Street Fighter V

[TheGreatNads]

Here's another gameplay exhibition of Street Fighter 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1 ... r_embedded

It features the same characters and stage, but different players, and some different moves. The video is lower quality. The most interesting, potentially cool move shown is one where Chun Li shoots a bunch of fireballs on the screen repeatedly after using a revenge meter. I'm kind of intrigued by that, I'd love to see some over the top move in that vein from Dhalsim for example. I suspect there will be special mechanics that one can use to get around a move like that which will be announced eventually(like focus attacks and parries were in 4 and 3 respectively).

Aside from that, you can see some more normals that weren't in previous footage, many of which like the game in general look painfully slow. Some of them don't even look good to me. People keep talking about how good the animation looks and how much detail there is(which is true about there being more detail), but some of those low kicks from both characters look incredibly awkward and lame, like the character is struggling to do them(they slooowly stretch their limb out and eventually thump the other character awkardly). The game looks slow in general, with a lot of the animations of similar moves looking slower compared to Street Fighter 4. I hate how so many moves like shoryukens(do people actually like the way that 2 hitting shoryuken looks at 0:48?) take longer to complete because Capcom wants to add more emphasis to them, particularly when it actually doesn't make the moves look cooler. It looks dumb. But it's the exact same type of stuff Street Fighter X Tekken did.

In the PS3/360 generation and in this one animators have worked so hard to make games unfun(games like Assassin's Creed and Infamous being the pinnacle of this crap) and it seems Street Fighter is even moving more in that direction. I don't think it's hyperbolic when I say much of what I'm seeing in this footage reminds me of the recent Mortal Kombat games(which are painfully slow compared to the old games and goes about adding more emphasis to attacks in much the same way, and fails in much the same way, even though it's much worse in the MK games). It's not like you have to make a slower or uglier game to have a more detailed(in terms of animation, lighting, and various graphical details) Street Fighter 4, this is just what Capcom apparently think looks good.

I wish I could blame this all on Unreal Engine but in reality Capcom were already moving in this direction with Street Fighter X Tekken. In fact I don't think any of their fighting games after SF4(not counting iterations on 4) look any good. Marvel vs Capcom 3 looks like shit compared to 2 for example. MvC3 doesn't look particularly similar to this game, other than the emphasis on superfluous bullshit moving around the stage background, but it seems like a consistent trend of making ugly games. It just seems Capcom have a particular look they've been going for, why I don't know, because no one was complaining about how 4 looked(aside from the people who want pure 2D graphics), but I know plenty of people who thought SFxT didn't look good(I can't speak to MvC3 since I didn't pay much attention). In summary I think the game right now looks like gutter trash.

[TheGreatNads]

Seeing Dhalsim footage, his normal look quite slow, which isn't a surprise given how the game overall has looked. Combined with Capcom adding more weirdness to his animations, Dhalsim seems a little more similar to Necro in this game(Necro had long range moves like Dhalsim but was totally not a zoning character like Dhalsim has been in pretty much every game he's been in). Hopefully he won't be as weak as Necro was. He even has a normal now that is just like crouch medium punch from Necro. Were this game to ever have Necro added(extremely unlikely) I would expect that bizarre matchup of Necro vs Dhalsim I've always wanted to see, to be a little less interesting now that Dhalsim seems to be less of a zoner with long range normals. He has a lot of new moves, I'm open-minded and interested in seeing how they change his style. One of them seems to give him more "get off me" capability, which is usually a big weakness for him.

He does have a kick similar to forward light kick in IV that seems to be a pretty useful poke though, so it's not necessarily that all of his normal are slow. I'm a bit curious how his anti-air normals will be, you really can't tell from the footage and that's kind of expected with Dhalsim, usually anti-airing with him is very situational with lots of different buttons for individual situations. I'm also not sure if he has any normal that is good as sort of an anti-air read. Like in IV you could hit people with medium kick in anticipation of a jump if you had a good angle, I'm not sure any of his normals are appropriate for that use in this game.

On that note, his regular fireball that now goes in the air at an upward angle does have use as a kind of anticipatory anti-air. I'm pretty curious to find out how the change in the fireball impacts gameplay. This is one area in particular where I wish I could play the game to test this out now.

It appears he does not have the regular Yoga Tower, he has some kind of version of it that cancels into a teleport(not sure what all he can do from teleports) like was shown in the trailer, but I don't think he can use it defensively to stand over fireballs and such. That bums me out. He seems to have more teleport options, or at least it seems like Capcom want players to teleport with him more, which is cool, though I'm not sure if that means teleports are any safer(there do seem to be some details that make landing safer maybe). His slides seem much better as regular moves(faster, particularly the heavy one that knocks down) from IV, but you can't cancel them into flames anymore. Sliding under fireballs presumably will still be a tactic(though that doesn't justify not having the tower), but it will be interesting to see how useful the non-knockdown slides will be for Dhalsim's offense, since he can't cancel into any specials. I haven't seen the drills used enough in footage, they were shown off impressively in the trailer, but I have seen them used only sparingly in real matches. I haven't seen if he has a Yoga Mummy type backward drill either.

One thing I'm hearing that is inexcusable is that he apparently has less normals than IV. For example some of the down/down forward punch buttons he doesn't have a long range move, instead, if I understand people correctly, they're the same as down/back. If that's the case, that is fucking bullshit. It's the reverse for kicks, where now all he has is slides. Fucking bullshit. I hope they add some more normals. Dhalsim should have 36 at minimum. Anything less than that is a travesty. If it was up to me, I'd be wanting more normal moves if anything. Less normals is just not acceptable. It's criminal.

Overall he looks quite different. Despite being weaker after every entry, I thought IV's Dhalsim was the coolest one yet, I would have been fine with them if they continued to refine that basic formula while adding a few things here and there. Instead they decided to overhaul him in some fundamental ways, which is interesting. Assuming I eventually play SFV, I'm naturally going to use Dhalsim, but I don't know what to expect from him.

There's a lot of speculation that Ibuki will be one of the DLC characters, and if not she would seem a candidate for a character to be added down the road(apparently in fan votes, she seems to be quite popular in Japan). With Capcom showing this tendency to simplify characters and having less normals to work with(not just with Dhalsim, they have removed the situational short range moves some characters had where a different attack would come out based on how far away they were from the opponent), it worries me that Ibuki will be dumbed down. I hope that's not the case, I think she's a great character, but I could easily see them ruining her and making her just a dull vortex character. There's so much more to the character than that.