about what you can expect from every other character as well: a few, dull, single-round fights and some really obtuse story-telling through illustrations.
There’s a “cinematic story expansion” coming in June, but if you’re expecting a lot of content out of that I wouldn’t hold your breath; producer Yoshinori Ono has said that the whole affair will only last about 1-2 hours. There’s no sense in trying to defend Capcom for this, really. Street Fighter games have never included cinematic story modes, and there’s no real reason why we should demand one now. What stings is that there really isn’t anything else to do in the game other than play online. If you have a friend or family member that you can play with on the couch in versus mode that’s awesome – that’s how the game is supposed to be played. Many of us don’t have that luxury, though. The Street Fighter V lone wolf is left with nothing but survival mode to occupy himself, but honestly it’s more fun to go into training mode and just give command of your training dummy to a high-level CPU.
I’ll admit that’s a problem. There’s no good way to practice fighting offline except to load up multiple character dummies in training mode, and even then you can’t really learn anything except your basic moves and simple two or three-hit combos. A challenge mode won’t be here until March, and that’s where the real training will take place. Capcom is getting a lot of hate for this lack of content, and many people think that Street Fighter V is a total ripoff.
It doesn’t help that at the time of writing this article (launch day), the online servers aren’t functioning properly. Matchmaking is taking forever, and currently you can’t make battle lounges at all. This is to be expected on opening day, but it sucks for Capcom that the server issues are being leveraged along with the lack of content by angry players to really bash the game as a failure. Personally, I think those judgments are premature and show a lack of patience and foresight.
Do I think Capcom should have waited a month to launch a fully-featured game? Absolutely, but it’s obvious that they wanted Street Fighter V out earlier because of the Capcom Pro Tour. And you know what? You’re not really hearing from all of the serious, competitive Street Fighter players because they’re all busy practicing whatever way they can. When writing my review, I was tempted to deduct some major points due to the lack of content and the state of the servers, but I realized that those problems are only temporary. By the end of the year this is going to be the best fighting game we’ve played in a long time, and that’s how it will be remembered.
I promise you that a small measure of patience will pay off very shortly. A proper challenge mode will give the single-player enthusiasts everything they need to stay occupied, and server issues will be ironed out; they always are (unless the game is published by Ubisoft). I’d like to hear from both sides, though. Who among you are currently obsessed with mastering the variable system with your favorite fighter, and who among you have been infuriated by a rushed, bare-bones package and server problems?