Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition review

Reviewed on: PS4

Now it’s complete!

The launch of Street Fighter V was surrounded by controversy and questionable decisions: the focus on competitive play and the business model were just some of them. However, the issue that raised the most problems was the lack of single-player and/or offline content for the game. Although it had a kind of “Arcade” mode, with characters that gradually increased in difficulty, it seemed rushed: kind of unpolished; and the story mode, well, let’s not even talk about it, with its illustrations of questionable taste. But all of this had a taste of, to borrow the terminology, a set-up for what was to come.

And, over the first two seasons, SFV grew and piled up updates and improvements — even if at a slower pace than needed. All of this, added to the scolding the community gave, culminated in Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition.

Let’s start by talking about the elephant in the room: Arcade Mode. After A LOT of crying and asking, CAPCOM finally added it and did so in fantastic fashion: themed after the previous Streets! So, we have a total of six routes within arcade mode: SFI, II, III, Alpha, IV and V, each with specific characters that match that era. That is, you won’t see or pick ─ for example ─ Alex on the SFI, II, Alpha and IV routes. Oh, and the endings aren’t repeated if a character is selectable on more than one different route (like Ryu and Ken, for example). Even though they are just comic book pages, a lot of important Street Fighter lore is explained in an easy and very accessible way.

Other minor but very cool additions are the Team Battle, where you can build teams and have fights with fighters (and players) taking turns until one team knocks out all members of the other. The Extra Battle mode brings fights with interesting, modified characters. At the moment, there is an event running to unlock the Viewtiful Joe themed outfit for Rashid, but other rewards are offered, such as large doses of XP and even FM! In addition, new Challenges and Demonstrations for all characters<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>. Also interesting, but only for fighting game data nerds like the one writing to you, all the framedata is now available in training mode!

But Arcade Mode is not everything this third season brought: besides our already expected six characters (Sakura, Blanka, Falke, Cody, ‘G’ and Sagat, with Sakura already available), we get the addition of a second V-Trigger for ALL characters, greatly increasing the layers of gameplay and possibility for each of them. And that is great, because veterans and newcomers can, together, enjoy an excellent game. And to give credit where it’s due: SFV:AE is an almost perfect balance between accessibility and hardcore.

Spectacular change

Right away you see a change in the game. When you turn it on, you are greeted by the game’s new motif: all highlighted with metallic colors — especially gold. Life bars, menus. Everything points to the spectacle that SFV:AE tries to be, and sometimes manages. You can clearly see CAPCOM’s attempt to make SFV:AE a personalized, unique and different experience for each player. This is done through the already known CFN (CAPCOM Fighting Network — a kind of social network for players to connect through online mode and be able to see, compare and follow statistics and data such as number of wins, character usage ratio and even watch other players’ replays) and through customization of some options that many may judge silly, but are actually extremely cool. One of them is the possibility of choosing which song the game’s main menu will play. That includes character themes, specific stage music or even the classic SFII tracks (which are paid DLC, unfortunately).

But the real spectacular change (with a few stumbles) is all of the game’s online content. The netcode is fabulous. While testing the game, I played some online matches (around ten) and, several times, connected with opponents with 1 or 2 connection bars and rarely got lag, and I confess that left me truly amazed, considering that I started playing SFV at its beginning. But you could already feel a (very big) difference in the gain of Fight Money (FM), the currency used to buy characters, stages and alternate colors, especially in the daily missions, which suffered a sharp reduction. Although the version we tested was the one that includes all characters, players of the old version without a Season Pass may find it hard to unlock stages and other characters.

I left the best for last: if you own the vanilla edition of SFV, all of this content was made available for free (except for the characters from the other seasons, which still need to be bought gradually with FM)

CONCLUSION

The truth is that Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition finally feels like a complete game. Everything is there for every kind of fighting game fan: the datanerds who enjoy seeing the moves frame by frame, the single-player modes for those who like a simple, uncomplicated story and the traditional modes such as Arcade and Survival for the more casual who just want to throw a few Hadoukens around. There is no better time than now to play Street Fighter V, whether you are a seasoned veteran or a curious newcomer.

MECHANICS – Street has never been so accessible and relaxed to play and, at the same time, has never been so hard to master a Street like this one. 10

AUDIOVISUAL – Excellent presentation, and although some OST tracks are especially irritating, it’s nothing that compromises the experience as a whole! 9.0

NARRATIVE – The complete story mode, although it doesn’t belong to Arcade Edition, does a good job of placing players in the lore of Street Fighter, which will surprise the most skeptical about its depth. Overall, it is simple and well done. Besides that, Arcade mode gradually introduces classic elements, relevant to the characters and their involvement with the story. 8.0

TOTAL SCORE: 9.0

Review done on the PS4 version kindly provided by CAPCOM do Brasil