I’m not talking about getting battered online by people who then send you messages telling you to ‘learn 2 block’; I’m talking about the simple process of booting the game for the first time after buying it and downloading it or popping the disc in. I mean, seriously, what a mess. Here’s the process when you boot that game:
First you have to agree to the End User License Agreement. Fine. Then, a Privacy Policy for Capcom. Cool. Then it tells you a title update is downloading. The download completes practically instantly. SF5 doesn’t ask you if you want to do a tutorial; it just dumps you straight into a story sequence. This story sequence is followed by a tutorial battle - though you can skip this by Pausing and pressing Skip Battle. …which leads to another Story Sequence. Okay. Then another battle, which again can be skipped in the same way.
Okay, that’s a pain, but if you’re a new player, all of this is important stuff. The tutorial teaches basic but vital Street Fighter concepts such as how to block, so it’s genuinely really quite important. Not everybody is a seasoned vet just installing on a new machine, and I get that. So, not so bad, right? Right. But! This! Is! Just! The! Beginning! The game then throws up twenty full-screen explainers of various systems. TWENTY! Some of them are even have multiple pages. Basically, these screens are designed to show up when new features are added to Street Fighter 5; they pop up once and explain something new to you. They never show up again. But, for some reason, Capcom has never reconsidered these - so when you boot Street Fighter 5 now, in 2022, you get explainers for five years of updates all in one go, and have to sit there for what feels like an age closing all these tabs. Worse, some of these explainers contain overlapping content between one another, or are even irrelevant to the vast majority of players. You have to sit through the following endless screens, expression blank, stunlocked like you’re trapped in a glitched infinite, but worse: …and then when you load into the game, the title update finishes installing and it immediately reboots, which is hilarious. The title update is needed, but the way it dumps you to the menu then whips control away to reboot the game before you can select anything is the real ‘chefs kiss’ finisher at the end of this huge mess. To be fair, the above is impressive in a sense. Not just in how dumb Capcom look for not trying to streamline and sort this out – but in terms of seeing how much has been added to Street Fighter 5. It launched as one of the most anemic fighting games I’ve ever seen, but over the years it’s experimented, expanded, and now honestly is one of the better-value fighting packages on the market. It’s hopefully been a vital learning experience for lessons and concepts to be taken into Street Fighter 6, which needs to be a massive banger if Street Fighter is to retain its genre primo status. Looking at this list, you can see how hard Capcom worked throughout Street Fighter 5’s life. After the initial mocking, derisive reception the game got in many theaters, Capcom could’ve been forgiven for cutting losses and moving on, as they did with Street Fighter X Tekken and Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite - but with SF5 they kept at it, and redeemed the game. Just look at all those added features and tweaks - and that isn’t everything they changed over the years! And yet… bloody hell, devs. Come on. Nobody who is installing this game for the first time wants or needs to see all this. They want to jump in and play arcade mode, or maybe that dumb-but-fun cinematic story. You could piecemeal these out a bit, flagging them up as people open the relevant menus. Or just get rid of some of them, ‘cos this is too much. It’s astonishing to me that this information overload wasn’t reconsidered when Capcom put out the Champion Edition update just a few months ago. This is a little thing, but as the saying goes, the little things make up life. These are the things they’ll also need to address if Street Fighter is to keep up with Mortal Kombat and Riot’s fighting game ambitions. Here’s hoping this, and many other lessons from SF5, are taken to heart.
