Street Fighter V: Champion Edition

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now

PC, PS4

Seth has never really been one for modesty, but he may be overstating in one of his post-victory barks: “This version of Seth is true perfection!” His first form, as the final boss of Street Fighter IV, was already pretty much perfect. Seth was the ubercharacter in SFIV: everything that was good, bad, beguiling and downright busted about the game was encapsulated in his moveset. His special-moves list contained a Sonic Boom, Shoryuken and Spinning Piledriver; he had a wall jump and dive kick and much more besides, making for an absurd and quite unprecedented set of tools that made him dangerous at any range, in any situation. He had long, lazy, safe ways of setting up damaging combos. He had everything, in other words, except for decent health and stun meters, which was just about all Capcom could do to balance him against the rest of the cast.

Seth is the headline addition to Champion Edition, and has been toned down from his SFIV form, not least because of the folly of introducing a flat-out broken character in the final iteration of the game. Seth has a new body: a woman’s, modelled on Juri. The special moveset has been dramatically reduced – no projectile, no piledriver – making for a more honest playstyle. Yet he retains his role as the game’s defining character thanks to his primary V-Skill, a grab that, if it connects, borrows a single-use special move from its target. From Ken, he pinches a flaming Shoryuken; from Guile, a Sonic Boom. While the move can only be used once, it can be used in almost any situation, even cancelling out of special moves, and adds a thrilling new dimension to individual matchups, the dynamic shifting suddenly with each successful install.

While it’s hardly innovative in genre terms – Smash has its Kirby, Mortal Kombat its Shang Tsung – this is new for Street Fighter, something that has been a pleasantly recurring theme over the course of SFV’s life. Its early failure was at least partly due to the extent to which it sought to deviate from, rather than adhere to, the series’ fundamental rhythms: a reduced emphasis on projectiles, a game that rewarded wanton aggression over patient play. Yet that has allowed Capcom to rethink the design of classic characters. Ryu and Ken have never felt less alike, while such defensive powerhouses as Guile and Dhalsim are here thrillingly strong on the front foot. And when it comes to the new additions, Capcom has clearly revelled in being untethered from series convention. The result is a roster of 40 characters that has a strong claim to being the most diverse, and most creative, that the series has yet produced.

If only Capcom had lavished the same care and attention on the game around it. If a series is to change its ways to this extent, it had better be able to explain itself; SFV was bad at this at launch and is even worse now that its roster has so broadened and deepened. The whisper of a tutorial still only runs you through the basics; the story mode is as laughable as ever, a series of single-round fights against an AI that plays as if its stick has been unplugged. Combo trials are the only source of information on how a given character should be played, but that is only half the battle, if that. You’ll pick up a few fancy strings, sure, but you’ll know nothing of the context in which they should be used. This is not a new complaint, either against SFV or the series more broadly. But given how the standard of tutorials has been raised elsewhere in the genre, we still expect better from its supposed standard-bearer.

Nor is there enough to do by yourself. Previously, what little singleplayer content is on offer was given a certain purpose by Fight Money, an in-game currency used to unlock new characters, costumes, stages and so on. But Champion Edition includes all those extras from the off, bar a few special bundles tied to the Capcom Pro Tour which can only be acquired with real money. What little purpose there was in grinding out each character’s story chapter is now gone. Arcade mode is sweetly split into sections based on series history – the Street Fighter II- themed mode only lets you play as, and against, characters that featured in the games in question – but it doesn’t hold the attention for long.

The result is that Street Fighter V ends just as it began: as a game that is not only at its best when played with other humans, but is critically dependent on them. Thankfully, four years of iteration and expansion have left it in its greatest state to date as a competitive pastime. A key element in Street Fighter’s appeal is that it feels good even when you don’t really know what you’re doing, and that’s certainly the case here: attacks connect with satisfying heft, combo timing windows are generously large and the Critical Art supers are as lavishly silly as anything the series has yet produced.

For those at the other end of the skill spectrum, there are certainly problems: the kind that are inherent in long-running fighting games with so sizeable a roster, where a given character is only ever a few framedata tweaks away from brokenness or irrelevance. More troubling are some long-running issues with the game’s netcode that Capcom has yet to properly fix; we’d add the time-of-writing caveat here had the problem not been around for years. But there’s a tremendous amount here to like: chief among it, the fact that after making a mess of the launch, Capcom has stuck at it, updating and improving the game under the gaze of one of the most sternly engaged player communities around. Over the course of four years it has turned a disappointment into something to be proud of. If only it had got it right in the first place. As any fighting-game enthusiast will tell you, if you don’t have fundamentals, you might as well not bother turning up.

A game that is not only at its best when played with other humans, but is critically dependent on them