Genre: 2d Fighter
Developer: Dimps
Publisher: Capcom

Street Fighter IV whisked a blast of cold air into the stale 2d fighter subgenre, with its Street Fighter EX-meets-water painting aesthetic, enabling players to paint with brush strokes in more figurative ways than one, defeating their opponent with ultra moves, revealed via dramatic and exciting camera angles. Street Fighter V then? Take IV, tweak some of the post-processing, and call it a day. This unambitious approach carries through all aspects of the game, from the less-character-than-Excel menu system, to the backgrounds, which literally couldn't be any less interesting. The game isn't ugly-- just tired.

Does Street Fighter V have music? This reviewer couldn't even recall after a few play sessions. Youtube watching reminded him-- "Yes, it does... sort of." Take one of the character's original songs-- Charlie's, for instance. Got his melody in mind? Now, imagine softening it down to the point where it's barely audible. Overlay it with the most generic techno beat you can dream of, and... viola! The sad part is that these stage songs are actually better than the angst-filled, teenie-bopper nu-metal menu track. Aside from Birdie's vocal work, the game's voice acting wafts somewhere in the realm of "unforgettable" and "flat out bad"-- like Necalli's unintentionally hilarious speech impediment.

Take Street Fighter IV's gameplay, replace the Focus system with something called "the V-System", and you have this title's mechanics. The "V-System" consists of the return of Alpha counters, plus what amounts to nothing more than a handful of new special moves for certain characters, activated with the two medium attack buttons. The new characters aren't particularly interesting from a mechanical perspective, and the old spooks like Chun-Li and Vega have undergone pointless alterations in their move sets. The game plays solidly, but is still stuck with the 2d "on-rails" plane and the same other pseudo-arbitrary conventions that defined the series since way back in 1991.

It's been nearly eight years since the release of Street Fighter IV. Imagine all of imaginative ways, dreamy new ideas, and boundary pushing mechanics that Capcom's designers could have conjured up to take the genre to the next level! So what wound up emerging after this colossal interlude? The least ambitious game imaginable, with nothing but the same tired, rehashed mechanics dating back nearly twenty five years, and an aesthetic so generic that the title looks more and sounds more like a half-cooked M.U.G.E.N release made by amateur, Mountain Dew-soaked teenagers than a triple-A studio like Capcom.