This past Tuesday, my copy of Street Fighter V was dropped off at the house and I looked forward to diving into it whenever I had the opportunity to play it this week. Unfortunately, two hours after opening up my copy and popping it into my PlayStation 4; I walked away completely disappointed and disgusted.
I have a pretty long background with the Street Fighter series: I played the first edition of Street Fighter 2 when it launched in 1991 at my local arcade and played every subsequent sequel and upgrade of the series from that point onward. I still have all my original SNES carts of Street Fighter 2 and own full sized arcade cabinets that has had every arcade release of the series played on them. Street Fighter IV re-ignited the series on the last console generation and while I enjoyed it, it still didn’t take the crown as the most definitive version of the series for me.
Street Fighter V was announced in 2014 and with it came the stipulation that this would be exclusive to the PlayStation brand and the only Microsoft related item it would perform on would be on the Windows operating system. This was a huge opportunity for Sony to have one of the best fighting game series on the planet as it could potentially bring those other Street Fighting fans on other consoles over to the PlayStation side. Unfortunately, Sony should have either babysat Capcom more closely on the development of the game or pumped the breaks on releasing a game missing half its content. Now I have to admit, I picked up Street Fighter V without doing any research on it. I bought it on the basis that after 25 years, Capcom would be sure to include the basic elements that they implemented in the series for some time. When I fired up the game though, I thought that I somehow started a beta copy of the game because it was lacking things like a standard arcade mode.
No arcade mode?! My only options for playing this game myself is to play its half-baked story mode that you can finish on a per character basis in 5 minutes or playing a survival mode that doesn’t quite match the feeling of a typical arcade mode. Capcom has mentioned that they will be releasing a better story mode for free, but we won’t see that until June. That’s 4 months away for a game I paid 50 bucks for NOW. To me, an arcade mode would have been more sufficient over such a lackluster taste test of a story mode.
So currently, the only way to get a real Street Fighter V experience is to play the online multi player version of the game; but the feedback on the performance of the online portion has been pretty mixed. Capcom had the same issue with Street Fighter IV initially; but they fixed it. You would think with such a heavy focus on the multiplayer of this game over its traditional features that it would be very stable. I guess that’s not the case. I can’t comment on the multiplayer portion of the game myself because I was suddenly reminded that I didn’t have an active PS+ account anymore and since the launch of PlayStation 4 you need that PS+ account to play multi-player games.
I have two options: I can drop another 50 bucks for PS+ bringing my grand total of wanting to play this game to $100.00 dollars or I can wait till Capcom finishes what it should have finished in the first place and play this game again in June. It looks like I’ll be taking the second option as dropping another 50 bucks for this game doesn’t even guarantee me a smooth performance on its online portions right now. I would have been better off buying the PC version. In all honestly though, I would have been better off just not buying it at all. That’s a sad state of affairs for one of my favorite fighting franchises. On a positive note though, it was nice to see that Sony/Capcom offers legacy support for fighting sticks from the PS3, but they missed the boat on everything else.
Looks like I’m sticking with Street Fighter 2 till June.