Why did so many people hate Street Fighter V? 

SFV is straight up a good game now, and the transformation its had over the years has informed Street Fighter 6 which for the most part has near universal praise going on at the moment. However SFV was a very rocky boat at the start, and it garnered a lot of criticism and honestly, quite fairly so. So lets talk about why SFV had so many issues in the early days, and what was done over time to help fix it!

I jumped in at Champion Edition, and, honestly, never knew about all this until I got more into the FGC. It's like finding out about your partner's wild history years into the relationship.

As someone who was deeply involved in my local scene during the SF4 days and fell off completely at the start of SF5, one thing I think this video overlooked was how offense changed. SF4, infamously, had a lot of ways to escape pressure. FADC shoryu was unpunishable until Ultra, backdashes had a ton of invincibility, and any grappler could blow you up with a 1 frame grab if you were overzealous. In addition most Ultra combos were also reversals, and so the potential of someone blowing you up for 'smart' pressure was constant. SF5 corrected for this in the other direction, perhaps overly so. Command grabs had actual startup now, so mashing them in pressure was no longer an option. Backdashes were counter hit punishable. And infamously, season 2 removed the invincibility from non-EX shoryus across the entire cast. This meant that when someone forced you into the okizeme game, finding a safe way out was extremely difficult. In early seasons this was even worse because there were throw loops that allowed the attacker to make their grabs meaty, so even mashing a jab would still lose out. It was also a very lopsided guessing game. The reason 'take the throw' became a memetic piece of advice is because if you got stuffed out of your throw tech, you were guaranteed to eat a full crush counter combo that would end with you in the exact same position. This was all happening alongside other changes that made the neutral/poking game a lot less prevalent. Fireballs in SF5 were much weaker than the previous title, along with most characters getting some sort of anti-fireball option in their kit (Cammy's backfist, Gief's flex, Rashid's roll etc). Even if you managed to play footsies for 80% of the round it was very easy to lose one interaction and then get vortexed to death by characters like Mika or Laura. A lot of this got ironed out in later seasons by making buttons less plus, adding proration to crush counter combos so they were less devastating, and adding V-Shift to give the defender more ways to interact. Offense is still very strong, but more attacks have lingering hurtboxes that allow whiff punishing to be more consistent and viable. It's still not my game of choice, but I think it's a huge improvement over where it was on release. tl;dr surely he won't grab me the fifth time in a row-GODDAMMIT

They did absolutely nothing to promote Necalli. He's supposed to be this terrifying eater of souls and he just jobs and jobs. Then isnt even the boss in his own debut.

Im really surprised you didn't mention anything about the netcode. Or maybe it was already super obvious. For me it was the biggest issue when I got the game because there was nothing to do offline so the only thing to play was ranked but there was the whole 7f of input delay online AND the horrible netcode AND the constant server disconnects that just crippled the game. That sound the game makes when someone RQs used to plague my sleep.

A few things I think I didnt hear in the vid ; - the game came out without legacy controller settings. Stick users coming from PS3 and 360 had to buy a new one in order to play. - for at least 6 months after release the invite system did not work. I couldnt create a room and invite my friends. - the game came out with a ton of delay input, especially on PS4, which made some moves unreactable. At the top of my head (I could be wildly wrong), Nash's dash was 17 frames and the game had something like 14 frames of delay input. This delay input rendered zoning impossible and made people fish for a crish counter. It was touched upon in the vid but it was not gracious to see people spam hp/hk in the hopes of hitting something. - the game was a PS4 exclusive on consoles, cutting itself from a large part of the playerbase, given for years the majority of players in SF4 were on the Xbox 360. - the game had stuff in it that simply did not work. The rooms and invites being broken was horrendous but other stuff like the battle statistics (how much you defend or you attack) did not work for years. Why even put it in the game in the first place ? - the rollback was awful. Rollback may be fantastic on paper but this one was to this day the worst implementation of one I've seen. Infuriating. - lack of defense mechanics. Backdash were not invincible, and worse would get crushed if you were hit by hp or hk. It would take years before V-shift were a thing. People around me would rage about having paid the game but not having a story mode, I forgot the details by now but they complained about stuff that Capcom was open about not being there and would be coming in the future. So I defended the game, for years. But 2 to 3 years in I burned myself on it and to this day I still can't stomach it. It is a shame. At least SF6 beta looked fun and it seems that the game will have more content in it at launch than SFV a few years in. I could also play with my friends and the rollback seemed good. Right out of the box, the beta is miles from the horrible beginnings of SFV, that makes me hopeful.

It was rushed

Honestly, my main gripe with SFV was with its roster. It felt awfully small compared to SFIV and all of my mains were gone (Rufus, E. Honda) or had been butchered so badly by the development team that they had lost all the tools that made them fun or viable (Juri). It was also so terribly balanced that a good chunk of the few characters available during Season One were just barely playable: Zangief was a mess, F.A.N.G. was incredibly fun but not super viable and you knew the balance had to be really crappy when Ryu, the poster boy character, was bottom tier. It just felt like a downgrade from SFIV in every way, even visually it was less appealing.

I hate that it takes several years for a game to get just right, only for it's predecessor to be announced shortly after.

Sometimes I do wonder if SFV lost its audience the same way SF3 did. I got into SFV last year so I didn't experience the disappointment that others had but I imagine it could have been at the same level as SF3. It's also possible that a larger new audience has been gained due to esports but if it did launch at the beginning as a good game, how much bigger would the SF audience be right now?

The way SFV released was unforgivable, but probably a net good for the FGC as a whole. A lot of older FGC players basically only played SF and other SF related games, with a lot of old fighters not being taken seriously. Capcom made so many early missteps with the game that the FGC stopped being Fighting Games by Capcom and hordes of people started actually looking at other fighting games seriously. Lots of players jumped ship for a variety of reasons, and good chunk of the people that stuck around were either in it for the money or their love of SF trumped any misgivings they had with V. I was in r/kappa during the first season or so of SFV and saw tons of people drop the game for stuff like Tekken and Xrd. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say the FGC of 2022 wouldn't be the way it is now without Capcom shitting the bed so hard. Thanks, Capcom. Your initial fuck up was so bad, the FGC flourished looking for better games to play! While they have improved a lot later on (I think around season 3-4 was when the really started to regain people's goodwill and become a legitimately good game) and SFVI looks like it might be a banger right out the gate, it cannot be understated how badly SFV's initial release and first few years were. It was boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision (like, y'know, 𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂 𝒓𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒌𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔) and going from that to the state they're in now is legitimately impressive.

I have a vivid memory of playing SFV the December of the year it first launched. My mom had bought my cousin a copy of it for Christmas, and after all the gifts were opened, we went to play it together like we did with SF3TS and SFIV. After only 30 minutes of just fighting each other, I asked my cousin if he was having fun, and he looked at me with a face that said it all: He didn't want to be rude and say he wasn't having fun, but that's what he felt. I felt so bad for him and my mom, who didn't know any better, and we just haven't played SFV since then.

I was a big Street Fighter fan, I remember getting the 360 just so I could get SF4 when it launched. And it was kind of the same story with SFV. But I was hugely disappointed when the game launched. I kept the game in hopes that it would get better but it took soo long to get there. While it's good now, I can't help but still have that sour taste with the game.

This is definitely something that has been discussed a lot,but i'd say the timing of how bad the sfxt launch was, combined with the game's lack of other console ports other than PS or PC,crappy promotional material compared to the previous installment,lack of single player options,lacking gameplay and horribly small roster,and the whole story mode shinanegans that happened definitely hurt the game's reputation and overall sales as well as favor in most of the players. I mean,i was someone who was very into USF4,and i didn't even hear crap about sfv until Juri was released lol. It was bad,and honestly a miracle that in the end capcom was able to save the game and make it into a pretty good ass game considering what the had. SF6 is definitely gonna kill the game once that releases though lmao

With Street Fighter 5's horrible launch, my friends and I held off on getting the game until it started to become decent. By Arcade Edition, I enjoyed what I tried of it despite its flaws. Last time I enjoyed it however was playing the "Mysterious Mod" with one of my friends. Incredible mod someone made and gave every character new moves, buffs, and even added a new mechanic that goes by "V-Cancel" which can be cancelled into a unique move at the cost of 1 V-gauge.

After going back to sf4 it’s noticeable how much less stressful, taxing, volatile and random the gameplay is. I actually feel like I’m winning due to good reads and strategy and losing due to my opponent outplaying me. In SFV it’s just so random with all of the brain dead blow up mechanics

I think the small roster on Street Fighter V’s launch isn’t as much of the issue as the characters that got excluded. Remember, everyone was complaining about how Guile and Blanka and Honda weren’t in the base roster and didn’t come back until DLC, and the negative press that came from the series-defining characters missing out. Granted, SF6’s base roster isn’t that much larger than 5’s, but I think it hasn’t gotten as much flack due to having all the World Warriors from the jump (plus Cammy and Deejay), at least from the perspective of the general public. Also I’d say the newcomers in 6 generally being more well received than 5’s base newcomers helps (Rashid is the only unanimously liked one: Laura’s got some mixed reception, FANG is mostly hated but has a small dedicated fanbase and everyone forgot about Necalli).

I kinda thought you'd mention the netcode issues and that one time they almost installed a rootkit on the PC version and disabled the the Netcode Mod fix someone in the community made. Also Story Mode showing up 3 months late?

Sf5 biggest mess up was probably the state it released in. Its in a great and solid state now and has a huge roster

Personally, for me, there were a few reasons why I wasn't super into the game, like the character design, the major changes to a bunch of characters that I played, but the reason I quit was the input delay. It was so noticable for me that it felt like playing with lag, which just made the game feel worse than all the other fighting games out there, so I just stopped playing it.

I jumped into SFV a few days ago after playimg for the first time a couple of years ago, and now, unlike last time, I'm having lots of fun. In fact, I watched your guide yesterday lol. Coincidence? 🙉

It's incredible just how much controversy this game generated in its early days. Like the rootkit stuff which was a real bad look. SFV is in a good place now but the only thing that's a shame is that what we have now feels like what we should have had in 2016 (except the dlc characters)

I love SFV and tbh I think its has a lot of personality and polish a lot of other fighting games on the market don't have. Tbh I think this vid could've been more brutal 😅 you didn't even go into input delay, netcode, the root kit, throw loops, etc

For me personally the big problem SF5 had (and still has to an extent) is 1: the insanely high damage everything does and 2: how stupid safe block strings there are. It's so easy to just get into positions where you have to block 5, 6, even 7 mixups at a time because you just cannot punish anything on block. It was especially egregious on launch and has gotten better but there's still a lot of that. And because damage is so high you only need to guess wrong a couple times for a round to be over. In the early days of Street Fighter 5 it wasn't uncommon at all for a Cammy or Bison to trap you in the corner and you were done. They could just keep you there forever until you tried pressing any button and you were put in the ground for it with no opportunity for counter play at all. I still think that moves are generally too safe on block, and damage is still ludicrously high but it's been dialed back enough that matches are at least enjoyable and you can find gaps in your opponents offense to take your turn back so to speak. Street Fighter 6 looks to be addressing BOTH these problems. Very few moves are plus on block, and the damage has been scaled back dramatically so even if you do end up getting pressured and punished, the round isn't just over because you had the audacity to block a move. VERY excited for the next iteration of Street Fighter, I will be SO glad to put 5 behind me lol.

i love this game, i been saying that for the last 6 years, but i never pretended it was perfect or anything, i was there at the beggining and i left for DBFZ for some good 2 years, also because DBFZ is probably my top 3 fighting game, but yes it was rough! You were generous enought to did not mention how bad the netcode was(now its just ok) and the rootkit issue, today i totally recommend this game specially because its always on sale and worth the money

You're the first channel that I've ever found from googling 'beginner's guide' or 'how to' and proceeded to binge watch and thoroughly enjoy

I remember before SFV came out, they said they wouldn't come out with multiple versions of the game like they did with IV. Well...

Disconnection issues were frequent in the launch days here in Australia I remember. It was even difficult to play survival mode as frequent internet dropout would cancel survival mode during mid play despite it being an offline mode in effect.

Wow for someone new at fgc (2018 was the year I understood and love fighting games) that's a lot negative for SFV than I thought, I only thought were the lack of characters and maybe the visuals but it's way deep wow.

I loved how long it took to unlock one of very few characters..That was a lot of fun.

Yeah lots of Street Fighter content on the channel right now! Mostly cause.... everything else is so dry lol, as mentioned in the recent community post. Whenever that lastest DLC hits for strive rest assured there will be full coverage, whenever there is news for Project L we will talk about it, but for now in lieu of news, I can find stuff to talk about SF wise, so SF it is 👁 (also expect an indie fighter showcase soon...)

They hyped Necalli up, just to instant kill him in the Story😂😂😂😂

If we dont talk about monetization when we talk about why SFV was poorly received, then we arent being genuine. The truth is that SFV slow development was due to the fact that the intention was always to sell features over time.

I think the biggest reason is obviously the netcode. My only gripe with Capcom concerning SF5 is not giving it a next gen upgrade with better netcode.

I remember being so excited for SFV back in 2015. I had just come off 100 hours learning SF4 with a friend and still getting my barrings on fighting games as a whole to actually learn them. I was all set and ready to buy the game at release and commit to learning it. Then the game came out and everyone said how awful it was. I basically avoided the game and never got into any fighting games since I had stopped playing SF4 around that time. I did finally pick up SFV a few months ago on sale since I wanted to get myself more familiar and ready for SF6 in June since I want to learn and commit to it. SFV is decent. It's not bad but it definitely doesn't get me excited like 6 does. Something about 5 just feels a bit boring to me unless you're playing more of the recent roster.

No chip damage kills outside of super chip + v-trigger comebacks devalued comebacks and killed the hype for me as a viewer. They became almost manufactured, imagine if the same applied to 3rd strike would evo moment 37 be remembered as such a legendary moment?

Too many safe moves, stubby normals, awful comeback v-trigger system, a lot of hitboxes seem...weird. Never want to play that game again

As a casual fighting game player my experience felt like a free to play game. It's something I expect from games these days.

I think that one of the big issues of SFV's launch is that people not only were frustrated with learning the game mechanics (which were very flawed back then) but they didn't have their main to rely on, so it felt very unwelcoming to play

3:32 Arcade mode should be standard on all Street Fighter games! I have no idea what Capcom was thinking.

SF4 > SF5

Thank you for the lesson. I bought SF5 at launch but as uber casual i was severely disappointed with its lack of single player or arcade mode. also lack of little characters stories too.

I love SFV as it is now. I hated SFIV so much at launch that I didn't even look at SFV until I just so happened to play it at an arcade last year (just after Oro and Rose released.)

You haven't mentioned that 3/4 of the roster is paid DLC. I played quite a lot of SF5 in the beggining trying to force myself to like the game and I could afford like one or two characters with fight money.

For me the 1st issue I had was the art style. Between banana hair Ken and lion King Akuma I didn't even want to play my old mains because I couldn't stand to look at them. The fact the tekken 7 had a better Akuma than SFV is really messed up.

The hype for SF6 has gotten me back into Street Fighter V and I'm motivated to try to struggle to get out of bronze eventually. Also using it to transition into using a button box (snack box micro) since my 40 year old wrist is busted at this point and my inputs were kinda garbage to begin with. It's also now gotten me very invested in watching pro tour and I'm now kinda obsessed with Street Fighter League.

The input delay was the biggest issue for me on release. Felt like playing while stuck in mud, it was gross.

2 years? No wonder I never came back. I picked up King of Fighters 14 and also I believe Tekken 7 was coming out like 2 years after SF6.

V is in such a great place, I don't want to start this journey over again! I hope you're right and 6 is great out of the gate!

We all known that Ken's face was the big issue.

going from usf4 to 5 was kinda jarring, it felt more restrictive especially in early days and it took so long for it to find its footing that it already put many people off myself included. once it got there it was great hopping in with seth and rashid was incredibly fun but it took a long time to get there

Simple, SFV was rushed out the door in a suboptimal state. Granted, the game is a great package now. But it took years for SFV to get to that point, & you only get one chance at a good first impression. Though if nothing else, Capcom clearly learned the right lessons going into SF6. As for roster size, 16 characters made from scratch is to be expected. Even SF6 isn’t that far above launch SFV. The complaints ultimately came down to the content.

Because it’s a Capcom game and people love to sling monkey poop at their titles because it’s the cool thing to do. Other fighting games do the same things as Capcom titles and no one bats an eye.

A case study on why you don’t force a new engine during a time of crunch onto a group of devs not familiar with Unreal and was busy with both Ultra SF4 and SF x Tekken

The same reason why SFxT died. Street Fighter 4 was too good. SF5 to SF4 is like MK11 to MKX.

I got a Steam Deck a few weeks back and never played SFV. Looks like it runs well on the Deck so I will likely pick it up very soon

there was also what it did to the fgc as a whole, going from basically 8 years of community growth with the release of sf4 after the post-sf3 "dark ages" and the decline of arcades outside of asia, with great attendance numbers for the big tournaments, lots of new fgs coming out, the revitalization of older games with newer players, livestreaming taking off, community content (like the excellent adventures for example) etc. it was pretty much "an era of prosperity" for the fgc, and sf5 kinda hit the brakes on all of it. Not immediately though, I think sf5 at evo 2016 still has the highest entrant number of any fighting game tournament, but it was supposed to "carry the torch" from sf4, and its failure to do so even affected fgc-adjacent communities like smash which started to stagnate a bit post-2016. mvci certainly didnt help much either

A number of things make me glad I found this genre when I did... Growing up with it would have been nice but I'm barely mature enough for the salt now lol, so I don't mind coming in late. But I'm also glad I didn't play sfv til 2020! It's been a pure joy especially with falke by my side.

There where 4 Major issues that made me sell the copy of Vanila SF5 I bought on PS4. 1. Freemium mechanics on a paid game. The whole "you can get the new content in-game, but it'll be painfully slow unless you pay" and "Get a ton amount of the currency early from 1 time rewards, and everything dries up after that unless you pay" mechanics are stuff you only see on Free2pay mobile crap. 2. Bare bones. You can't get more bare bones than that. You said it! 3. Censorship before, during and after it's release. Nothing rises my buyer's remorse more than finding out the product is censored. 4. No complete retail version. Dispite feeling that the game owns me money for buying it at launch, and having miniscule content, expecting me to pay or suffer to get more, I was ready to jump right back once a complete edition was released. I like collecting my games after all, and you can't make a collection out of digital licenses. All updated editions after that had the hatefull voucher and their unsold vanila disks inside.

The game can be forgiven for anything except the main thing - netcode and overall stability of the game. Each online round is a new game, each new opponent is a new timing for everything (sf5 is the only game in which there is a situation where you are clearly sure that the game itself takes place before or after the picture is drawn on the screen; if you adapt that you win but this is terrible for overall skill growth bc this is a set of new competencies that is not needed in principle anywhere, even in SF5 itself outside of a bad online connection) Offline or in an ideal connection, this is a great game from 2 or 3 year for sure. But since there wasn't much to do besides grinding the ranking - the overall impression is still terrible, especially for the first serious fighting game due to the problem described above.

Abigail: Broom broom I got attacked and cancelled on Twitter.

I really didnt like how .. "surgical" SFV feels, especially in the beginning. Only certain combos were allowed to work and only in specific ways. "This button would lead exactly into this one other button" and nothing else. Everyone did the same combos. If you wanted to utilize your knockdown advantage there was exactly one way to do it. "Buffer this button and dash up" or whatever. At times I felt like I was just working my way through a flowchart over and over and over again. I didnt really felt engaged at all, neither with the game nor my opponent, just "did as I had to". I was missing the option to "free style", figure out my own combos, my own mixups. Everything felt like it was setup to work in a specific way by the developers and nothing else was allowed or would even put me at a severe disadvantage.

SFV is decent now I must admit. However, there are still fundamental issues with the mechanics and gameplay. Being a SF4 player, I just couldn't find the same fun factor and satisfaction in SFV. I'm just waiting for SF6 now.

I can tell you right now the reason I hated it was it played awkward, lacked content and I hated how stiff the animations looked compared to older SF games like some people just felt weird. Cody in particular just felt neutered in terms of moveset and animations and I missed his old moves. Plus how the game remained so unbalanced for the longer time. I just couldn't stick with it.

V-Triggers are the biggest reason I struggled to get into the game even in its best state, when I started playing was halfway through its lifespan and I tried it again when people considered it good and I got arcade edition upgrade for free, V-Triggers were just such an unenjoyable mechanic that I couldn't enjoy the game overall

I didn't hate it. I hate how it was launched and how bare bones it was.

I've been playing since 92. I took a break for a few years in the early 2000s but played sf4 from the beginning to the end. I played sf5 for the 1st 9months and never touched it again. This was the 1st sf game I can say I actually hated

The game had nothing on release. The online was broken, 16 characters only and banana hair ken. SFV is a completely different game now. I love it.

yeah, the launch of 5 with basically only Online fighting...was weird. I think this was at the dawn of 'everything has to be online' ... and a couple early games just forced you to be online unnecessarily. Another example..Titan Fall. But I think you answered the question of why ppl hated the game back then... it think there's a completely different set of reasons why ppl don't like it now. I'm not sure Capcom has fixed those...only time will tell

Street Fighter V’s launch serves as a necessary lesson for ALL fighting game developers: Fighting Games is a genre you need to do right, take your time, miss your yearly fiscal year if you have to, I guarantee it will pay off and win everyone over in the end. At the very least Capcom would look at this game and learn from its shortcomings to not only improve the game but take these missteps to heart when developing Street Fighter VI and now EVERYONE is excited for the game.

My biggest problem with 5 has always been the lack of creativity. With very few exceptions, the devs designed each character to have one optimal way to play them, and one only. If you look at 4, the difference in Daigo's Ryu versus Valle's or Choi's or Jyobin's is very apparent; there was no "correct" way to play the character for optimal results. Whereas most characters in 5 have obvious uses for each button, linear BnBs that require no execution, a priority system that takes out trade combos and a bunch of other interesting interactions you had in 4, almost universal hitboxes which removed character-specific combos, stubby normals with little recovery, etc, etc, the game just didn't have the sense of discovery after the first week or so. The main times the meta develops is when balance patches drop. 5 has obviously come a long way to fixing some of these issues since launch, with the final season's cast all being really interesting with a lot of depth, but fundamentally, 5 is a game which pushed e-sports hard, while significantly reducing the skill gap from previous games. Those two choices do not work together. I can only imagine what game we could have gotten if Matsumoto and Nakayama had more say in direction from the start. After all these years, 5 is finally the game it was trying to be all along, but that's still a game I have little desire to play. I am incredibly optimistic for 6. Everything so far looks incredible.

Street Fighter had a lot of issues and a lot of them were fixed, but the biggest one that has many people still feeling sour about the game has not gone away. One of the most famous nicknames for the game: Guess fighter 5. The feeling that whether you win or lose comes down to chance in a lot of interactions still remains. The best players are successful cause they can mitigate these scenarios and force it on their opponents, so it still happens at every level. For the casual/low-level player it happens literally all the time... and its not fun. ...oh, and the netcode is still ass.

My biggest gripe was how limited the combos were :-(. When the game first came out and the combos were so toned vs down it really put me in a sad place LOL... Versus how Street fighter 4 combo system allowed you to be more free

The change in managment likely had an effecton, or was a symptom of, the dev focus shifting more to appease the players of the game rather than the sponsors of the game

I think the only bad thing about this game that never got fixed was the netcode, it's definitely not as bad as before, it's functional. But booting up SFV is hard when you're used to silky smooth GG strive.

Just to hang a point on the launch roster, I really didn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary for a Street Fighter game, and I think fans really have short memories when it comes to that. SFII had a starting roster of 8, and by the SSFII Turbo it had 16, 17 if you count Akuma. Alpha immediately followed that and had a starting roster of...10 characters; 13 if you count secret playable characters again. In Alpha 3 (home versions) it ballooned up to I think 39 characters. But we'll count Alpha 2, since only that was released when they moved to SFIII; Alpha 2's final roster was I think 19. Then came SFIII, which boasted a measly 10 characters again. By 3rd Strike it got up to 19, the same as Alpha 2 but way below Alpha 3. Finally, SFIV launched with 19 characters, and years later got to the 44 being referenced in this video. So sure, SFV's starting roster of 16 is less than SFIV's, but just like every other game in the series, it eventually blew up (to the point it boasts the most characters of any game in the series), and just like every other game it launched with less characters than the game that preceded it.

Buying a game and its DLC content is a lot like voting. If y’all just allow a video game company to give you bare bones ie an incomplete game with glitches. Then that’s on you. The new wave of gamers basically just allow companies to charge them a premium on incomplete (and sometimes broken games) w/ a crap ton of DLC at launch. Which should of been included in the game from release, instead of 6 months later:

Love this game. It has its flaws but now it's a great game now

I agree with most of the points here, but there's a couple of things I feel you failed to mention that still stick in my craw to this day. 1.) at the time of it's release, the video games industry was still strongly pushing back against the idea of mobile game-style MTX put into the game and Street Fighter 5 is guilty of some truly ghoulishly abhorrent stuff. it is a retail priced triple A game that tries to sell you colors, skins, characters, stages, timed-exclusive event stuff, loot boxes for the survival mode, shots at the challenge matches against boss characters, etc. I do not feel that the Fight Money system excuses this unreasonable amount of gated content, and I basically don't ever want to touch my launch copy of SFV I got for my PS4 any more because at this point buying championship edition seems like the better option for not getting taken for a ride. That's not even getting into the option to toggle mobile game style ads to get extra Fight Money. 2.) Everything to do with the online experience. the Netcode is borked so badly that it gave rollback netcode a bad name, and also... usually primarily online based games, when you buy them on PS4, they tended to come with a leaflet with a code with some free Playstation Plus on it. Street Fighter V came with a leaflet with a redeemable free month of Twitch Subscription to Capcom Fighters.

I prefer characters to be from different parts of the world representing different fighting styles. I liked the concept of Rashid and Laura, but not so much the others. The others are just too wacky and weird for me. Loved the concepts of El Furte, Juri, and Hakan in sf4. Jamie in sf6 is the kind of new character I'm interested in

Two more things on the gameplay: 1. Capcom went with an abysmal delay based netcode with SFV when rollback was readily available and becoming the standard for many other fighting game franchises, making SFV seem behind the times off the jump. 2, if you came from Ultra SF4, there was a marked loss of expression with how you could play characters in SFV for the most part. Capcom severely reduced the usefulness of light attacks and made them much harder to start combos with, but then have each character some kind of "magic" combo button that glued an opener to other moves. This limited the overall combo routes characters had and basically made a very clear "optimal" style for each character causing them feel very "cookie cutter" as people said. Couple this with the the overcentralization and utility of crush counters plus the smaller roster at launch and you had a very barren feeling game. Profound sadness...

As someone who came from Marvel 3 and Killer Instinct, SFV's gameplay didn't bother me that much. I was already used to playing very volatile, swingy fighting games with lots of installs so I think SF players were just caught off guard by that. Even in 3S getting killed by Genei Jin every 5 seconds and grabbed and killed by Makoto is just a day in the park there. Looking forward to 6 for sure.

V triggers are a comeback mechanic, and that sucks, but they're less egregious than Ultras from SFIV. And though they didn't emphasize this enough in the mechanics, you could earn them by using your V skill, not just by getting hit. Another thing that sucked about the game was that there were no chip kills except for with supers, and supers shared meter with far more useful EX moves, so too many games came down to a slog where one or both characters are alive on a magic pixel fishing for the last hit. There were two things that made me hate the game though. 1) The netcode was bad, and in 6 years, they never found it worth the investment to fix it. 2) I've heard people refer to this game before as +2 Fighter, because you kind of just had to memorize which moves your opponent had that were unintuitively +2 on block; if you didn't, you'd get blown up in just a couple of interactions, and the round is lost. A lot of the other fighters I play have universal defense mechanics like pushblock, Fautless Defense, and whatnot (which the Drive system in SFVI seems to mimic to some degree as well) to handle these kinds of scenarios that are otherwise knowledge checks, but it just made SFV completely unfun to learn until you overcome these knowledge checks. They added V Shift later, which may have solved this problem for me, but at that point, I had no interest in returning to the game's terrible online experience.

It's still the best SF game to me, love this game 💝.

Because it wasn’t Street Fighter. It was Street Fighter vs Tekken 2… SF4 was the last true SF.

honestly I feel like it was how limited the characters felt and lack of modes then the roster cause I still think 16 is a good number it’s the quality not quantity

It still sickens me that Capcom charged full retail price of 60 goddamn dollars for a bare bones game that only catered to the hardcore esports crowd, absolutely repulsive. I don't care how "complete" the game is now they shouldn't be allowed to sweep that horrendous business practice under the rug, that kind of bullshit makes what they did to Asura's Wrath seem like a mild tickle! And as such, between this and Marvel Infinite, I don't have much faith in SF6 even this late into the waiting game. Damage has already been done. I mean for fuck sakes they expect 60 dollars for that upcoming game as well, hell there's an "Ultimate Edition" going for 1o5 dollars! For vanilla SF6! That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.......

You need to remember SFV was made when capcom was on the ropes financially. I'd say the biggest difference between the launch of SFV and SF6 is most obviously money. After SFV came out, Capcom just kept knocking it out of the park with hit release after hit release. Their profits jumped wildly and steadily over the coming years and the more they made, the more SFV got. Releasing franchises like Monster Hunter to Steam for the first time and breaking the franchise's sales records by light years. Now they're extremely well off and I think that that's exactly what you see when you look at SF6. If you think about it, it's actually been quite some time since capcom released any game that wasn't a major hit. They're on a roll. Several of their franchises were on the decline like RE, DMC, MM for various reasons and Capcom turned them all around after SFV. MH became a mainstream success story. Capcom's been getting fat and now we're gonna reap the fruits of that with SF finally getting what it deserves.

better question: why do people dedicate thousands of hours to a game they hate for any reason beyond that it's the current title?

Crush counters had to shave off 20% damage from the next move, while VT cancels shaves off 30%

You downplayed how bad the input delay was. Also, so many throws that first season. We had 'throw loops' ! Also, the worst, worst thing about the game was the netcode

"Learn from your mistakes" Who would've thought that this was a good idea?! I mean it has been around like FOREVER!!!!!!!!

Remember kids, if you spend as much time with books as electronics, you'll know the phrase is "glimmer in your eye" not "glimpse"

The biggest problem for sfv for its 1st year was it wasn't a complete game period . The dlc wasn't even dlc exactly as those characters were meant to be in base game but ended up being unfinished so we had to pay the bill along with are 60 bucks to an uncompleted game missing tons of content. Mainly because either way Sony or Capcom rushed to put out the game and nobody questioned this season 0 content.

1:55, this, thing, on the right side of the screen. Just look at it, I know I hurts.

Button strength priority made CC fishing in neutral even more insufferable. I forget, is that gone in SF6?

The whole sf5 situation si so absurd to me.yeah i get the hate it got in its first year,but in 2023 sf5 with all content? A superb game.but of course everyone just likes to ride the hate train,just because.

I worked at gamestop when the first update that added some SF content to Monster Hunter Wolrld that required an SFV save to access, even with my discount I couldn't justify spending $10 on a used base game copy so I just borrowed it.

as a indian i hate it because of it's server. in 2019 they had this huge "net code" change whatever update. which screwed my experience. previously I could get matches every 3-5 minutes, after that I had to wait for 30mins sometimes to get a match, had to drop the game. sucks since I was loving it and was ultra Gold and each day felt like I was achieving something. hope SF6 is better man, although I will only get it on sale and after akuma reveal.

Wait... ESPN had an issue with R. Mika's costume? Don't they show real-life humans beating each other half to death in cages on primetime TV?