Retronauts - 753: Street Fighter V

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

The virtuous Diamond Feit, valiant Kevin Bunch, voluminous John Learned, and vindictive Brian Clark venture back 10 years to assess the value of (and possibly vindicate?) Capcom's Street Fighter V.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

previously on Retronauts. Well, I'm sure Street Fighter's 5 wore its own conversation. You know, what happened after Capcom built up all this goodwill? I mean, Street Fighter 5 and suddenly everyone got angry again. But that game turns, that game is 2016, so we'll get to that in, you know, 2026. So, you know, look forward to that when my children were in high school, I guess. This weekend Retronauts, Capcom finally learns to count. to V. Welcome back to Retronauts and welcome back to Street Fighter. That's right. We're going back

to the well. It's Street Fighter time. I have it on record that we have podcasts about Street Fighter, Street Fighter 2, Final Fight, Street Fighter 2 again, Street Fighter 2 beyond the game, whatever the hell I was talking about back then, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter 3, and in episode 555, we covered Street Fighter 4. At which point I joked about, well, Street Fighter 5 turns 10 in 2026. And here we are. It's 2026. And Street Fighter 5 indeed is 10 years old.

Therefore, it's retro. Therefore, we're talking about it. My name is Diamond Fight. I am almost retro five times over at this point. Let's talk to my guests, starting in Maryland. It's Kevin Bunch, wondering what happened, to Scullomania and Street Fighter EX. Aren't we all?

What a game changer. Would have been a literal game changer if they launched with Scullomania and Street Fighter V. Let's next move on since he spoke up to Ohio. Ohio because I'm us. My name is John. John learned. And crush counters are terrible. We're getting that out of the way now.

They're fucking, fucking terrible. Okay. Thank you for cursing already. And going over to the state of Illinois. This is Brian Clark from One Million Power. And I am very disappointed to just now learn that this is not, in fact, a podcast about the anime Street Fighter 2V. Thank you, Brian. That was a joke I had in my pocket, but that's all right. I'm glad someone said it. Someone had to. Lord knows, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw Street Fighter V. Like the actual V. I'm like, what? There was already a Street Fighter V. We did. This has been settled. I've spent so much mental energy trying to forget that anime happens. So I never can. I wasn't going to go there. It's burned into Brian.

He can't, he can't let go. It can't hurt you anymore. No. But yes, as established, we have spent many, many hours already talked about Street Fighter 5, Street Fighter in general, I should say. So we were coming to Street Fighter 5. We don't need to legislate what Street Fighter is at this point. If you're listening, you should know by now.

If you're not familiar Fitzger, go back to some of those early episodes. They're all fantastic, I promise you. So let's talk about, street fighter 4 again because we have to do this because it's very important because street fighter 4 was a monument to release it kind of broke a sort of industry-wide doldrums about fighting games which is another episode we did with kevin and i we did about the sort of the quote unquote dead years of fighting games now the dark ages yes street fighter 4 snapped out of that street fighter 4 was a big success And Capcom spent a lot of time and a lot of money really tapping into that phenomena. Like, it premiered in Arcades of 2008. They had console versions ready by 2009. And then iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration.

The final Ultra Street Fighter 4 launched in 2014. So it's like six straight years of Street Fighter 4, like public facing. Lord knows how many years they spent behind the scenes. But still, a lot of Capcom, a lot of Street Fighter during that time. And it was also paired with a lot of other fighting games from Capcom and not Capcom, but Capcom itself was very much in the spotlight during that era. You know, you had Marvel Copcom 3 come back. Then you had Marvel Capcom 3 again a few months later.

And I was like, really? Are we doing this? And then somewhere in there you have Street Fighter Cross Tekken, which had its own bag of worms, and let's be honest, some people out there are still probably telling themselves that Tekken Cross Street Fighter is happening, even though Harada is out, and I'm sorry. Someone's out there. Someone out there right now in 2020s? It's like, I cannot wait to get the Tekken version of Tekken Street Fighter. It's got a lonely vigil. Let go. Not inside of the Namco factory. Let go. Let that ship sail. And you can't forget the greatest

fighting game Capcom did in this time period, Tatsunoko versus Capcom. If only it got a proper home release, you know, instead of the Wii. But we got two versions on the Wii, and they were both great. I don't want to play a finding game on Wii. I'm sorry. I'm a bad person. Well, you and most people, apparently. Well, right.

I'm very lucky in that I live here in Japan, so I was able to find an arcades. And every once in a while, I put in a hundred yen, and I get to experience 10 glorious minutes as golden light on as Lord of Intended. So, yeah, Street Fighter 4, big deal. But also, we also mention this out loud. As Street Fighter 4 exploded, so did Evo and streaming games in general, but especially streaming video and Evo as a marriage. And I have some facts here. I have some facts.

In 2011, 2 million unique people watched Evo 2011. Four years later, Evo 2015, that number. doubled four million unique online viewers. And I'm not even counting other streams. Don't forget, Twitch was not the only game in town. There were other streaming services for a few years there. I know at some point ESPN was streaming this stuff. I don't know if that was, I think that was, wasn't that coinciding with Street Fighter 5 actually? ESPN involved. I think so. That sounds right. Yeah, because they changed some of the animation, like, camera angles to make it friendly or for ESPN. And they wouldn't allow certain costumes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. We're going to talk about.

about these things. Wait, wait. Are we blaming ESPN for the, for the butt slap? Is that what we're saying? Definitely. Sure. Okay. All right.

Got to blame somebody. Like, they animated it and everything. It was ESPN, I think, that, like, stopped Fudo from using a specific Armica costume. They're like, you can't do that. We're on TV. And he's like, I'm from Japan. I don't care. I don't know what ESPN is.

Shut up. Yeah, right, right. That's true. There is no ESPN here. It needs nothing to them. Nothing. But in this environment. in this, and I would say in general, I think we can all agree, in general, while Capcom had some, you know, good moves and bad moves during this time, in general, the opinion was the Street Fighter 4, we love it. We want more Street Fighter 4. Thank you very much. It was ported to every console. I had it on the 3DS of all things. Like, very well received. And then during this time, we start to hear, you know, inevitable, we knew what happened, but like we start to hear talk of a five.

I found a reference in 2013 from associate producer Tomuaki Ayano, who I guess was talking about Tech and Cross Street Fighter at the time, but he made a little, I don't know if he's joking or not, but he was talking about how long it takes to make video games. And I read his quote here, game development is a long and arduous process. If you look at the history of the series, it took six years to go from Street Fighter 2 to Street Fighter 3 and 9 years to go from Street Fighter 3 to Street Fighter 4. That's not quite accurate, but whatever. Purely based on that, it would probably take us until the year 2018 before Street Fighter V comes out. Ha, ha, ha. If only. Yeah, that might have been the better move.

That might have been the better move. But no, as far as we know, development was already underway for Street Fighter V. We have news at least, at least in 2014, there was very much public talk of developing Street Fighter V. there was a Ono, we'll talk about him more detail later, but Yoshinori Ono tweeted in 2014 in front of God and everyone, he said, hey, come work with Dimps and Capcom on an upcoming fighting game. He didn't say what that game was, but everyone in 2014 is like, oh yeah, a new fighting game with Dimps? Like Street Fighter 4? Like the one you were just made? Yeah? Obviously, he didn't confirm anything. But clearly things were underway. News started. there were little hints here and there. And yeah, I would say by 2015, we already got like full-on announcements and trailers and teasers. And, you know, the news cycle began. Here it is.

Street Fighter 5 is coming. And I want to say probably the first big news that everyone was surprised by is that because they partnered with Sony and Sony helped promote the game, especially early on, got a lot of promotions from Sony, it would not appear on Xbox. They were going to have a PlayStation 4 version, and there would be a Windows version. No Xbox, no Linux. That's it. So everyone's like, oh, okay, we're doing that, huh? This was a big deal. I remember at the time I worked at a local newspaper, and I did a feature article about our local fighting game community, because of course I did.

And, like, I was talking with the TOs, the tournament organizers and what they're looking forward to, like, in the future. like, yeah, well, you know, we haven't made any decisions on, like, what hardware we're going to try and pursue, uh, yet between, like, the Xbox one and the PS4. Because everyone's just kind of, like, waiting for Street Fighter 5 and figuring out what we're going to run it on. And then they came out and announced, oh, it's just going to be on PS4. That's it. Have fun. And that sort of like solved the issue and also completely killed, uh, the Xbox as a, like, tournament platform. Because the Xbox 360 was very renowned in tournament circles because it just ran everything better than the PS3 did.

Yeah, I was going to ask, as a person who went to more tournaments at that point, I got the impression that on average you were much more likely to see something running on a 360 regardless of what else it was available on. Yeah, like, some tournaments ran PS3 just because like they were around. A lot of people had them. But a lot of the times they went with the Xbox 360. to lower input lag. You could get the, like, PS360, like, boards to install in your stick or whatever, your controller to be able to use it on both.

So, like, a lot of people did that and just used the Xbox one. That was before Microsoft started caring about cracking down on non-licensed third-party controllers. Those were the days. Yep. So you can say thank you to Streetfire for, for completely killing all the momentum of the new Killer Instinct game from 2013.

Well, this was a point, too, where Sony was really trying to get into bed with Capcom over fighting games. So, like, I want to say Evo 2011 or 13, I can't remember, went full PS3? Or was that, am I wrong about this? One of them did. And they were like, there was such a public backlash. They had to go back to 360. Yeah, we're like, just kidding.

And then, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of rumors that Sony ponied up a lot of money in development for Street Fighter 5, and then Sony went and basically bought Evo for a little while, too. So they were really kind of shelling out cash to get in bed with whatever Capcom was doing with their flagship fighting games. It's so tragic because just think, just think about what the Connect integration could have been on Street Fighter 5 for the Xbox 1. Just imagine the lost potential of standing up and shouting McDonald's at some point. I don't know.

Fireballing, Milo. Ask your parents, kids. Yeah, that counts as child's cruelty, John. We don't joke about that here. I'm sorry. That's no, we can't harm Milo. Speaking of development, we should also mention that Street Fighter 5 is an Unreal 4 game. So that was a new change.

I believe four and the Marvel Capcom 3 were both on empty framework, I think. Marvel Capcom 3 was on empty framework. I could have sworn the other one used Unreal as well. Yeah, I don't know if Street Fighter 4 was. I don't think it was. Okay. But it certainly was Unreal 4. Unreal 4 was new.

It was not. And someone put a link in here about an early pledge that Street Fighter 5 was going to look hyper-realistic, which I think we can all agree would not have worked, but they teased it at one point. So that's the thing. I mean, after the fact, after this game came out, and maybe we're getting a little, I'm getting a little bit, ahead of ourselves here. A lot of rumors sort of hit the internet about a troubled production with this game, which started with a more realistic art style, which Street Fighter 6 kind of ultimately adopted. And they've made a few images public, like one of sort of a beat-up hot Ryu fighting a more

younger-looking Rutger-Hauer bison. And I think it looks very cool personally. But like, this is clearly what they were kind of prototype. typing early on. And I think this kind of gets into what ultimately happens with Ono as well down the road and that like development evidently was not going very well. Like they kept saying, at least in these interviews, that, you know, we were doing this, we were going down this one path with how the game was going to look.

And then other people in the company were disagreeing with us and that it should have more of an anime art style to it because ultimately all of the Street Fighter games, the mainline Street Fighter games, look pretty distinctly different. different except kind of four and five. And this kind of also leads to how dimps got involved, too, at least as far as like, you know, all of these things that were sort of floating around on the internet that like because development wasn't going so well, because at least the art direction was taking more time than they were expecting that like they needed to pull in another development to basically get this thing out the door. And that's sort of how dimps got got into this. Even though Ono tweeted in 2014 that, you know, Dimps was hiring, the writing was kind of on the wall internally at Capcom that like things aren't going great here.

We had to put out basically another season of Street Fighter 4. We had to make an Ultra Street Fighter 4 to keep people interested in this stuff while we ultimately finish a Street Fighter 5. And Ultra being outsourced even. Like they didn't do that one in-house. Right. Or with Demps rather. But it kind of shows.

It's kind of a buggy game. And they had to port it to the PS4 on top of that just as a stopgap. Which is history will repeat itself as we move on with this conversation. Yes. Well, we mentioned his name several times. Let's talk a little bit about Yoshinori Ono, who we must stress at this time, he was the face of Street Fighter. You know, if there was a tournament, if there was a press conference, he would be there. He'd be carrying a little toy Blanca. He would give lots of interviews. He was a very enthusiastic person. As I understand it, he was the driving force behind Street Fighter 4 existing. He was the guy who was like, no, no, no, let's make a Street Fighter, please. He worked on other fighting games. He was like, no, this is fine, but let's make a Street Fighter 4. And so throughout all the lead-up of Street Fighter 5 and the early year Street Fighter 5, like it basically is all about, oh no, like on stage being the guy.

that has his ups and downs because having a guy up there and like, oh, that's the guy for Street Fighter that lets you sort of identify with someone. But also, if you're going to get mad at someone, which the internet sure did, they got mad at, oh no. And again, it's 2014, 2015, 2015, 2016, everyone's got a Twitter, he's got a Twitter. They're probably tweeting him every day. And let's not forget, 14, 15, this is also like peak harassment hours. You know, obviously, oh, no, not a lady, but there's lots of people on the internet who are very angry about video games and anything they perceive as an attack on them or an attack on gamers, God damn it. So I'm sure this man who, you know, I don't know how much English he speaks, you know, naturally, but whatever time of day it was, I can only imagine how many tweets he was getting about everything, everything possible. I'm honestly surprised he stuck around Capcom as long as he did.

Yeah, he made it through release and he made it through several years of Street Fighter Vee, but he actually left Capcom in 2020. Last I checked, he's working on some other fighting game, fate, the fate fighting game, I think. The fate series. Yeah. Which, you know, people seem to like, I guess. And there hasn't been a fighting game in that series. God, since the arcade PS2 one, I'm forgetting the name of it, but it's, I mean, there have been many fate games since then,

but I don't think any of them been fighting games. He burned a lot of goodwill. I mean, like, Ono is a really, he's super gregarious guy. He's great in front of the camera. He's great in interviews and stuff like that. But like with what I think really, with the amount of output that Capcom had sort of in this period post-Street Fighter 4 as well, it was like they were cranking out a lot of games and a lot of fighting games rather. And if he's the guy of the fighting game kind of end of that company, If there's anything wrong with any of those games, like Diamond said, he's going to get blamed for it.

And this kind of hit the fan with Street Fighter Cross Tekken, which did not have a good rollout. And that was one of his babies, too. Like, that is something that he really wanted to be involved with. And, you know, when something, I guess, that bad happens, like that it was almost too much bad publicity for him to shake. And then with the ultimate rollout of this game, too, it's like the writing was really on the wall for him to, to, to, probably take off, but you're right. He stuck around until 2020, and I really like him a lot. I hope he does good stuff with the Fate series. I've never played any of them myself, but kind of a controversial figure as far as all this stuff is concerned. Fighting game fans notoriously grouchy

about everything. Oh, yes. Per snickety. As we'll get into on this podcast. Yeah. We should also mention by name Takyuki Nakayama, who is credited as the chief director of Free Fighter V. He joined Midway Through Development, and this was his first project credit as director, which I feel like is the general vibe on Street Fighter 5. If you look at the credits, a lot of the faces and people at the top don't have a lot of time at Capcom. Like, Ono is definitely the veteran among them. Like, he goes back to like the 90s. but most of these guys, and I'm sorry they are, most of the guys, they joined Capcom like within the last 10 years prior to that,

some even less. And, you know, they've got a variety of credits. They're not like, you know, it's not quite like Kheki Kamii directing Resident Evil 2, but it's a lot of new faces and very few holdovers from the heyday of the 90s or even like, you know, Street Fighter 4. I think like some, a lot of people who like made a lot of Street Fighter 4 possible aside from Ono aren't really part of Street Fighter 5 so that you can sort of see the changes.

I mean, Seth Killian is in here somewhere, but is he, like he joins Capcom at some point then he leaves Capcom and, geez, I forgot to look this up. Wasn't that before 5? I believe that was kind of, that started, like he was a big, a big factor in Street Fighter 4 in just kind of hyping it up and some of the design decisions from what I understand.

But I think he's there and out, before Street Fighter 4 ends its life cycle, if I remember correctly. That sounds right. That lines up. That lines up. That might explain why Seth comes back to five, but he doesn't look like Seth anymore. Could be. It was Combo Fiend.

Another old-timey fighting game player. He was a producer at Capcom for Street Fighter 5, and he's going to come up, I think, a little bit in this conversation a little bit later. About some of the immediate, like, first glance, differences and similarities from four to five. First of all, let's say it's right to pat, the basic control scheme does not change, even though this is now a console game. Like, Street Fighter 4 tickly launched in arcades, but then had a long life on consoles. Street Fighter 5 launches on console. This is a console game. And yet, they stick with the basic joystick and six buttons, you know, lights and mediums and heavies.

They stick with that, which is kind of notable because during this time, Capcom had experimented with a lot of other different combinations, especially in Marvel Capcom, which was designed for controllers, and that only had four buttons. So it's like, Street Fighter V? Like, no, no, no, we're doing the same six-button output thing. However, right-the-pat, focus attacks, gone. Revenge meter, gone. Ultra combos, all gone. We're resetting this thing.

But you still have your super meter. That's still there. Yes. And X attacks are still here. They kept those. They got rid of prox. Normandy Normal attacks, which is basically in Street Fighter games prior to this, like, if you're Ryu and he push heavy punch, he does one thing. But if you're close to the opponent and push heavy

punch, it's a different attack. And for some characters in prior Street Fighter games, like, that's a major part of their game plan. So old-timey players were like, we're a little off or put off by the fact that these things were being taken away from them. Ultimately, it's It didn't really, I mean, it did affect some things, but like there was a kind of a feeling in the air early on that that would, that they're dumbing down the gameplay system of Street Fighter. Maybe we can speculate why in a little bit too, but that's just one of the more subtle differences that was really evident from the beginning. And they got, they got in front of it in interviews pretty early on too. Combofein was like, we're done doing that. Heavy punch is just heavy punch.

Hard kick is just hard kick. There are no proximity to normals anymore. But there are more command normals for people. So like Ryu's standing heavy kick, if he was close to an opponent, was an axe kick. It would hit twice. But now he can just do that whenever he wants if you just hold back on the stick and hit heavy kick.

So they took away sort of the small complexity of distance from the opponent as far as like what happens when a button's pushed. But they did throw in the occasional extra kind of move here and there for people that do sort of want to tinker with combos and see how they can sort of suss out optimal damage situations. And, you know, since we're talking about normals, I do want to

also mention from Street Fighter 3 of all things, they brought back the normal priority system. So this was something where the heavy, the stronger your normal attack is, it'll beat lighter attacks if they like hit at the same time.

So if you're trying to jab someone out because your jab is fast, and has a really good hit box, they can just, they can hit you with a heavy punch or fierce, you know, if you will, and just blow you right up. And that brings in the crush counters that John loves so much. Certain moves for every character, if you get a counter hit with them with that sort of a priority normal system, you will get a crush counter and your opponent will be stunned for an extra long period of time.

so you can kind of destroy them. And at the same time, they also brought back the stun meter from Street Fighter 3, which a lot of Street Fighter games have always had stunned. You hit someone enough times, they'll be stunned, and you can sort of attack them for free. In this one, there's a meter, and you can kind of see where it's at, so you don't have to try and keep that up in your head. But also, like a normal throw will do stun damage on top of normal damage. So you have these really nasty mixups where you'll like, you know, just blast someone with a crush counter.

And then as they're getting up, you'll mix up into a grab and that will stun them. And then you can, you know, hit them with another combo and get them pretty close to losing the round. It's kind of ridiculous. But, you know, that's how the systems are put together. They never, like, really change that very much until the very end of the game's life. This is how they wanted it to get played. I think there was a feeling, sorry, Brian, I know that you want to say something here, but I think that there was a feeling that like the crush counter was meant to be a tool used if somebody like whiffs a dragon punch or makes a really bad mistake.

Like this should give you like optimal combo opportunity if somebody really blows it. But what happened at least in the early years of the game was that because crush counters were not created equal, like reuse crush counter moves where his heavy standing punch and heavy standing kick, which can be ducked under, right? Bison's was not. It was a heavy standing kick that hit mid. So like it's you can't duck it.

You have to, you can block it either way. But like, let's say bison knocks you down. All he has to do is walk up to you, stand over you, and just keep spamming the heavy kick button. And unless you want to burn resources to do an invincible follow up, he's always going to crush counter you when you wake up. And it was total. baloney.

Or you could block it and he could actually mix you up with a grab. With the throw. Right. Throw loops for a bad thing in this game, too. Throws are very dangerous in this game for other reasons too. But they did tinker with this over the course of the game's life and they did include it in Street Fighter 6 as well. But like, it is much less egregious later on.

In the early phases of this game's life, there was a lot of complaining. There was much wailing about the crush counter. Not just from me. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We're talking about throw loops being a problem in Street Fighter 5, and now they're a problem in Street Fighter 6 again. We're kind of a problem in Street Fighter 4. And Third Strike.

I play a lot of Third Strike. There's a whole lot of throw loops. Street Fighter 2, Super Turbo, loves throw loops. It's almost as if Street Fighter has throw loops, period. Maybe. Look at the boys in the lab to look into that. I wonder if kind of, all the surrounding normals and anything and everything is sort of the result of what, at least

this is the way I remember it, I'd be curious if what everybody else thinks, and this is probably not the case by the end. But I feel like there was this perception at the beginning that, like, combo pass were much more like complex and varied in Street Fighter 4, and 4 was just seen as making them, like, much more linear. You didn't have all these crazy paths necessarily you could go down, like there were a lot less one frame links and things like this, which I feel like people, again, at least at the beginning said, like really felt like it stifled the creativity of, you know, creating combos, I guess.

Do you mean in Street Fighter 4? There was not enough one frame links and Street Fighter 4 for you? I think, I think, awful lot of one frame links. I think you mixed up, like, I think you said four twice. Sorry, yeah. I meant that there were less in Street Fighter 5 than as opposed to four. And so So the perception of Street Fighter 5 was that it had a less creative combo system because of things like less one frame links, making like combo paths much more linear. Yeah. And why were there fewer one frame links? Because of frame buffering. So another thing, something Street Fighter 5 introduced for theoretically more smooth online play was an inherent frame delay in every normal move and that they called frame buffering.

ring. So if you go from third strike to Street Fighter 4, it's not that much different if like you're doing a low, fierce punch into a dragon punch or whatever. Like the feeling of those two moves commoing together is fairly smooth. Whereas in Street Fighter 5 and to a certain extent, Street Fighter 6, everything feels like you're kind of like linking them together. And there's a timing difference with what you do with your normal moves into basically everything else. So the stated reason is that they wanted to make online play smooth because many, many, many, more people were playing online than in previous Street Fighter games, obviously, because it was a console first game. But they also kind of wanted people to do those fancy linked normal move combos that you were seeing at super high level Street Fighter 4 play out of like an intermediate player, which is, I keep teasing this. I know we're going to talk about it eventually.

like there was a feeling in the air that like the reasoning behind that too is because they wanted more flashy stream ready gameplay out of this game sort of out of the gate and the frame buffer was was a big part of that you know I think that was a good time to get into the other big like mechanical change here uh since we talk about all the stuff they took out uh we got to talk about their big thing that they added was like the V system or the five system I don't know. I don't know which way you're going on this, Capcom. We can make a joke. V on this one. We can make jokes both ways. We can call it Street Fighter V, and we can call it five triggers and five skills and five reversals. It doesn't matter. The point is it's all written with the letter VE. That's what matters. But yeah. You're going to call them vibes. You're going to do the vibe shift. Vib shift. I like it. Round to something.

That's the big new thing. That's the big new thing. And one of things I think that certainly intimidated me as a a new player at the time. I mean, everyone's new players, Street Fighter 5 when it's new. But, like, when I first look at the game, what I think really intimidates me is that the focus attacks Street Fighter 4 were kind of like this thing. You could use sometimes,

but you didn't really have to use them. It was fine. This V-trigger V-Skill thing seems to be really integrated in how you use every character, and every character uses them a different way, which is definitely intimidating and learning new characters. Like, oh, what do they do? What do they do? But basically how the basics,

explanation is you press two middles at the same time, you activate a V skill. Again, everyone's skill is different, but it's a free thing. You can do whatever you want, and what you do with it will help build up your V gauge. And when your gauge is full, you can press your both high attacks, and you do a V trigger. What does it do? Well, it depends, but what's important is it will empty that gauge. So you've got another meter beyond the other meter that you sort of manage, and every character can interact with that in different ways. And by all means, let's hear some examples, your favorites or not favorites. For the V triggers, I think at some point they added in like two for every character.

They added a second trigger later. I very much remember the trap ones. So you had stuff like Ibuki throwing the giant Sherekin, which would like boomerang back, and she could use that for setups, poison. She can throw like the Molotov cocktails around and get juggle combos The other one I remember very distinctly Is this the one where like Gile can just throw like sonic booms without having to charge them? Which is completely absurd.

I feel like most of these moves were intended to be like I feel like V-trigger Sorry, I can never remember which one of these is which Yes, V-triggers were more meant to be like almost almost like a comeback mechanic for a lot of people, like something to be able to like turn the tide very quickly with like some sort of a high damage move, which I don't know.

I guess there's arguments that like supers have sort of always been that. But for some reason, I remember the reaction to these being a little more visceral than just being like, oh no, look, it's just supers again, but this we're calling it V triggers. Maybe the damage ratio was, like way out of proportion versus your average, you know, historical Street Fighter Super or something.

For me, it's like two different things that, for one, they make every character like really distinct. Yeah. In a way that you don't usually see in a Capcom fighting game. Maybe in like Street Fighter Alpha 3 with like the Vism combos and like some of the Darkstalker stuff. But, you know, fundamentally, if you're playing Street Fighter 4, like every kid. character is going to have their distinct moves, but they're going to play Street Fighter 4. They're going to have the same mechanics. This feels more like an anime fighting game, if you will, like guilty gear, where you have

to pick a character and you have to like dive in deep on how that one character plays the game, and it's more difficult to pick up other characters to add to like your roster. That's kind of how they kind of struck me here. Yeah, there is a little bit of overlap when it comes to V-Cube. skills, but it's very, very rare. Like, Ryu has a parry, like, in the Three Fighter 3 games. When they introduced Alex, he also has a parry that works very similarly. But that is, like, a singular example.

Like, Chun Li's V-skill, she does sort of like a little hop forward. That's not, it's not quite a jump. It's more like a K-O-F hop, but it does a little bit of damage on the way up. It's so bad. It's, like, Ryu's V-trigger, put him in a denger. in a dungeon state, so all of his fireballs were better. Basically, a lot of the V-triggers were like installs were like, so if you think back to Marvel versus Capcom three, everybody like had access to the X-factor thing that made them super powerful for a brief period. For most, not most,

but many characters in five, the V-trigger kind of does that. It puts them in a hyper-powerful state that they can do extra stuff. Maybe more things combo like heavy punches can now combo into DPs where they couldn't before, that kind of thing. But like, you know, there, there was were egregious differences. Like if we're comparing Ryu to Chun Li, he was in a dungeon state where his fireballs were better and he can combo more stuff. Chun Li basically got like a poor man's gennage in, which basically breaks the game, you know? So yeah, Kevin's right. Like you're not only kind of learning a character and have to really figure out how your character is going to change when you trigger the V trigger because like we could be talking about like you're playing

a totally different character mid-match. But all. Also, like, how your opponents are, like, the matchup scenarios are much more complex because, like, okay, when Chun or Laura or whoever is in a normal state, I can play them this way. But when they go into their V-trigger, that will alter the course of this match, which does make it a pretty fun game to watch, especially if you're really a nerd for this stuff and you're kind of following who does what and how they do those things. It makes for very complex chess games. but yeah you've got like this is the kind of game that is made for tournament play and you have to basically camp out on one character and real to really learn this stuff to probably maximize your enjoyment out of this but before it's almost like teckin like there's so much more to learn even though it seems less complex that it's not a good idea to just sort of like bounce around the

cast even though the cast of this game pretty early on was kind of tiny yeah and you know they also had, they brought back the alpha counter. They called it the V reversal now. Use a little bit of V gauge and you can either like dodge the attack or like do a little counter hit that does like healable gray damage. And they sort of like beefed it up a little bit. I think in the last season, season five, they added in the V shift mechanic. This was well after I stopped playing the game. So I still watched it, but I was done with it. But you push like the medium kick and the heavy punch together, and you get like a command parry slash backdash. Your character just so like hops back and if anything hits them, like it doesn't really

do anything. And if you get hit while you're doing this, you can do a V-break counterattack. And it feels a little bit like what they ended up doing with Street Fighter 6, like trying to shoehorn it into this while also addressing the real issues that this. this game had with, you know, throw loops and momentum. But, yeah, it's, it's very much like if you like the V system, you probably like Street Fighter 5 and if you hate it, you do not want to play this game for more than, you know, 10 minutes. The V-trigger was also their way, this game's way of combo extension, which is sort of a modern

fighting game staple at this point. So, like, you could be mid-combo specifically with normal moves. you can hit V-trigger and extend the combo out. But something Kevin brought up earlier, which is a pretty major, major difference in this game than all the other Street Fighter games, is that blocking anything creates gray health. So you're always losing a little bit of health if you block any kind of attack, but it's healable health over time, right?

So by that reasoning, they also took out chip death, basically. So, like, you can't get somebody to, like, a pixel of health. toss a fireball at them as they're waking up and they'll die. That doesn't happen anymore unless you kill them with a super move. But that also makes normal throws in this game very, very dangerous. So if you're just sort of like wailing on somebody and they're blocking everything, they've got a pile of gray health and you sneak in there and you throw them or you start a throw loop with them, they're just going to lose all of that gray health.

So this was made to be a very aggressively played game. the first season was like super aggressive in that respect because gray health is just not a thing in other street fighter games. And it really sort of alters the pace of the game compared to the other, especially four. And before we move on, like you mentioned that you can use it for combo extensions, the V-trigger, but you can also use it as like a sort of like a defensive measure. So if you're trying to, you know, open somebody up and you're doing like a block string and it's just not working. and you hit them with an attack that they're going to punish you for it.

You can activate your V-trigger. Yeah, if you're fast enough, yeah. That'll set you right back to your neutral state, and you can block it. You can use that as a lure to get them to press a button to attack you, so you can, like, hit them with a crushed counterback. There's a couple little layers of strategy there that are, you know, neat. But it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's not like four where you could, like, dash-cancel out of a botched dragon-pull.

hunch attempt kind of thing. So like if you if you toss out like something that's super unsafe, you can't V-trigger your way out of it. Plus you only get like you only get like one V-trigger a mat around around. Yeah. Let's also talk about an important subject to me personally and that is fight money. No, not F-E-I-T fight money, my money. There's nothing there's nothing to speak of that. That's not your attempt at bison dollars creating bison dollars? You're spending your fight money on fight money. Again, big mistake. No, I'm talking about fight money, F-I-G-H-T money, fight money.

And this was something they announced early on. I think part of this is probably because, again, we had the perception of Capcom being a little tight-fisted. When it came to online sales and DLC, there was certainly a big controversy with the Tekken Street Fighter game about how much of the quote-unquote DLC was just finished stuff that was already sitting on the disc

and the idea you had to pay to unlock something regarding the disc, really rub people the wrong way. So the fight money system, I think, in theory, was supposed to be sort of a place, an homage out there. It's like, hey, if you play a lot of street fighter, you're going to earn fight money. And when you earn this fight money,

you can spend these fight money, monies, I guess, dollar. I don't know what the unit is, fight monies. You can spend the fight monies, on the DLC stuff, which you know there's going to be a lot of DLC. But here's the problem. The problem here is that if you want to buy something with your fight money, it costs a lot of fight money.

Okay? So much. If you win an online match, we shall stress that aside from a few like, you know, single, like offline mode stuff, like, you know, there's some like some guides you can go through. And I think the early game launched with like a, a quote unquote story mode you can play through once and get like a, a big chunk of fight money. That's like one-off stuff. The basic fight money thing is you're getting by, you know,

fighting people. A online match, winning an online match, gets you 50-5-0 fight monies. A new character, if you want to buy a new character that's too much,

oh hey, I want to play that character. That's a hundred thousand fight monies. 100,000. That's a lot of matches. Okay. Stages, you know, DLC stages, 70,000, a costume, 40,000.

And that's also not counting the fact that some of these costumes, I don't know if it's because of partnerships or contracts, but like some of this stuff cannot be paid with a fight money. Like some of you have to pay cash for. And really, it's like, I can't help, but I'm old enough to think about the Simpsons, the itchy and scratchy money, like it's money, but it's more fun. But except for the stuff that you can't spend it on. Like, okay.

So, I, feel like right at the bat, this thing that looks like a nice, you know, player-friendly gesture, in turn just becomes a thing that's like, no, you're not going to get. You're not going to play enough Street Fighter to have these characters for free. You're just not. You're not going to get that. Yeah. I think if you did all of these quote-unquote story modes for the launch lineup of characters,

you got just enough that you could get Belrog without paying any money for him. which I'm sure, I'm sure to them was like the ideal situation. Like you want the people to play and get the fight money just enough so they engage with the fight money system and download another character. But then if they want to keep down the other character, it's like, no, really, you got to pay. You got to get your wallet out. I'm doing the gesture. Pay the money. And forget about the, forget about the FMs.

We want the USD. We want the JPEY. We want the British pounds. I don't know if you call those the P's or the L's. because it looks like an L system to me, but whatever. It's a lot. It's a lot of money that just, you know, quickly adds up. And it really doesn't accumulate in any meaningful way unless you're playing this game like, I don't know, 10 hours a day?

Like 10 hours a day, maybe? So this is post free-to-play revolution. Like League of Legends is definitely, I think, at this point. So other games, we're trying to kind of, online games, we're trying to incorporate these kinds of, features, scare quotes. And fighting games naturally lend to this kind of model very well. And this was Capcom's first real push into doing so. So eventually, I think it was in, I don't even know if it was in season one or

maybe season two where they started like adding weekly and daily missions to have you earn a little bit of extra fight money here and there. But yeah, that was, well, there were two, I want to say there were two currencies when this game launched. I wrong about this. There was fight money and I think there was something else. It's like battle something. Yeah. And they merged them over time. Should have been bison dollars. But yeah, right. Because like to Diamond's point, it was it was pretty egregious. Like you're not really getting that much. You got to, I mean, if we're doing some quick math, that's 2,000 wins that you have to

have online to earn yourself a new character. And if you're winning 2,000 matches in the span of of time that you can get a new character? There's no point in you switching to a different character at that point. Just start going to tournaments and win real money. But it's, this was Capcom's first jump into this. I, you know, Tekken, Tekken 7 was not that far away. It was going to start following suit. The Tekken had a free-to-play fighting game for a hot second two.

So like this was just something that was kind of in the air. And I guess I can't blame Capcom for introducing. something like this into a mainline street fighter but sure wish it was better. Yeah. I play Street Fighter 6 from time to time but I don't remember. Did they give up on this idea of like

oh you can you can pay cash or you can pay with fun bucks? Like can you even buy new characters in Street Fighter 6 with fun bucks anymore? No. I didn't think so. They do still have fun bucks in Street Fighter 6 but you can use them to buy other things like stages or a soundtrack.

Yeah, it's cosmetics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they have a ton of ways to get them in that game. Yeah. So it's not as egregious. Let's talk about the launch lineup of characters, because that's the characters you get when you buy the game. So there's no fun, no FM's involved. And I would say you start off with 16 fighters, which is respectable for a street fighter game, I feel.

The lineup is definitely dominated by familiar faces. And by familiar faces, I mean a large percentage of Street Fighter 2 characters. You've got you, you got Ken, you got Chunli, you got Thalsam, you got Cammy, you've got Bison, I mean dictator, you've got Vega, I mean Klau, you've got Zangiv, other familiar characters. Birdie, yes, technically from Street Fighter 1, but he's very much, he's a big black fat guy like Alpha. He's Alpha, he's Alpha, he's Alpha Bertie. Karen is there from Alpha, Armeika is there from Alpha, definitely a surprise there. Did I miss anybody? No, I don't think so. You missed, you missed Nash, Charlie Nash.

I thought he was dead. He was. And he got back. He's back. He has some metal parts. He's got some metal parts to his body now. I don't quite know how you... He's going off a metal face. Yeah. I, to me, my big takeaway from Nash is I just remember a very early showing at Evo. Like, everyone, all the top players were basically playing Nash. And they all love the one super where Nash, like, dash is behind you and, like, basically like buzz saws you with some sort of, like, sonic boom. And so what? So what? When I watched the high level, like the finals, it was just that move over and over again, like Nash doing that to Nash. So everyone on Twitter was like, trust no one, not even yourself. You know, Nash made the surprise face and behind Nash is another Nash. Yeah, you know, I do kind of appreciate that a lot of these returning characters, they like really reworked to them. Yeah. So like Vega is no longer doing like wall dives and stuff. He's like got a stance change now.

Dalcum, like basically all of Dalcum's stuff is like, it's still very much like he's the range character, but all of his moves are really weird. His fireball is now just like an arc and like his normal, where he's like punching and kicking with his normals is different. D'Berty is like out of shape and he's like throwing cans of stuff at you. Like, yeah, and then Bison is super slow. Nash is super slow, except for the fact now he has like,

like a teleport dash. Look at that. The shirt is there. It's some interesting stuff. If we're talking about changes, I'm sorry to interrupt Kevin, but if we're talking about changes, I got to say it because I said this like five times during our last podcast, Bison Heavy Kick. It's just, it's just not the same, man. There's no kick.

It's like a knee. It's like a weird short-range bison knee. Like, I'm sure it's still effective in some situations, especially with the priority thing. But, like, bison high kick and Street Fighter 4 was like almost a win button. It was so incredible, an incredible normal. I loved it. And then I set down to play five, like, okay, here I am. Here's my character.

And he just like, I'm going to, my knee to your chest, fear me. Like, no. The foot. Listen, the big foot on a crush counter. Oh, God. Terrible. Yeah, Vega was a motion character. They took away his charge moves.

Yeah. Yeah, Capcom's just really, they've really got it out for charge characters the past few streetfloters. They've really cut down a lot of their stuff. I wonder if that is a sort of a byproduct of online play, too. I wouldn't be surprised. That's me speculating. I don't really know for sure. But, like, yeah, other charge characters show up in this game over time.

But, yeah, it's just not as a. much a thing as it used to be. And mash moves. Like Chunley's kicks, like in Street Fighter Cross Tekken, they introduced them being like a motion. Emotion here. I think the same is true for like Blanca and Honda when they finally show up too. And they rework.

Wasn't really playing at that point. They rework Nash into like from being other guile into being basically a short range guile, which also means they eliminated like the flash kick charge motion and stuff. Yeah. Well, there are four characters. at launch who are brand new characters, although brand new is perhaps an exaggeration. Let's just say, let's say new, because the first one that comes to my mind, it's always going to be

first in my mind, is Fang, F-A-N-G, who's this very tall guy wearing big floppy robes. He's a charged character. He definitely has charge character moves. He throws poison? He poisons you? And to me, I can't help it. I saw that character revealed. and I'm like, this is absolutely 100%.

Someone tried to make Sienko Lele in 3D for a dark circus game we never got, and they basically just stretched her out and gave her a funny face. Like, okay, now it's a new character who throws poison. And I'm like, I wanted this game and you just didn't give it to me. He's a very silly character. His jumping forward, like jump kick is a backwards like Ioriogami kick. Like, you have to cross up with it. Or it doesn't hit.

He's so weird. And he floats. He flaps. He flies. Yeah. That's true. And he's right up there, too. He's right.

Like, from the start, you see he's, like, he's, I guess ballrog boxer is out. He's like the new fourth guy in Shattaloo. Yeah. Which is kind of like, brand new guy. We love him. I don't love him yet. I want to love him, but guys start playing it. I'm like, I don't know if I love this guy.

I'm sorry. Behold our four kings of Shepard. Ataloo. Like, who's this dude? Shut up. He's always been there. You love Fang. Yeah, he's weird. The poison mechanic, I think it's very interesting. It's very novel for a street fighter game to have this. And I think they did a really good job with it eventually. Like, I think he kind of sucked until one of the last patches they did. And then they finally, like, found that sweet spot to make his poison, like, really dangerous. And they've really carried that forward into six with, Aki. Yeah, Aki feels like Fang but good. I appreciate that. The best thing I can say about Fang is if you turned on the Japanese voices, you got to hear Shigerichiba voice M.

Oh, yeah. And that was pretty cool. The classic, the man who introduced every episode of Hokkaen and just got more and more excited, even as you get to like episode 200, and by that point he's just screaming. Yelling. Sweetie! Ingen, all. Yeah.

I'm a. Macy's still alive, honestly, Shigerichiba. I don't know how he survived that encounter, but he did. He has no more blood vessels in his face. But speaking of ladies derived from other characters, let's talk about Laura. Laura Matsuda, because she's Sean's sister. She's from Brazil, and I guess everyone down there has electric powers, because that's what she has. She's got electric powers.

That was the, like, I believe that was the explained reason why she threw electricity. It's like, well, Blaka did that. He's from Brazil. We thought it would just be really funny if all the Brazilian characters had electric powers. Have any of us been to Brazil? Can we prove that not everyone there has electric powers? Ooh. I mean, I've had friends visit frequently, and I feel they would have told me.

Like, hey, I just go back from Brazil. Guess what? They're all electric down there. Maybe you have to sign something. Yeah, NDAs, man. Yeah. She's the fast grappler of the game. She's like the Makoto stand in, but she's got to, we keep talking.

about the electricity, but she's got like an ultra slow moving fireball, which is a pretty major part of her kit because she's got really good movement. She has a couple of interesting sort of like strike grabs. And it's like her whole game plan is basically kind of like throwing out a slow fireball just to see what you would do and then basically and essentially throw you after you make a mistake either by jumping at her, in which case she DPs or you try to stand and basically defend yourself against, you know, the normal moves and the slow-moving fireball and you just get, like, pile-drived out of it. Also boobs. Yeah, no, we do have to talk about that because, again, this is very much the era of feminist frequency and the pushback

against feminist frequency. So when Laura appears in a trailer, there is a very strong reaction online. I mean, also, Armica too. Armica, too, but definitely, I would say more so with Laura, because Laura is clearly, I don't know if she's not wearing a bra or she's wearing a bra to make you look like she's not wearing a bra, but whatever the case is, she's very busty, she's very open about being busty, and I saw an online reaction that was very much split between, oh my God, she's so hot, I love her, and what are we still doing here? Why is every woman in the game a giant breasted lady because we kind of glossed over it

but an early version of the game like the Street Fighter 5 versus screen is a 3D models like it's not just a static picture anymore the full 3D models appear and they look at each other they're glaring at each other and they're like

they're breathing whatever an early version of this whenever Chun Lee came on the versus screen her memories just started bouncing and like going all over the place. It was like a Gynax. It was like a Gynax anime. It was like,

it was really noticeable. And you know, Capcom's like, oh, it's a bug. It's a bug. And to me, I'm just like, why do you need breast physics on the versus screen? Like, why do you need it there? I understand the game, you know, the character's moving. You want to have physics for their body. But like,

the versus screen needs this? Are you sure? I don't know. I guess the real competition was D.O.A. as they saw it. Yeah, right. Yeah, Laura was a character that I really liked playing, but I didn't want to, like, have other people see me playing. Absolutely. I'm hoping my wife is not walking in here as I play this.

Close the blinds. I'm like, wow, she has such a great kit. She's so much fun. Is there any costume she has that doesn't make me look like a degenerate playing her? And the answer is eventually kind of. I mean, we're not prudes, but, you know, you got a pair of jeans. I play my, it's fine. Yeah, right.

Like, you know, somehow she is hornyer than my as a design. I don't know how else to describe it. Yeah. It has to be said. It has to be said. I'm not here to judge Laura. I'm not here to judge the artist who made Laura. But when Laura came out at that time, it was very much, that was absolutely the conversation

that was going on. It's like, okay, that's okay, all right? Again, and some people were on board from day one. You know, I'm not going to repeat what they said. But some people at the time, friends of mine said some very explicit things. on Twitter. And I'm like, okay, I believe you. And for the most part, Street Fighter 6 swung way back in the other direction based on this backlash. So, like, we still get some Cammy in that game, but, you know, you would expect Elena when she came, or my, for that matter, in a Street Fighter 6

isn't like Laura or Armica is in this game. So Capcom kind of, I think, took some of that to heart, I think. But it is telling. It is telling. I got to say, I don't want to two, I mentioned to six right now, but it is telling that when my came out for Street Fighter Six, the conversation around her, and I mean like, the official conversation around her was very playfully talking about her, her body. Like, as I recall this, like an opening sentence of some, you know, like official, like, official, like, official, like, official, like, there are two big reasons you want to play my shit, annoyy. And, like, again, Everyone, now, Blue Sky, everyone on Blue Sky is like, wait, you can talk about your game that way in official communications?

I've been writing my game wrong. Yeah, they did not shy away from that, like, my in the game. They don't really, like, delve into it too much. It's like, well, you know what? She's hot. Like, it's fine. You can see that. You have eyes.

And then in all the official communications, like, here's every single, like, pun and play on words we can think of. Double Entras. Here we go. Laura did not get that benefit of the doubt. Laura walked boobly so Mai could jump boobly, I guess. There we go. Let's talk to Kali. I feel like Nikali might be a sort of proof of concept as far as V-trigger stuff goes, because, like, he is a guy, he's got a lot of hair, he's very physical, but once you activate, you're basically, the hair goes up, and you're like, you're kind of a new guy, and you're very angry and you do more damage.

I feel like concept-wise, it's very much like, oh, you want to try, you want to learn the V-trigger? Well, here it is. Here's one character and you V-trigger. And now he's basically a different character. He's almost, he's almost Pillarman-like when he gets activated. You know, super saying. Yeah. He was in a lot of the early press stuff.

He was in a lot of the marketing material that, like, they were kind of setting him up to be a major force in the world of Street Fighter when this game came out. And that didn't pan out. Yeah, as soon as the story mode dropped, his entire thing was like showing up to threaten everyone and then get his ass kicked and like disappear. Like, oh, wow. So you made this guy to look tough and just get beat up. He's like Wharf, but without any of the charm. And I feel like he never got any real traction on the competitive scene either in the long run. Like I feel like no, I never saw him in tournaments.

There was one player who ran him and like won a Capcom Cup. Okay. I think that, like, there's a couple other notable players, but I feel like they were mostly just playing him because, like, C. Viper wasn't in this game. Yeah. Last or not least, launch lineup anyway, we got to talk about Rashid. Because I feel like Rashid, again, I was active in the press this time. I feel like as soon as Rashid was announced and got playable in early, you know, early demos and such, I feel like that was the guy. Everyone's like, oh, okay.

Now, yes. Now we're excited about Street Fighter 5 because he's charismatic. He's always got a big grin on his face. He's like, Tornado Man? I don't know. He's like summoning tornadoes. He spent, like his super moves is spinning in tornadoes. He has his own vocal theme song.

That's just his name over and over again. Like that's greatest legacy. Yeah. Really right away, I feel like he wins a lot of people over. Like, hey, Rashid's here. All right. He was cool. If I remember, it's, it's,

like internally at Capcom, they considered him to be like the protagonist of this game. And he's kind of all over the story mode when it finally came out. So I kind of see it. But he was, he's very interesting because he's kind of an archetype that you didn't see often in Street Fighter. Like he was kind of putting out like these big tornadoes for his V-trigger. And he could use those to like move quicker around the screen, if I remember right? And to like, you know, pressure you with him.

So he has like a lot more mobility than you kind of expect. out of anyone in this game, especially since Vega is so weird now. Yeah. I remember a lot of the old-timey pro players kind of landed on Rashid pretty early on in this game of lifespan. I don't really remember seeing him a ton in tournaments. I mean, compared to Nash and Bertie, they were kind of the big mainstays at least the first, the first time this was at Evo. But yeah, a lot of people seem to like Rashid kind of out of the gate. I'm going to go up to bat for this launch lineup.

I remember this game getting some flack for having a relatively small roster early on, but all of these characters are like super distinct and fairly unique. And for the way this game was put out and for the likely reasons it was put out, I really like playing as almost all of these characters, like at least sort of tinkering around with them. I think that this was a, if they were going to keep it small, the way they did, I think they did it the right way with just so many different types of characters. And, I mean, Ryu and Ken have been, you know, very, very unique for a very long time.

But, like, the gulf between them in this game is just vast in how they play. They basically made Ken a K-O-F character with a run command. So I know that a lot of people, like this was one of the chief complaints, at least from the competitive scene, was that the launch lineup was pretty small, but I think this was a really good kind of early cast. Yeah, my feeling about Street Fighter 5 is for all my other complaints about it. Like, the roster at all times is really interesting and really well thought out, really well put together.

The way they, everyone plays, the way they space out which characters come along. Like, Akima doesn't come in and like the launch lineup like you would kind of expect them to. He shows up in season two, and he's also playing pretty distinctly than how he used to. So, like, they had a lot of, like, they had a lot of fun with both the old characters and the new characters and, like, separating them out. And that is something I will give their V skills and V-trigger systems for, because that is another way for them to differentiate these characters who otherwise have very similar movesets. Yeah, I think the New and Ken thing has slowly built over time as being distinct characters, but to me, five is the first time that Ken, truly looks and feels completely different than DeU, you know? Like, design-wise, I mean, there are some jokes about bananas on his hair, but jokes aside, like, they redesigned Ken top to bottom.

It's like, okay, no, we're just, we're doing a different guy now. He's a different guy. I'm sure he's got a classic costume in there somewhere, but the default Ken looks nothing like any version of Duke. Just doesn't. Totally different guy. But I want to highlight that I mentioned, that's all 16 characters. who's the boss? I guess,

Bison? But like, not really. Not really, because when the game launches, there isn't really a boss because there's no, again,

it's a console game, but there's really no substantial gesture to pretend that you can play this game by yourself. There really isn't. Like,

there's almost, like, what's available single player at launch? What's even available? You have a survival mode, and you have the character prologs, and all of these have enemy AI that is so dense that I would put the challenge rating somewhere in the negative zone. Like, they'll just stand there and let you wail on them. And even in survival mode, until you get up to like 20 or 30 fights in before they start fighting back.

It's really embarrassing and really boring. Okay, this is something I've been dancing around since we started this podcast. So this game obviously was not released in a finished state. And the sort of going reasoning is that they wanted to make this competitive for the e-sports scene. Like we want to get this out for pro players to play so we can get some eyeballs on streaming. Esports is starting to become sort of a global thing, not just in Asia with Starcraft in, in, you know, League of Legends in other countries and stuff like that.

Like people are starting to make money off of this. we need to get our hands into that pie. So this game was clearly meant to be basically made for hardcore players to play online so they can get ready for Capcom Pro Tours, which they were just starting to launch around this time, too. So this only basically came out with modes to train you to play competitively against other people. Even the survival mode is kind of like a dummy for you to learn to do some of that stuff. So this is one of its, probably its biggest complaint is that this game was released in such a state that like, if you're not interested in doing that, then you're wasting your money on this. It's cool to, you know, it's just slam buttons in training mode and stuff like that.

But there is no story mode to speak of. There are no challenges, like combo challenges to teach you how to actually play this game competitively. Like, there's no teaching method to this. I don't even think the training mode was all that robust at launch two. There weren't really that many options from what I remember. It was made for people that just, you know, I want to see if I can go pro playing Zongeef someday. And that's how I'm going to do it. It's three fighter five.

Yeah. Big, big problem. Yeah, it feels like something that they had a contractual obligation to get out for like probably Evo and the Capcom Pro tour, like you said. And like they could not delay. this without screwing up a whole lot of like contracts and marketing plans. So they're like, okay, get out what you can and we'll just patch out and everything else later because we can do that now. And I don't know. I don't know if that was worth necessarily the contractual obligations with how this game got received.

But that's the choice they made. So many people, I feel like never looked past that, right? like that left such a bad taste in people's mouths that regardless of how good the game got later or how much they changed or how much they added to it, like it didn't matter. There was a whole subset of people you just couldn't get back after making that kind of a first impression. Yeah. Totally. It dogged this game for its entire lifespan. Me too.

This is me. This is me we're talking about. I played so many street fighters and bought so many street fighters up until this point. and when I saw Street Fighter 5 and I saw the state of it at the beginning, I'm like, I don't want this. I'm not interested. Also, I mean, it doesn't help the fact that I personally am not really interested in online competition. Like, I would have to play with friends online, sure, but I'm absolutely not the person who wants to like go on there and play strangers. I played that.

I played Street Fighter 4 against strangers just long enough to get the trophy for playing strangers. and then I turned it off. Like, no, never, never again, do not do, do not come to me. So was Free Fighter 5 launched like that. Was Free Fighter 5 launched like that? I'm like, well, then I'm not buying this game. And I literally never bought it. Like, I only, like, I played it in a company of other people.

Steam did like did some free play weekends. I downloaded it on Steam. Eventually, we'll talk about it later. Eventually, we'll talk about it later. Why would I buy this? It's not, it's not, it's not ready. And frankly, at this point, whenever I see any big video game launch in February or March, to me, that screams, we need to get this out before the fiscal year ends.

Yeah. That to me is, that's what I'm reading, you know? Yeah. And I think the bones of this game are very good. And I, you know, if you want to play competitively, this, to Kevin's point earlier, this game does a lot of very interesting things. that Street Fighter games in the past didn't do. And the fact that they wanted it to be such an aggressive game with the gray health and

stuff, I really found that interesting at the time. I'm like, this is going to be something that's like unique to the, at least this brand. I'm into this. I'm maybe this is me basically being an apologist for the moment. But like, even I was like, where are the combo trials? Where are the, I mean, where's all the setup here? Give me some something to work with. Like, even I don't want to just be on this.

the treadmill every night playing this. It's just, that's, you know, even as somebody that likes playing competitively, that's not for me. So, yeah, I, it was a bad opening salvo. And they, it took them basically until the end of this game's life to fix that. And they, for the most part, they did. There's a lot of goodwill for, like, for this game way after the fact. And it's, it's even got some, a lot of nostalgia for it.

It's starting to bubble to the surface now. But, yeah, at the time, it was a hot mess. This game got a lot of flack when it came out. And deservedly so. Yeah. Before we move on, I just want to also highlight artwork. This game has artwork in it, but I must put the artwork in sort of air quotes. Like, there are a lot of just static drawings that show up in like, you know, in the story mode, quote unquote, or little like interstitials.

And it's just really not good. Like, this is a company that has, you know, this is a company. that has, you know, probably employees dozens and dozens of, like, top tier, like, God-tier artists. They've got a legacy, a fantastic artist working for them. And all these sort of interstitials that appear

are just really slapdash, awkward, like, anatomy stuff, like really weird-looking people. Like, I don't know. I remember, see, that also, I saw that. I'm like, what the hell? Again, early Twitter, you see these images on Twitter,

and you're like, that's a that's a that's a in the game that's not like some some some concept sketch that's in the game dude that was bengis they got bengis to do those and it's like bengus drew with his feet they didn't give bengus a lot of time or money evidently not like you know he probably sketched some stuff out and gave it to an assistant be like put some color on that and send it in it's it is baffling to me how bad those look because it's fucking bengus doing them Like, what happened? They must have been crosswires.

Maybe they sent the email to someone else. They sent it to Bangus. No, you said this game had a troubled development. I really do probably have to assume they did not give him a huge amount of time to, like, hash those out. Yeah, 50 drawings. You've got like three days. Get cracking. Well, let's move on to the seasons because, you know, obviously this game launches in an online era.

So they launch knowing there's going to be more character. So let's talk about season one. And I still read the bat. Season one, all familiar characters from previous games. So no original characters. Everyone here's back. Although some of them go through various changes. We got Alex from three.

We've got Ball Rock Boxer. We've got Gile. Gile looking like Malkop for some reason. We've got Ibuki. We've got Judy. Jury, I think, really establishing yourself as a fan favorite at this point. I still can't believe Judy wasn't a launch character in She was a DLC character four and a DLC character in five,

and I see her so much on the internet. People love Judy. They love a fail girl, you know? And Orian shows up oddly dressed. I don't know why he felt he needed to wear clothes, but he's... However, they brought it back. If you do the light punch, medium kick, heavy punch button combo, like and Street Fighter 3 to like pick extra colors, but here you can do that with Urien

and his clothes will fall off. And you'll see everything. You'll see it all. The jury is funny because I feel like she's another, like, character that fell victim to ESPN. Or maybe, like, just her design, like, maybe they took the backlash to Laura at heart because she's wearing this, like, you know, leather cat suit sort of thing, right, with the top zip down. And under it, she's apparently wearing, like, a black leather shirt, too. A turtle neck kind of thing, yeah

A turtle neck kind of thing And it looks really weird And then in Street Fighter 6 she doesn't have that She just has the cat suit And you're like, oh, that was what she was supposed to look like in five, isn't it? And they just changed it because everyone got like really weird about Laura Yeah Like, okay, I can see it

I can see both ways It works either way She's a lot of fun in this game I think she's a lot more approachable to use than she wasn't for And, like, Gile was just tons of fun in this one. Oh, yeah. They actually gave him a new move.

Imagine that. Yeah. But, like, the static boom and, like, the perfect boom system. They brought that back in six, and it was really, really good. But, like, it started here. Gile changed this game. So when the first season was going, and it was before all these D.L.C. characters came out. The inclusion of Gile, because he was still a charge character,

cranked the the aggressiveness of the game way down. So like Daigo and a couple of other big competitive players, especially a lot of the young guys, they were using Guile because they could control the pace of the game differently than basically every other character at a competitive level. So this seat, like these DLC characters are really kind of Capcom sort of really sort of thinking on the back end, like how are people playing this game?

How is the competitive scene? going to evolve, should we start slowing the game down a little bit? And Guile was basically the first sign of that happening. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is this the first game that actually did, like, defined seasons for DLC, or was that Tekken 7? I feel like they were both, like, right at the cusp. I don't know.

I want to say I saw it in Street Fighter first, but I don't know, huh. But, like, now that's just, like, a common approach to, like, fighting game characters. It's like, oh, we're going to have a season of content. then we might have another one, et cetera. And before this, you know, like with Capcom, it's like, all right, here's a new characters for the new version of Street Fighter 4 or whatever. I feel like they started at maybe the tail end of four.

Because I remember, like, Latent Street Fighter 4, they announced, like, we're going to release five characters over the next year. And I don't know if they called it a season or not, but they very much, like, said, hey, over the next year, we're going to bring five more characters out. Here they come.

So whether they call it a season or not, I feel like that might have been the way forward, whereas Street Fighter 5 is like, no, here's season one and season two will come out later. And like now everything's a season thing and you get season passes. Yeah. I mean, how see, I mean, the season pass, of course, every game now is season passes, whether deserves it or not. But, you know.

Right. Yeah. Urien is awesome in this game. He has a ton of one to play. He's wild. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I was really concerned with how they were going to incorporate the, the, the,

the Aegis Reflector and they made it his V-skill, V-Track. One of the Vs, I don't know, but the V-trigger. The V-trigger. And it works really, really well. And you can do like wacky juggle combos with him. And again, he's tons of fun to watch. And we should also say, too, that sort of unlike Street Fighter 4, this is a deceptively high damage game, too. So, like, Ryu hits like a truck in this game. And especially in the first season, he was just, like, four-hit combos would be 50. percent of somebody's life. It was nuts. So, like, Urien came in and was doing stuff like that, too, which, again, made for really interesting viewing because, like, there could be big, big swings back and forth in matches. So characters with, like, super high damage were fun to watch. But again,

once they put Gile in there and Uri into a certain extent, too, that, like, the pace of the game was starting to sort of kind of regulate into a more moderate kind of flow, So season one was really this game kind of like getting on its feet and solving a lot of its problems pretty quickly. Move on to season two. Let's do it. All right. Season two, in contrast, season one, which was basically all familiar faces, season two, they're starting to stretch the legs a little bit. It's like, okay, let's try some new stuff.

And I mean, yes, Akama's here, although Akama has a new look, but it's, you know, it's Akama. Okay, fine. Abigail, is Abigail the largest streetfighter character ever? He must be. He's got to be, right? His head barely fits on the screen. Like, he's, like, Hugo was large, but Abigail is ginormous. Final fight reps.

I feel like, I feel like Abigail is almost like the double dragon movie, a bobo human being. Like, he is so huge. Yes. He is so huge. Like, technically this guy's from Final Fight, technically speaking, but they redesigned him and stretched him in every direction. He's wearing, like, tires around his arms. That's how large he is. Like, he is huge on the screen.

I don't even know how he's playable. He's so big. Like, I made a joke early on the show about Golden Lighten. Golden Lighten is not as big as this guy. Holy crap. It is weird that they went with these proportions for him, but I have to say, and we'll get to some of the other ones later, I love. that this almost sort of marked the beginning of Street Fighter really leaning into its final fight heritage, like in a real serious way. I mean, obviously, poison was in games before this, but I think you get more Final Fight characters per capita in this fighting game or in this Street Fighter game than you do, you know, anything before or sense.

This could really be called Final Fight Revenge, yeah, with the big team. Also, is this the first time we figure that we know that Abigail is Canadian? I didn't know that until you said it. He is. I promise you that's true. And I feel like I only heard about it when they introduced him in Street Fighter 5. Huh. That's wild.

I do love that they brought back his like goofy throw from Final Fight as like his command grab in this where he just like tosses you lazily in the air. He's an extremely funny character to watch. I don't know how funny he is to play, but as a viewer, I always got a kick out of Abigail popping up. I'd entered sort of like Street Fighter 5 malaise like well before this point, but seeing Abigail in there made me briefly come back to it before I quickly left again. But his inclusion was enough to pique my interest. You know, it's funny.

We just talked about Final Fight characters and Tree Fighter. It's funny that Hagar never made the jump, but I guess he was just too busy. He was too busy fighting, you know, Galactus, so he couldn't get away. That's true. It's got to take that pipe to Galactus, yeah.

Yeah. I remember getting Akuma and being very excited to play him, and Akuma really highlighted a weird problem I have with this game in that like everything feels kind of stubby to me. Like normal moves don't like extend. Like, and I tested this. I actually played a little bit of it today. And this is still a problem.

We're like, Ken's idle animation, he's sort of bouncing back and forth. I'm Ryu and I'm doing low, medium kicks just to see if they're going to connect. You at home aren't seeing my fingers flail around on screen right now. But like, my foot is obviously connecting with Ken as he's bouncing back and forth. But I'm not hitting him. him. And that is something that in this game drives me up the goddamn wall. And Akuma... Where are my hitbox? Exactly. Like, Akuma's almost his entire move set, it feels like it has no reach. There's no distance to it. And like every character in this game sort of feels like that to me to a certain extent. And especially versus something like an Abigail, which like a medium punch crosses the midpoint of the screen because it's so gigantic. with everybody else not being able to, like, I mean, not everybody else has to have that

that sort of advantage, but like, if Akuma can't like reach maybe a third of the way through the screen with a standing heavy punch, what are we even doing here? And he plays very oddly. He's got a very kind of Nosferatu Zod look to him if people know what I mean, because he's clearly based on that character anyway. But I want to, I could be wrong about this. You guys jump in here, but I feel as though like this is where a lot of players sort of got turned off was when Akuma showed up in the game and he wasn't that great.

And people were like, is Street Fighter 5 going to solve any of its problems if Akuma's the way he is? I don't know. How about Ed? Ed dresses like he wants to be bison. Apparently, this is a story reason he, you know, a lot of these characters in this game apparently are like ex-bison soldiers or ex-bison replacement bodies, which is like lower stuff that I can't wrap my head around. He just, he dresses, he dresses like a fascist. Let's be frank here.

He's a bison, like, I don't know, replacement body sort of thing that showed up in Belrog's ending in Street Fighter 4 and like Belrog took him with them and like kind of raised him. So, you know, that's great for Ed, I guess. He's the rock Howard of this game. Yeah, he's like, he's the rock Howard. And Belrog is your Terry Bogart, as he always was meant to be. But, so, yeah, he's kind of a boxer.

And, yeah, he's, like, got very interesting, like, inputs. Like, he's not a motion character or a charge. He's, like, button taps. And that really doesn't exist in Street Fighter or a lot of other fighting games. At least 2D ones. I guess it's all over 3D fighting games. He's lasted. He wound up in Street Fighter 6.

So somebody likes them. People love him in 6. Yeah. Someone at my locals who, like, considers him, like, the hot character in Street Fighter 6. It's like him and my. That's all it's working for me. Did they change his haircut?

Because I'm not, I'm not under the haircut. I think, I think a little bit. I think so, yeah. Now, my notes here, my notes here say Colin is a new character, but Kevin, you disagree? So she's a new playable character,

but she was one of the judgment girls in Street Fighter 3, and they brought her back and made her a playable character. She's like, part of the same organization is Urien and Gill, I guess. And she has like ice powers. She shows up.

At the end of Street Fighter, at the end of Third Strike, she's the person that, like, takes the book from Gill before the final, like, arcade mode fight starts and she sort of walks off screen. Yeah, yeah. And she's in Gil's endings in the earlier games, too. Oh. Well, here she just, she looks like, you know, she's more Russian than Zangy, like, at least in appearance-wise.

And I got to say, as someone who lives in Japan, I see a lot of Russian ladies. She's a deep cut for a season that also has Abigail. Yeah, for real. Yeah. All right, let's talk Manette. Let's talk about the orbs. It's orb time. It's orb in time.

She's pondering. She's great. I feel like she was the first of these, like, new characters in this season that, like, really blew up on social media and locals and everything. Like, people thought she looked really cool. She's got sort of like an ancient Egyptian slash cat aesthetic going on. Very scogoros. Very scogoros.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember describing her as like a character design cool enough that she falls into this category of like, did Capcom actually like design her or were they just rubbaging through S&K's dumpster again? Which is also how I described a jury and see Viper and Street Fighter 4. Well, jury is just Julian Kujo, but yes, C-Viper, I understand. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, she's a cool character. She's, like, very complex to play.

Her whole thing is she has, like, orbs, and you can, like, place them on screen, and while they're out there, like, sure, normals are stubby. But then you can, like, summon them back and they'll do damage. Like, she has a lot of really, like, really complex combos and weird stuff she can do. Honestly, the orbs remind me of, um, spiral swords. in the Marvel games a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Which is probably not fair, but just like, I don't know.

I see a character summoning stuff like that around them. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's like Spiral, no? Yeah. When I came back to Street Fighter 5 for a little bit, she was the character I played. I was absolute dumpster fire with her, but she was a lot of fun. I was probably the only person who thought this,

but when I first saw her, I was like, that looks like the final boss Cleopatra from Double Dragon three. Wow. Yes. We can't say that it wasn't. Uh-huh. Oh, my God. I can't believe that it... Speaking of deep cuts. I can't believe someone brought up a number three of this podcast and it wasn't me. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Never going to unsee that now. My pleasure. I know what I'm new tomorrow.

All right. How about Zeku, aka Grandpa Strider, hear you? Also a very cool character concept, just like an old ninja. And then he can transform into a young ninja. And he has two very different movesets and, like, styles of movement, depending on which mode he's in. He's a cross between kind of gen with the changing movesets. And he's the Bush and Ryu archetype character of this game. So Guy, Maki, Kimberly, and Street Fighter 6 kind of thing. And I think this kind of goes around with the rest of the cast of season two here, definitely.

that like really unique stuff to the Street Fighter franchise is happening with these characters in season two. Like, Ed, with his kind of unique move set with his, you know, the way his special moves come out, Manat with basically putting landmines on the screen with the orbs. Like, Capcom was, I think, really thinking outside of the box with how they were setting up these characters. I think they did a really good job with these. They were cooking. Yeah, they were cooking. I remember him having a really great.

theme song too. A lot of the music in this game, I think, was really great, which is like, maybe my favorite thing about this game is what ended up being the soundtrack. But this one, in particularly, I remember hearing it be like, God damn, this is a great song. Yes, because this game launched alongside, basically, again, we talk about streaming video, but streaming audio also a huge part. Like, this game, if you look up the soundtrack of this game, like, this got to be like a hundred tracks. Like, every character has multiple tracks. Some of them are, like, remixes of old songs, some of them are new songs. And I think it was an episode of,

was a VG Empire or the, yeah. Yeah, there was an old episode that just focused on the music of Free Fighter 5 and like how varied it was and how many different styles it includes. And I were listening to that as like, wow, that shows a lot of great music in this game that I haven't bought and don't really plan on buying. But the music's great. I don't envy Greg's choices today.

There's lots of music you can put in this pocket. Just to avoid the jury theme. I think that's the one everyone disliked from this game, like the one bad song. Well, now Greg Hassey is the jury theme. I'm sorry. That's why I brought it up. I've cursed us.

You're welcome, everybody. Played right into his hands. Season three. So, season three is a mix of faces we know and new faces, and maybe one that might be both, because Sagaat comes back, Sakara comes back, no longer a schoolgirl, now she's a gainfully employed adult. Blanca's back.

Cody is back. Can you believe it? What a ridiculous concept? A convicted felon serving as a leader of the public. That's so absurd. Except he's good at it. Ridiculous. So, Socera cracks me up so much in this game.

It's like, okay, she's not a school girl. She's an adult. She's graduated school. she's working at an arcade. It's a dead-end job that she hates. And she's just like questioning what the hell she's doing with her life. And I'm like, this, this is Sakura entering her millennial experience. I will say, though, as a person who once worked in an arcade, she's not doing it right if she feels that way about working in arcade, that in some ways, not pay-wise, but in some ways that was the best job I've ever had still many decades later.

Like the problem is that she's tired of getting blown up in K-O-F-13. Maybe that's what it is. Are we all? Falk, I think, uses a similar move set to Ed. I was out of the game, I think, by this point. But I don't think, like, I think it's like you're holding punch buttons or kick buttons and, like, letting him go as opposed to doing motion inputs. So she's, I mean, also sort of like of the Shadowloo cabal. Yeah.

But, yeah. She's like a staff fighter. Yeah, she can charge her staff and do stuff with it. Right, right, right. Yes, yes. My joke in the notes here is I call her Sister Ed, and that's not, that's just because she dresses like Ed and she's a lady. So it's just, you know, first thing I thought of, Sister Ed. And then, you know, the last character on this season is the best one, maybe of all the new characters in this game.

Honestly, I thought that Capcom stolen from Bioshock-Infinite. I was like, wait, we've got like Muscles Lincoln? Or is it Q? Is it Q? What's happening here? Let's talk about G. Let's talk about G. Do you guys remember the reveal of him?

Yes. It was insane. I was like, what, what am I watching? There's like a man coming out, like a real life man coming out dressed as him, like giving the speech. Like, what the hell is happening? G cuts promos. He's a wild character. Just like, it's a dude claiming he's the president of the world and he has like geothermal power.

He can, like, summon eruptions from the ground. And, like you said, he looks like Q. His move set is a very similar to Q, but, like, all the attacks are done, like, with more finesse. So there's clearly, like, a linkage there that Capcom is probably never going to address because they just, like, messing with everybody. A Lincolnage? A Lincolnage. Yeah. But he's, like, got the top hat.

He's got the beard, the long coat. He's so funny. I was done playing this game at this point. but like, gee, almost got me back in. Same boat, yeah. I think I even bought him and I just never played that I was scouted the game at that point. Maybe I should go back.

Like, I have the full set for this game. I should just go back and mess around with him. Sagat, I do want to bring up one funny thing with Sagat is that when he got announced, one of our local players is a big CVS2 head. So, of course, he loves Sagat. And he lost his mind. He was just like running around the vote. venue. Someone was like recording this and he comes up and he just starts like cutting,

not really cutting a promo because he's not like talking to anyone in particular, but he's just like going on this, like, rant about like, oh yeah, my guy's coming back. I can't wait to just like dominate everybody. This guy's going to be so good.

He's going to rock. And then he comes out, he tries him, realizes all the buttons are stubby. And he's like, man, Scott sucks. And he's just kind of stayed sucking in this game until like,

sort of towards the end, they made him okay. but very disappointing return. I am really surprised it took them until a third season to get either Sagan or Sakara in this game for as big as fan favorites as they are. And it kind of makes me think that these guys were like break glass in case of emergency characters. You know what I mean? Like I think the feeling at least in the competitive side, and we're past the point where Capcom was like, putting in new modes and stuff like that.

Like the Shadow Falls came out in July of 2016 to 2017. We'll get to that. But like, you know, the game was in a much better state for single player audiences. But like, I really am a little shocked that like these two characters in particular took this long to get into this game. And it, I mean, it's kind of the same with Street Fighter 6 because it took a couple of seasons for Sagata show up. Season three again. Yeah, right. But still no soccer.

right? Yeah, by saving her, clearly, from the one the game starts going downhill. That's what I'm thinking, yeah. What's the timeline like, do we get Milf Sakara in six? Or what's going to happen? She'd have to be? I mean, yeah, I mean, she'd have to be pushing 30 now, right? Or does she own the arcade now?

Oh, that's true. She's an independent business woman. These are not free ideas, Capcom. If you're listening to this, we want some fight money for real. We want some fight money for real for this. Think about it. owns Mikado. Oh,

like they're going to write it into the, into the lore. Do you think she's the one who, who convinced them to get, like, their own idol as a mascot? I mean, that's, now things are kind of starting to make a little bit more sense. Yeah, it's all falling into place. Because this game

is another integral. It happens between Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 3. I can't believe that. I really, I can't believe they made another sequel and decided, you know what? This has to take place before 3. We can't, we can't go forward. yet. Ridiculous.

It's like how Star Trek, it's like every Star Trek show now has to happen before another Star Trek. Just give me new Star Trek. Just go. Metal Gear, man. Like, everything's about Big Boss now. Prequels. Prequels.

Prequels never end. Prequels. Let's move on to season four where I feel like season four is both, we're going for flexes and also we're out of ideas. Somehow it's both at the same time. Yeah, they've been really running out of gas here. You've got E Honda back. Okay, we all know E Honda.

We've got playable Gil. I really did not expect to see Gil in this game, but Gil shows up. We've got poison, although poison, Poison technically debuted in Street Fighter, in Tech and Street Fighter, but then she was a late addition to four, but now she's here in five. I feel like they should just put her out, like, early on in the Street Fighter. Like, she deserves better than this sort of this late season stuff. Seth comes back, and now, again, female body, but the voice is male sometimes.

don't know what that means for gender-wise. I really don't. I mean, honestly, gender goals, I could go for a Seth. If someone wants to give me a silver body, I'll take it. But I'm really not sure where that fits in Seth's personality. Then there's Kage, K-A-G-E, yes, Kage, who's just like evil reu with fangs? Like, I thought, like, didn't Street Fighter 4 already have, like, two different evil reuse? We got another evil review. Like, I don't understand what Kage is doing here. I'm sorry. By all me. I mean, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong, but...

You're not wrong. Okay. This is the dumbest character in this entire game. Okay. He should not be here. And then as Brian alluded to Final Fight, we've got Lucia from Final Fight 3. Yes, yes, yes. Final Fight 3 fans, we're back.

We found you. You're the one. The deepest cut on this entire game. I like Final Fight 3. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is zany. Like, how did they... Why?

did they dig this one up of all other characters? I mean, I'm delighted to see such a big swing like this, but like, who saw that coming? No one. If you told me they were adding in a character from the Final Fight sequels, I were like, oh, they're throwing in Maki, cool. Exactly. Right. People like Maki, but Lucia's like, okay, wow.

You just, somebody at Capcom was like, this character, I think she's super cool. Let's bring her in. This is some intern that turned into a staffer over a Capcom that has been holding on to this for 15 years. Like, I'm putting Lucia into a game. It's going to happen. I'm one of the 10 people who bought Final Fight Tough. I'm going to pay it off. It's going to happen.

This is my time. And she's like counter to everything I said about 20 minutes ago and that like, this is when the game stopped being high damage and started being Street Fighter. four. So, like, there are plenty of videos out there of Lucia doing, like, 25 hit combos, and it only winds up being, like, 20 to 25 percent of somebody's life. It's preposterous. And that makes me not want to play this game. Like, when it gets to stuff like that, like, just give me, like, four or five big hits, and I'm pretty happy with it. Yeah. But I do like that she's in it. I think it's cool. It's very cool. I appreciate her from a distance. There you go. Just don't let me play the game. I'll take that.

I'm on that train. I'll play Final Fight 3 as her, though. There you go. There you go. And things get even zanier from here. Well, we should mention at this point, when Street Fighter 5 was in the planning stages and early on, apparently internally, according to Nakayama, internally, they were going to do six seasons. But because the early reception was so bad, they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to make it six. You only get four seasons.

So this, in theory, at least when they were getting this part, this was going to be the end of Street Fighter 5. However, when they released the sort of catch-all champion edition, we'll get in the editions later, but when they reached the Champion edition that included seasons 1 through 4, so many people responded well, and by well, I mean, which they spent money, so people spent enough money, Captain was like, you know what, you get one more season. Go ahead. So Street Fighter V gets, season V. Go ahead for it. And it's a weird mixed Street Fighter season V because, first of all,

Dan, I don't know why you need Dan here, but okay, Dan comes back. We get Oro, Oro no longer arm-bound. He sold the turtle there. But his arm's untied. Rose, I mean, okay, I can't complain about Rose. Everyone loves Rose. No, yeah.

She got out of Shamwile. Again, we talk about deep pulls. Here's Acura from rival schools with her brother. Yes. This was the standout character for this season. She was super cool. Summitting, what's

his name? Daigo is like her V-trigger. Just like come out and be tough looking. And this turned it into an anime game to Kevin's point earlier because like Ocura is like pounding people into the air like 60 feet.

And that nobody else in this game was doing and stuff like that. Like, wacky air combos that are like three stories off the ground kind of thing. Like, yeah. They gave her mechanics from her own game. Exactly. Yeah. And Dan was kind of a weird gorilla in this game, like, when he was introduced.

He had like infinite combos, but on purpose. And eventually, I think even Capcom was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. It was cute for a while, but this was sort of a dumb idea. So they introduced a thing where like, you could start doing the infinite. but it would randomly drop on purpose. Because he's Dan. It's a very Dan thing to have happened. I think that's great.

Yeah, I think it's so Dan. He's actually not a bad character in this game. Like, he's not intentionally awful because, like, you can't really do that anymore. But he's, like, intentionally mid. Like, his stuff works, but not great. And we come to the villains of this game. Yeah, the elephant in the room. The elephant.

11 That's fine But yeah Let's talk about 11 Again The only weirder thing That actually bringing back 12 Was to bring back

Something that looks like 12 But is not 12 They're 11 12 Eve Hey It's 11 Hey 11 is the Mokujin of this game

You pick them if you want to do like If you want something random You pick 11 And 11 is a technically free character. They gave him to everybody. Him, it. But, yeah, it just copies other characters, I think,

from, I don't know, does it do it from round to round? Or does it do it from, like, fight to fight? I don't really know. I haven't played this game since he came out. Yeah. Well, last but not least, we've got Luke. And Luke is... Totally leased. Totally least.

Okay. Last and definitely least. Sorry to all the Alex Lay fans. I got to stress that the character comes out and they already, at this point, again, it's the last season, they're already working on six. So they already know he's going to be a bigger deal in six. So we have a quote from Nakayama and Game Informer who says, we saw him as a kind of guest

character coming from the future. And I don't know which one of you said he looks like a Paul brother, but God damn, he does look like a Paul brother. That was me. Yeah, he, uh, they, they, I think they realized people thought he looked kind of like a douche in this game. because they kind of redesigned him in Street Fighter 6. He no longer quite looks like you want to just punch him in the face so much.

I don't know. I still think he does. His face is still pretty rough to look at even in sense. Very punchable. It's inherent. Yeah. And the worst part is that they made him really strong in the game when he came out and the final patch that they did for this game left him as like the strongest character.

So, like, if you watch people play Street Fighter 5, he's going to show up, which means you have to look at him even more. Well, at that point, they're going to hype 6, right? They overpower him in 5 and then, okay, well, go play 6 then. Yeah, and then they overpower him in 6 for a while, too. Yeah, he was sweet and 6 at the beginning. Like, that is a Capcom thing. Like, when Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition came out, the Otto had Yun and Yang made overpowered on purpose, because he thought they were super cool. and he wanted them to be the best characters.

Like, sometimes Capcom will just do Capcom things. Yeah, balance is merely a suggestion to those guys. So look at the totals, though. This is strange to me. Every time I look at this online, all the summaries and AI voices tell me it's 45 characters. I put the list in my Google Docs and counted them. There are 46 characters in the game. I don't know why.

Maybe some people don't count 11, but 11's a character. They have a character bio. They're on the screen. They're a character. but I count 46, which is more than Street Fighter 4. Notably, again, Street Fighter 2 dominates. Almost everyone for Street Fighter 2 is here. The only ones who didn't make the cut,

Faylon, T. Hawk, and DJ did not make the cut for Street Fighter 5. But everyone else is there. A little bit more from 3. We talked last time about how they really didn't want to have almost any 3 in 4. There's a little bit of 3 here. We got a few faces from 3. I'm very surprised that only 2 original 4. characters made it into five. And all it is is Jury and Seth. And Seth doesn't even look like Seth anymore.

So really surprising. I mean, I didn't expect Haqan to come back, but I don't know. I thought maybe Able. Maybe Able. I don't know. Maybe. They've really abandoned Able as being their like poster boy for four. He's just gone. Yeah. I'm really surprised it wasn't Viper. You know, like Jerry I get, but like I really thought if there was going to be another one, it would have been Viper. Yeah. Well, Viper is back in six, right? Vipers back in six, so they clearly, they've gone back to that well, but yeah, as all, all in a sudden done, eight, eight from Alpha, by the way. But so all in a sudden done, again, five is very much building on two, like four did, but they've at least expanded it, have a little more variety. And some of the newcomers in five, I feel like they really did go weird. Some of these people are the weird that I want. Some of the weird I don't want, but some of them are the weird I want, which I appreciate.

I really think there's a lot of Street Fighter 3 in this game's DNA, a lot. And I think this game really sort of is starting to acknowledge, or Capcom acknowledging that Third Strike is a thing that people still like, even though they try to basically scuttle it like a bad submarine for years. So like the UI of the game, other than the like the V-trigger meter at the bottom of the scream is just like how it is in Third Strike with the stun counter. I've always said that Third Strike is a weird game in that like each individual character is basically a character pulled from different fighting games.

Like there are juggle characters like in 3D games. 12 is basically an anime fighting game character stuck outside of an anime fighting game. This game with the V system is basically that. It's like kitchen sink design. Everybody does something wildly different. And it was made, like, this is a little bit more in a spiritual sense, but this was an unfinished game when it was released. And New Generation is a famously unfinished boondoggle of a game. This has got a lot of things going for it that, like, I really like personally, because I like the weird as well.

And because it wasn't like, here are all the Street Fighter 2 characters right up front and we're just going to throw extra guys in there here and there kind of thing. It was like that in reverse, which is basically how the Street Fighter three games did it too. Like, here's some kooky stuff, and we're going to slowly kind of introduce some older Street Fighter characters that people know and remember. And this is one of the reasons I still find this game interesting, even though I am kind of repulsed to play it. Like, I like a lot of the things that went into this. And I think on paper, this is a really awesome game. Like, it does a lot of really interesting things. I really like the gray health.

I really like the aggressive way it's played. They did introduce extra V triggers and extra V skills for every character. Like, you can adjust them in a variety of different ways before each match starts kind of thing, which is also a street fighter three thing. I mean, you know, that introduced, they introduced that system kind of there. But it's also history repeating itself in that, like, people. did like this thing by the end. But in those early years, they were really off in the wilderness. And it got a really bad rep.

And it took them a long time for people to come around to it. So I'm curious if, you know, now that we're 10 years removed, hopefully or maybe in 10 years after the final season of this game hits its anniversary, maybe people will sort of like circle back around a Street Fighter 5 and be like, you know what? There's some good stuff there. Maybe people will come back to it. Who knows? I think it started a little bit.

I know Street Fighter 5, like, it has side brackets at a lot of major tournaments. All the time. You know, it's like the street fighter way of things with fighting games, you know, in the community. Like, here comes a new street fighter game. The people who played the old one hate it. They drop off of it. But it has like a new crew of people who like it. And then the next one comes out and it all happens again.

Yeah. And the people who, like, started on Street Fighter 5, like, they exist. And a lot of them still like Street Fighter 5 and we'll still play it and played a bit of Street Fighter 6 and bounced off and decided to go back to what they know and like. What they know and love. Right. I'm sure some of them love it, yeah. They're out there. Yeah.

Let's talk about 2016 specifically, because when this game comes out, it comes out and critics look at it. And a lot of people in the press say, this is an incomplete game. I have some quotes here. Simon Parkin, writing for the Guardian, who refused to score it, by the way. Simon Parkin writes, an unfinished catastrophe, a game delivered half cooked, as if to meet a financial deadline rather than an artistic one. Peter Brown, for GameSpotts, called the story mode laughably short and low quality, and he pointed the lack of challenge trial modes. he called it a major disappointment. Now, we all know that the four had a long tail.

It's four sold very well. So at launch, Street Fighter 5 sells 1.4 million copies in that first period. That is below expectations. I mean, you know, Capcom is very open about what they expected. That is not what they expected. However, at this point in time, Street Fighter 5 has sold almost 8 million copies. It is the top-selling Street Fighter game. Now, the caveat there, 8 million copies compared to like your monster hunters and Resident

Evils, those are rookie numbers, you know? But at the moment, much like Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter 5 ends up being a very big seller despite the reception. I can tell you, though, at this time, it's only been about three years, but Street Fighter 6 has sold 6 million copies, so that's definitely on pace to surpass Street Fighter 5 someday. we'll see what happens, but certainly the company knew right away that things were not good. There is a English copy of a investor briefing in May 2016, so only a few months after Street Fighter 5 comes out. Kenzo Tsujimoto, the head of Capcom, the Capcom guy talking to investors, says some aspects of Street Fighter 5 needed more polish.

And if the company president is talking to investors and uses that kind of language, he may, might as well if like shoot a gun at your office. Like that's like, that is such a condemnation of your work. I'm sorry. That must have hurt. That must have hurt to have that on the record. Pack your bags, Oh no. Although he did.

He stayed there. Although one year later, Ono in 2017 was quoted as saying, we all know that we didn't put out a complete product. So, you know, at that point he's very much doing damage control. But also, he's publicly announcing that, geez, we really didn't do a good job there. We just didn't.

But as his normal for Street Fighter, as soon as the game comes out, they start doing updates and they start doing updates. The Shadow Falls, not the shadows, A Shadow Falls was the first big update. It dropped summer 2016. That's the one that previously establishes

exactly when this game takes place. It has the quote unquote story mode to it, which very much feels like riffing on like the Mortal Kombat, you know, theatrical story mode that was very popular at the time. Mm-hmm. People don't like it, though. People are very displeased by this thing.

I got a quote from Nick Rowan and Destructoid who says, it bounces between characters like a particularly coped up game of racquetball. One year later, we had, sorry, two years later, we have S-Five arcade edition. And yes, they did release it in arcades, at least in Japan. That adds an arcade mode as an extra V-trigger for all the characters. You get a bonus stage. If you bought it new, you get characters from seasons one. two. If you just got the regular

version, you get all the free update stuff, but the characters aren't free. You have to pay for characters. And then again, two years later, right, really right before the pandemic blows up, you have Street Fighter 5 Champion Edition. That includes four seasons worth of characters, a ton of costumes. This is, or was

on PS Plus at one point. So if you have PS Plus, you probably own this game, quote unquote. And that's the one I think that most people are probably talk about and play today. Obviously, they remember characters and balance pieces after that. But still, that was the big one. I think that one, everyone's like, okay, yes, I'll buy this game, Capcom.

Again, maybe the pandemic helped in that because suddenly no one wanted to go outside anymore. Well, I think the, certainly the pandemic helped a lot of online video game sales in its way. But, like, also, this being a PS Plus game, I don't know what the deal is between Sony and its partners. But, like, they do count those downloads as sales, I think. So 7.9 million copies of this game sold. How many of those games were just like free? All right, I'll tinker around with this because I can't leave my house. I'm just baking bread right now kind of thing.

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I was going to say. I don't have the year breakdown. I just have the total. I do think that the general attitudes around it shifted around the time that Arcade Edition came out. And by Champion Edition, people are like, okay, this game's like, it's salvaged.

It's all right. But I do think that because it fumbled so bad from out the gate, like, it really ended up being a positive for everybody else in the fighting game space. Like, especially Arxis in particular, really capitalized because, like, this is around when Guilty Gear Excerd came out. And they had, like, a few other projects that they did in this era. And, like, those really blew up in ways that, you know, Guilty Gear XX never really. did. Or Blaze Blue. I feel like Blaze Blue never really got the kind of traction that their stuff post Street Fighter 5 did. And, you know, other games like Undernight and King of Fighters 14, like they got new players offline as well. And I think a lot of that was because people came out

to because they wanted to play Street Fighter 5 and realized I don't really like Street Fighter 5 that much. What are other people here playing? I'll try this out. Oh, this game's kind of sweet. So generally good for the ecosystem. Yeah, Tekken 7 came out like the year prior to this. But like it got geese and it got Akuma and a lot of those players just topped on Tekken 7. That game blew up. Right. And the first season of Tekken 7 has looked at as kind of a shrug for competitive Tekken play.

But like, you know, as people sort of like talked a little garbage about Street Fighter, like Tekken has had already been like writing the ship. And Tekken 7 was like the best. selling tech and game by miles at that point. So, yeah, like, this is a weird instance of, like, you know, a rising tide only lifting every other ship but Street Fighter. Well, I think we can all agree, though, that certainly Capcom as a company, I don't know how many people stuck around as far as, like, personnel-wise, but Ono did not,

but Capcom as a company clearly saw the total reception of Street Fighter 5. and they definitely learned their lessons because when it comes time for six, I feel like six, like from day one, six is much, much, much beloved. Or at least everyone's like, okay, I'm listening, Capcom. I'm listening. And when it comes out, people are like, hey, this seems nice. And, you know, Street Fighter Six has a lot of other things that, you know, this changes to three five, six. We're not going to get into that. But I do feel like from day one, Street Fighter Six has the reception that Capcom probably wanted.

and hope four with five that they just did not, they just, they bumbled it. They didn't get it. See you on the Street Fighter Six podcast in 2030. I don't. Am I still hosting a Retroodd podcast in 23rd? I don't know that I am. Who can say? I don't know that.

I might literally be a grandfather in 233. I don't know. Diamond, it's going to be your kids hosting this show. There you go. There you go. It's up to them now. Grandpa, get in here. We've got to talk about Street Fighter Six.

Any other closing thoughts? We're over two hours, so any new wraps up we want to hear? The best... Go ahead. No, you go first. Okay, okay. I did want to say that, like, you know, we've talked about, you know, how online was so important to this. And I do think it's really funny that at one point, like, this just has, this doesn't really have proper rollback net code.

It's a very poor implementation of it, I think. Yeah, this is that era of, like, Japanese fighting games having terrible net play. Yeah. And I remember, was it during the pandemic, but someone, like, went in and actually, like, got their netplay working pretty well, but you had to download a mod. And Capcom just went ahead and patched that out. And then, like, did their own update that did not really fix it very much. And I think the backlash to all that probably also fed into Street Fighter 6 having very, very good net code. So that's, I like to think that.

I don't know if that's actually true, but... Oh, this game ran... so poorly, like right out of the box, like loading matches, even offline took forever. And then loading matches against online opponents. Like, I used to joke on Twitter that I played around more on Twitter while I was playing Street Fighter than anything else. Because I'm just killing all of this time, just watching like two characters in their boot physics.

And so probably the best thing I ever wrote for US Gamer was they had me do the, My experience is during the network test, and this had a famously horrific network test. And that, like, it just straight up didn't work. So they sent out all of these codes for the people that pre-ordered the game and the press to get into a network test that didn't load past the title screen. So I slowly got irritated and much, much drunker than I wanted to be. and I just basically took pictures of all of my written notes and made that my copy. And Kat Bailey was like, this is perfectly fine. We're going to pay you for this.

And it was unhinged by the end of it. I'm like, I should watch Black Dynamite. I wish I was playing Street Fighter right now. Nothing. It was three hours of me staring in front of my screen. And then eventually Capcom's like, we're pulling the plug. It's not working in everybody. So, yeah, this game was not in a good.

I mean, for a long time, it was not in a good, like, back-end state. And the arch—I played this a little bit this morning, and it did—I strangely enough found kind of a lot of matches online playing this. I was a little surprised, and they ran pretty well. But, geez, those early couple of years were pretty ugly. Yeah. Yeah, looking up Street Fighter 5 on, say, SteamDB, which is, you know, it's one platform, but still, it's a large platform.

and there seem to be regularly hundreds of people playing Street Fighter 5 on the average, which is really in line with other games of that era. You know, obviously, obviously six is the big thing, but there's definitely an audience out there. People are still playing five somewhere for sure. Yeah. God bless them. And like you mentioned that load time, like once they started going all in on the esports stuff

and having like advertisements for upcoming events and whatnot, that just made it so much worse. Ugh. Yeah. Like, you can probably hear my eyes rolling. Well, let's give the last word here to the Street Fighter media team themselves, because in 2024, on the eighth anniversary of Street Fighter 5's launch, I don't know why they did this, but on that anniversary, they made an official tweet in Japanese.

I have a translation here from Automaton Media, and the money quote is right here. The initial phases of release betrayed players' expectations in many ways, including network issues and a lack of content. This is something we are truly sorry for. You don't get that a lot. You really don't get that a lot where a company comes out and just says, hey, this is our official brand talking. That last game, we screwed up. We betrayed you.

I'm very sorry. You don't get that a lot. I don't think Capcom ever apologized for any Resident Evil's, have they? I don't think so. I don't think so. No. Even the ones that... Apologize for Resident Evil Zero, Capcom.

Do it. It's time. Hopefully, though, apologize by way of remake. Anyway, if Three Fighter Six was not the hit that it was, these guys would have never said something like that. That's also possible. Yeah, it's like, hey, we got the audience back. Let's admit that things weren't so great last time.

Mia Culpa, yeah. Anyway, that's a wrap. Let's get out of here. Thank you very much for listening to Retronauts. I'm so glad you came here for the record. If you listen to this podcast, you didn't pay for it. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. However,

Patreon.com slash Retronauts as the URL you want because you go there, $3 a month, you get all our episodes, one week early, higher audio quality,

$5 a month, which is just $2 more than $3 a month. This is simple, you know, V, 3 plus 2 is V. You get the early episodes, you get exclusive episodes,

you get exclusive columns from me. I write the column, I read the column to you. you get community podcasts that are just for our listeners. We get Discord. We have a Discord access. I don't know if Discord's going to exist by the time this podcast goes up, but at least for now, at least for now, there's a lovely retronauts Discord full of people and they're all adults, I promise you. I promise you Discord.

Everyone in the Retron's Discord is an adult. There's no children there, for God's sake. Let's go in reverse order. So, Brian, tell people about you on the Internet, if you like. Sure. I'm on Blue Sky is One Million Power.com and the website One Million Power.com has links to all of my things, including a lot of Japanese game and music translations that I've done over the years.

But these days I've been much more active on the One Million Power YouTube channel, whereas of this recording, I recently posted a documentary style video called The Fate of Castlevania, which features actually both Diamond and Kevin. And as a result, I will take full credit for today's announcement of Castlevania Belmont's curse. You're welcome. Thank you for your hard work.

Check that. John. I'm John Lernid. You can find me on Blue Sky as, or I guess at John Lernad, not as. That's really me. I have a YouTube channel called Anitated Games where I also talk a lot about Castlevania and other stuff. And you can find me on the Retronauts Discord fighting with Kevin about Third Strike in CBS.

Oh. As we do. And as for me, you can find me on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org. That is my website and my YouTube channel and my book, which is available through limited run. I like to talk about really old game history, and I do so regularly in those formats. Also play CVS2. Ugh. Cvastew.

Cigot wants you. Sigot wants you to play Cvias two. So got Blanca and Cammy want you to play Cvias. too. All right. I've been your host, Diamond Fight. You can find me

on the internet if I look for Fight Club. F-E-I-T, that's my last name, not the word you know. C-L-U-B, that's the word you know. Put them together.

Search the internet. Go to my website, fightclub. It's very low-tech. It's beautiful. People said, you really made this? Yes, I really made it myself. That's all the HTML that I know.

And before we say good night, I just want to hit everybody up. So quickly, let's give us some nice, some nice V-words. I really like vindicate. Villeify and vacuum. Vacuum's a good one.

Anyone else? V-words? Vortex. Very nice. Ooh, that's a good one. Volumnius? I don't know. You know what I'm getting at.

You've facilitated between a couple different V-words. There you go. Yeah, I'll find my way. All right. Good night, everybody.