When Street Fighter V released earlier this year, Capcom promised with an almost apologetic tone that they would add some much needed content for the game in June. On July 1st, they finally delivered on that promise after three long months wherein they only managed to keep one of their promised deadlines for additional characters and other minor updates. But now here we are, with a proper story mode, a challenge mode (which was released in April, I know), some training videos and a store with a plethora of things to buy. Unfortunately, these offerings are too meager and the pricing scheme in the store to exploitative to likely keep the interest of any but the most hardcore of fans.
Let’s start with the first big addition, the challenge mode, which is really more of a training mode of sorts. There are 10 challenges per character and essentially what they do is show you some basic combos and special moves. In a strange move that is almost impossible to explain, there are no command prompts on the screen to perform these moves. Instead, it just tells you what the name of the move that you have to perform is. This could be a special move, or just a regular move that has a name. So if you’re like me, you’ll be toggling between the command list and the game screen because you had no idea that polysyllabic word in Japanese means you need do a strong punch while pushing forward. It sounds like a small complaint, and in some ways it is, but this is a company that has gotten this right before.
Aside from these combo chains, these challenges don’t really teach you how to use the characters. How to use their specials, and what the context to use their different abilities is. To help with this, Street Fighter V has demonstrations. These are non-interactive instruction videos that show you the abilities of your character and how to use them. They are good to give you some context on how to use the character, but it is really strange there is no interaction in these segments. They are fairly short, but there are quite a few of them, and they cover all the characters. Still if you really are looking to unlock things, you would probably want to watch most of them as they give fight money. Nothing like letting a movie play in your interactive piece of entertainment.
Things don’t fare much better for the game’s new story mode. Yes the story is dumb, very dumb, but Street Fighter, and most fighting games really, aren’t exactly known for their incredible tales. Fighting game stories have to craft a universe where they can justify everyone fighting each other, manage stakes that have global reach, and make it look like somehow a dude in a karate gi is more effective than a B-2 stealth bomber. Street Fighter in particular also has to deal with 25 years worth of canon storytelling, (some of which didn’t even originate in the games themselves) to add to the burden of its plot. I was not expecting a great story from Street Fighter V, but what I got did feel underwhelming nonetheless. For starters even with all that extra time in the oven the mode is too short. You can clear the story mode in one afternoon, even without skipping cinematics. Compare this to games like Persona 4 Arena, or Guilty Gear that have stories that take more than 10 hours, and you realize just how short this is. As a side note, you cannot pause during the very long cut-scenes. Another strange omission that feels like it would have been obvious to include.
So we knew the story was going to be dumb going in, and there is a lot here that I would not be as tolerant of if this wasn’t a fighting game. Characters fight each other as a way of greeting, they also switch sides for seemingly no reason. They fight over points they end up agreeing with by the end of the fight, they fight in situations when just talking would have been plenty. All things you’d expect from a fighting game plot, and there are things that were genuinely nice and entertaining. Rasheed’s story was interesting, Karin’s leadership role was unexpected and welcome. But among all the nonsense there were things that were just annoying or baffling. The much hyped Necalli just shows up and dies, and much like Injustice, Ryu just shows up at the end to kill Bison and then disappear. It doesn’t help that the voice acting and animation is very amateurish. While some scenes are great, the quality of others seem on par with a fan made movie made with Source Filmmaker that you might find on youtube.
More importantly story mode is not a substitute to a true arcade mode. You cannot choose a character. Rather you will play each one round, easy fight with whichever character the game wants to you use. And the truth is that the story does not merit being played through more than once. It’s just not that compelling or interesting. You might even play it twice as completing it in the harder difficulty setting nets you extra fight money. But after that is done, you will most likely never touch it again, and be back to the same issue of little single player content.
You will probably want to watch videos and play the underwhelming story mode twice for the fight money, because the store system is designed to get you to spend. The initial impressions are good. If you clear everything that the game currently offers you will end up with something around 350,000 fight money, which is enough to buy three characters. That seems very generous, but keep in mind that there are four characters as of this writing, with two more having been announced. Each character costs 100,000 fight money, and they are not the only thing you can buy. There are stages, brand new ones valued at 70,000, and iterations on existing ones valued at 40,000 fight money each. Costumes, which are purely cosmetic, will also set you back 40K Capcom Fun bucks. Added to this there are a myriad of smaller cosmetics for sale. There are custom titles, which you could previously earn by doing something title worthy, and things like alternate colors (which to be fair can be earned in survival) and themes for your UI.
So how do you get these awesome things once you’ve exhausted the single player content and it doesn’t pay you fight money anymore? Well there are two ways, you can pay for it, or you can try to fight online to get fight money. This pays a total of 50 fight money PER. WIN. If you lose you get nothing. So assuming you win half the time, you are looking at winning 4,000 fights to get a new character. This is exacerbated by Capcom’s own shoddy programming and matchmaking. It still takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes to find a fight. More than once I’ve gotten messages that the game could not connect to the server even as I just won an online fight, and that means that fight, and the precious 50 fight money I’d get were not recorded. I feels like I won the fight for free. This short sighted, and greedy system ends up turning out what is supposed to be fun part of the game into a cynical exercise of grinding and counting as you try to inch closer to unlock the different parts of your $60 purchase. Losing fights is now a problem as you lose your chance to earn fight money and must wait 10 more minutes to fight. It makes you feel cheated as the crappy Capcom technology fails to record a win, and your money.
Of course, you are able to purchase all this with money. This is why this system is so exploitative. The game charges $5 per character, $4 for new stages, $2 for existing stages, $2 per costume, and there are also $4 premium costumes that you cannot unlock with fight money at all. You can also buy the season pass for $30 on top of the $60 you already spent on this game, and I am not even sure it includes all of this content. I did check, but the PSN entry on it is so vague as to what the Season Pass includes, I would not be surprised to find many things omitted from it. You could end up paying $90 for the game and the season pass, and still have to pay extra for costumes, stages, and fighters.
I would say this is a scheme that rivals free to play pricing schemes, but the truth is good free to play games know how to do this better. Good free to play games know to put your next target within reach to entice you to pay more. If a player has to win 100 matches to unlock a character rather than 4,000, then they are motivated to keep trying and the chances of them getting impatient and just buying the character are higher. This would also work better if you could buy fight money rather than buy the character outright. Have you ever wondered why mobile games sell you premium currency rather than just the thing you can buy with the premium currency? That’s because you can just use what you want for whatever you want and have more left over to get tempted by other things. Other pro-consumer things would probably entice people to spend more too, such as something similar to the loot crates you get in many shooters. As it is, Capcom’s pricing scheme doesn’t come across as an alternative to earning cosmetics by playing the game. It comes across as a cynical attempt to extract as much value as possible from their user base.
Capcom was at the verge of having something that could have been a classic in Street Fighter V. I stand by my statement that the gameplay is fantastic. But all of the ugliness surrounding the title and the transparent attempt to nickel and dime costumers have made it highly unpalatable. It hurts to say this for a franchise that I love, but if you haven’t already, don’t buy Street Fighter V. If you have, don’t give Capcom one more cent than you already have. Buying this game, and using real money to buy all of this content in a game that shipped with so little to begin with is telling Capcom and the games industry at large that you are ok with them shipping unfinished game and gating content off from day one in a cynical attempt to wring as much money from you as they possibly can. I don’t want to send that message to them. And then, if this game fails they might give us all the content it should have had in the first place at a reasonable price in a future sale.
