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So I saw someone on Twitter try to do a postmortem on Street Fighter V and where it went wrong and it kind of petered out. I thought I would give it a try myself, and then realized why it failed.
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Namely, it's actually very hard to say anything that, looking back, Street Fighter V did right.
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At least under Ono. When the new team came in it seemed to shape up.
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Awhile back, Plurk talked me into watching a seven and half hour video on Resident Evil from someone who showed up to the franchise late, and the video essayist complained about how a few games were looking backwards, as they put it, maybe because they weren't sure where they were going.
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But the games he was complaining about (RE Outbreak, RE Rev 2) were a sort of fanservice that long-running franchises get sometimes, where the idea isn't to break new ground, it's to celebrate what came before, remind people why they like the thing they did.
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Street Fighter V is an example of a game looking backwards because it has no idea how to actually go forward.
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Backwards literally; it is an example of the thing Capcom does when a game bombs in that regard, where all the sequels become interquels.
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Street Fighter III had problems and while Third Strike is beloved now, its failure terrified Capcom, so Street Fighter IV was set between 2 and 3. And there were rumors that initially Street Fighter V was supposed to be Street Fighter Alpha 4.
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And was moved at the last second because so much of Alpha 3 already leads into Street Fighter II; what the hell time was there left between the two games to fit a sequel in?
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So Street Fighter V becomes IV-2 in a lot of ways.
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The problem is is that SFIV already had put a pretty neat bow on things; it explained how Shadowloo was collapsing further in civil war after the events of 2, it seemed to really have capped off things. But rather than try to make a new story, it just... kind of kept going.
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The problem there is that Street Fighter V doesn't know when it is.
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It's set after Street Fighter IV but before III, so it tries to bridge those games, except it doesn't know how to do just that.
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Consider Alex.
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Alex is supposed to be an everyman of a different sort than Ryu; an angry young man who took up fighting as a way to understand himself and connect to his adopted father. He doesn't have goals in New Generation/Second Impact, and when gets revenge his Third Strike story line is about wanting a rematch with Ryu, who inspired him to try expanding his horizons.
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But SFV is set before III, so he doesn't have that. He's just some 17 year old fighter that Shadowloo kidnaps for no reason, and he fights through some simulations of others, and then gets a scar before getting rescued. He ends his story mode unsure if it was a dream or not.
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Alex gets off easy compared to a lot of his fellow III characters. Ibuki is in SFV because why the hell not, you can practically hear the game ask.
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Oro is about the only one who has any actual business and it's more establishing him as another force equal to Gouken and Akuma.
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The Alpha characters likewise are also a bit just all over. A Shadow Falls contrives as hard as it can to explain Birdie and R Mika's presence.
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The problem is SFV doesn't have any internal logic to why returning characters return.
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The logic seems to be "who did Ono think sounded fun, or someone convinced him it would be fun?"
621st Raven
which...that is a big oof already. It sounds like a worse version of what I remember criticizing Blazblue for, in inventing reasons to bring characters back from other games
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Rereading this I thought of how this game fucked up in particular.
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You have to have at minimum the World Warrior cast, because you're going to wind up with them, and they are the literal opposite of hype for DLC slots.
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Alpha 3 by its first revision had the World Warriors. Street Fighter IV launched with the Championship cast and 4 newbies and while that was lame as fuck it meant things could only go up from there. Street Fighter 6 has the World Warrior cast and either literally the Super characters or stand-ins for them.
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People had to wait until season 4 to get the whole World Warrior cast in Street Fighter V.
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Basically the only characters you can do as DLC from Street Fighter II are Akuma and the four devas.
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Also let's look at the new characters real quick:
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F.A.N.G. - Literally the biggest joke, nobody liked him, I have heard at most people like some of his mechanics and hope that A.K.I. is a less shit version of him.
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Laura Matsuda - She's okay? She's another weird mix grappler and the fact that apparently Brazilians are just electrokinetic in Street Fighter is weird? Most people mechanically wrote her off (iDom is just built different) but she has a non-zero chance of coming back.
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Necalli - the biggest fucking waste of a slot possible. They spend all this time building him up for him to kill 0 people and mean nothing to the story of Street Fighter V, a complete wet fart of a character who is doomed to obscurity unless the SF6 guys pull off a miracle.
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Rashid - people love this guy; it's worth noting official art says he's the main character of Street Fighter V, like Alex and Abel were for 3 and 4. He's already been leaked as DLC for 6.
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DLC season 1 is just characters who were clearly intended for the base roster but they ran out of time on, nobody new.
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DLC season 2 is the concept of "Characters who have never been in Street Fighter in a playable state" which is like, a season 5 concept to be honest. Also Akuma because he missed the Season 1 DLC.
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Abigail and Zeku are both... alright. They're there. They will never be relevant again. Nobody gives a fuck about them and people hate Abigail because he was stupid good for like a year and some change for no reason.
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But Ed and Kolin... you want to talk about the biggest fumbles possible.
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Ed as a huge slab beefchunk man makes no sense whatsoever, and his gimmick of being a tekken character was badly concieved. This is again a problem of when this game is set, because when we see Ed in 4 he is all of about 8 years old.
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And the game goes "uh he's got gear aging due to psycho power fuck you" real quick when 5 introduces him as a Liefieldian twenty-something.
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Character-wise Ed is probably one of the most interesting things the DLC does because it lets us have characterization for Boxer and uh... that's about it. Ed gets some, Falke gets a little (and we'll get to her), Bison is further reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout.
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Which let's take a moment to think about old M. Bison for a second; so we job Necalli to make Bison the big bad again and... his entire story is a rehash of Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 2. Oh no Bison does something scary, on no Charlie eats shit and dies to him, oh hey Ryu uppercuts real good and now he is dead forever again but for real this time, blarg.
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Anyways.
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I still think Ed has more redeeming traits than what they did with Kolin.
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Namely because Kolin, underboss of the motherfucking Illuminati under the big dick twins, literally changes her hairstyle and says her name is Helen and the whole hero cast, despite having people with connections to Interpol, US intelligence, MI6, and Rashid and Karin's nonsense billionaire resource networks, looks at her and goes "legit."
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The UDON comics does away with the pretense of Helen entirely and has her just tell team hero "look you wanna fucking kill off Shadowloo or not?" and it works infinitely better.
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Even then she's still the victim of terrible writing.
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Like she has powers of her own, except she doesn't they were granted to her by Gill, except she does later?
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She brings Charlie back by using one of the Eleven bodies to essentially X-COPY him (why is he a weird zombie then?) but then later on we find out she can literally manipulate souls as her own power so why did she need the science to do it?
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It needlessly convolutes a character who could have been cool as hell.
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Now I will say one good thing without reservations for season 2.
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Menat is great and she should be in Street Fighter 6 without reservations. Let her be the Rose to JP's Bison, let a new generation take over the conflict.