Alan Wen ARCADE MODE HAS GIVEN STREET FIGHTER V THE SINGLE-PLAYER CONTENT IT DESERVES, AND I’M GOING IT ALONE.
Street Fighter V finally lets players challenge just themselves
Nearly two years after its original launch, January finally saw Street Fighter V updated as Arcade Edition, which includes what many players, myself included, have been desperate for since Day One. It’s not like there wasn’t any single-player content, but the Survival and Story modes failed to deliver some very basic things that we needed: structure and a sense of purpose.
Fighting purists might counter that competition is the precise point why there’s no Arcade mode – there’s no better way to learn than playing against better players, git gud n00b, and so forth. Look, it’s not like I haven’t tried. But even after the past two years, I still can’t hope to get beyond Bronze. Thankfully, now that Arcade mode is finally here, I’ll never have to consider being matched up with, and bodied by, random strangers ever again. I can’t be the only one expressing this sentiment. Because, as exciting as the competitive scene is – and I’ve gladly deprived myself of sleep to watch the Evo and Capcom Cup finals in recent years – not everyone is aiming to go pro. When your skill set has plateaued, there are only so many times you can keep taking defeat before you have to say, “pass the salt”.
That’d be a crying shame because SFV is also mechanically the best fighting game there’s ever been, without the filler that lesser rivals compensate with. It just needed a better package to make us mere mortals feel like we can accomplish something without the risk of breaking the controller every session. The new update goes out of its way to make up for it by giving a number of routes based on different entries in the Street Fighter timeline. Basically, you get to fight against a series of AIcontrolled matches culminating in a final boss. You can also choose difficulty settings for the next match to suit your skill level, while repeated defeats will scale that fight down to something more manageable.
RAGE METER
If all that sounds like sacrilege to the hardcore, relax: there are still new V-Triggers to freshen up the rest of the game. It sounds basic because it wasn’t a huge ask in the first place. It’s on par with how Rocket League lets you enjoy a season against bots on your own terms instead of getting senselessly slaughtered by the auto acrobatics of online players. Obviously, this is coming from someone who’s not made to compete on the world stage; much worse is that I am so susceptible to gaming rage that it’s getting bad for my health, and with ever more competitive games become the popular choices, I just can’t hack it any more.
Yet there’s still that burning desire to be – to appropriate a term from Seinfeld – the master of my domain. Nowhere is this better illustrated than when I keep returning to my favourite game of all time: Bloodborne. It’s brutally unforgiving at first, probably still hellish the second and third time. But the satisfaction of revisiting FromSoftware’s masterpiece comes from how much better I get, how attack patterns are etched into memory and parries timed to a tee. The feeling of mastery when I can put down Vicar Amelia on the first attempt instead of the hours previous runs took becomes irresistible. Just let me leg it at the first sight of an invading player and it’d be perfect.