I just finished again playing the General Story earlier today. I had a lot of costume customizations, and it had been a while, so it was reasonably fun to go through it again. It reminded me of a lot of reasons why SFV will never be one of the best games in the series, though. In fact, it seems like it's the odd numbered ones that have struggled the most, finding cult followings among the super competitive set, maybe, but otherwise being rather unremarkable in their performance in the marketplace. This assumes for the sake of argument that the "zero/alpha" sub-series is an even number, of course.
A few technical things first. Why the devil are load times sooooOOOoooo bad on the PS4? The game is native to that console, fer cryin' out loud. I don't know if its better or not on a good gaming PC with the Steam version, but the load times for SFV on the PS4 are embarrassingly bad. Just absolutely terrible. Worst in the series. SFA2 on the SNES was better.
I deleted the from my PS4 for months and then redownloaded it again. For some reason, since I've gotten it back, I've had a hard time staying logged into the server for more than about half an hour or so before I get booted and have to get back on it. And for some extremely stupid and inexplicable reason, the game wants you to be online even in totally single player experiences. Getting booted out of the general story mode because you lost your connection to the Capcom server is beyond stupid and really, really annoying. I NEVER play any online modes; if I'm not playing a story mode, I'm playing arcade. I should never EVER have to connect to the server unless I'm browsing the DLCs. This doesn't happen with any other game, it doesn't happen when I'm streaming movies, or using other devices, etc. To be fair, I do occasionally (although much less often than in SFV) get have hiccups in our video conferencing software at work too, though. I can't completely and totally rule out that my own internet service is causing the problem, although the likelihood of that being the case is extremely low since everything else works like a charm. Even so... why do I even need to be online at all?
The story mode is also pretty embarrassing, although I admit to liking some aspects of it. The plot, though... gah. Who wrote this, a fifth grader? And the dialog... Look, I know it's probably translated directly from the Japanese, but why do Japanese anime and other storytelling formats always tend to sound like a bunch of pretentious blowhards reading out of context fortune cookies at each other in an attempt to sound like somebody has some depth to them? The "comic relief" such as it is, is so cringy that it makes me feel like I need to go to the gym just to recover from the beta that's all over it. The live-action Street Fighter movie with Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made that got a wide release, but that comes across as a masterpiece of craftsmanship compared to this story mode storytelling.
SFV is also a shockingly ugly game most of the time, although it isn't consistently so; sometimes it actually looks really good. Sometimes the ugly is technical, like the incredibly plastic looking models, and the really bad clipping and crazy spastic behavior of hair and clothes. But sometimes its just the art design. Somebody really hated Ken and Akuma, for instance, and went out of their way to make them look absolutely retarded. Meanwhile, Ryu and (most alternates of) Chun-Li look quite good. The "hot Ryu" redesign is so good that it is up there with the Mark of the Wolves Terry Bogard as a kind of "this should have been his design in the first place" kind of redesign. Recent DLC character Akira looks tremendously good. Alex looks like he has a broken leg in his normal standing stance. It's really kind of all over the map, but when you compare SFV to some of its PS4 generation contemporaries like Fighting EX Layer, King of Fighters XIV, SNK Heroines, Tekken 7, etc. it really stands out as a mostly tremendously ugly game.
Character selection and prominence was quite weird. Did Karin go and become a fan favorite sometime when I wasn't looking? She was in one game as a totally forgettable rival; she is to Sakura what Ken is to Ryu, except that Sakura isn't as iconic as Ryu and she doesn't really need a Ken. Even the UDON folks completely ignored her other than an off-hand reference that Sakura's friend from school makes. And they LOVED pulling obscure characters out and finding ways to use them for something. There are plenty of fan favorites and original world warriors that don't show up, yet we also get a lot of kind of obscure and odd characters. Even very prominent characters from the last game don't show up except as cameos. Really? No Crimson Vyper? But we get Seth come back as a girl? Seth the boss that nobody really liked, and who was one of the weakest parts of SFIV? (To be fair, not very many of the SFIV original characters are very good. Rufus? El Fuerte? Somebody should have been fired over those two.)
I will say that at least at this point in the game's lifecycle, the gameplay itself is pretty solid. Not the most exciting SF gameplay I've ever seen, but it's not overly simplistic, it's not overly spastic, and its not overly technical. It does kind of hit a sweet spot that the best Alpha and SFIV iterations did. But given that almost everything else about this game is mediocre, disappointing, or otherwise fails to live up to the promise that it should and could have, and those other games with equally compelling gameplay are still around and can be played quite easily, it's a little weird to expect us to get very excited about this title still.
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