The Backlog: Street Fighter V /w Arcade Update

So I finally came back to this game after only playing it at it's original release on the PS4. Got the game and the first Season Pass during the Steam winter sale so I can give me thoughts on it now. At the very least it no longer feels like an Early Access game but is it worth your time or money? Let's discuss.

While I personally never hated the character prologue stories that the game had at release, I can agree that they certainly were no replacement for a proper single player mode. Aside from giving you background on the characters they served one simple purpose. Easy character experience which equals easy Fight Money which I will cover further later.

At some point they released a free expansion in the form of the Cinematic Story mode which wasn't anything ground breaking it was probably the best we could have hoped for out of Capcom. It's way better then the story in Marvel vs Capcom Infinite and offered some interesting character interaction the likes of which we would normally only see in a Street Fighter anime or comic instead of the game itself.

The Arcade mode is about what you would expect from an Arcade mode, though the bosses are lackluster. Arcade mode is actually 6 separate Arcade modes representing multiple games over the series history. Street Fighter, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter IV, and Street Fighter V. Only characters from those games can participate in those Arcade modes, the problem is characters from most of those games aren't in Street Fighter V leading to some weird character options as well as missing boss characters. And whoever you do end up fighting as the Boss (IE Ryu or Ken for Street Fighter 1 instead of Sagat) will just be a regular fighter with their AI difficulty turned up slightly.

All in all though all of the above at the very least makes Street Fighter V now feel like a complete game with a proper selection of single player modes. There is also Survival and Challenges which are all kinda meh...

But the biggest problem still hindering this game is Capcom wants to have a F2P game economy while being less generous with their currency then an actual F2P game while being a full priced game. After the Arcade update there are only 3 ways to obtain Fight Money. Leveling up, winning matches online, and completing challenges.

Leveling up characters is an incredibly slow grind beyond the chunk of exp you get for completing Prologues and Survival. And winning matches only nets you 50 FM per match when unlocking a character costs 100,000 FM. That means that in order to unlock a single character you basically have to win close to 2,000 matches.

The challenges are only a weekly occurrence meaning they're time locked. They include missions that if you complete them all will earn you about 3,000 (was around 6,000 before the Arcade update) and Extra Battle which pits you against Golden Shadaloo Soldiers to earn money. Extra Battle however costs FM for every single combat attempt, meaning if you lost an try again you have to repay the entry fee and each one of these battles has a limited number of attempts. Also in spite of being some nameless generic soldier they are harder then just about anything you'll face in Arcade mode or most of Survival.

All of this is on top of them removing one time rewards you got for doing Story and Survival. Since I bought it before they made this change I got all that FM and I still can't imagine grinding to unlock more then one character.

All this is on top of the fact that most of the DLC costumes can't even be purchased with Fight Money. Which makes sense because that's how most F2P games do costumes, the problem is those F2P games make it considerably easier to unlock the characters you want with the in game currency.

So my final thoughts on whether you should buy the game? It comes down to what you want. If you only care about the single player content, the Fight Money might not matter to you too much. But if you want all the characters then you're really better off getting the Character Passes and using your Fight Money for the costumes and stages you can unlock with it since it's in such limited supply.

In the old system which yielded more guaranteed rewards someone did the match to figure out you could earn 412,000 FM in a year from doing the challenges which is the only feasible way to get it at a decent rate. Meaning at most you could reasonably get 4 of the 6 characters released in year. So I say regardless of why you want the game, if you buy it only buy it on a sale. Because whatever you pay, you'll pay more on top of that if you see costumes you feel the need to have once you get it.