Tag Street Fighter

Street Fighter V Story Review – A Flawed, but Admirable First Effort

kennyu4 2 Comments

Street Fighter V‘s much anticipated story mode (“A Shadow Falls”) released over a week ago, and my impressions can be summed up as “Too much story, not enough time”. There were so many interesting story threads and themes explored in the prologues that very little of them really had any time to breathe in the main story. What I loved about the prologue system is that it introduced what every character “wants” as a way of setting the stage for a larger intersecting story. This is a huge deal to me because “wants” are the bare minimum one must have for characters in a story for it to be even remotely good, and you would be absolutely shocked to find out how often stories have lead characters who don’t really “want” anything in particular. For the most part, this game’s story avoids those pitfalls but falls into a few of its own due to its very nature. Street Fighter has a pretty large cast of characters, and the question of who to focus on becomes the chief determinant towards whether or not a story is a good one. This game tackles that issue to mixed results.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

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Could Street Fighter V’s Four Kings be the Key to a Strong Story Mode?

kennyu4 1 Comment

With Balrog finally shown off and announced for release this Friday in Street Fighter V, the game’s antagonists who are part of an evil organization known as Shadaloo, have all been assembled. This is important because the story mode is also set for release on Friday, and according to previous interviews, the story will be about the fall of Shadaloo, bridging the gap between Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 3 (the series has an odd chronology). The story will place a huge emphasis on Shadaloo and its operatives and their varying goals, and I bet that its quality will live or die on what it does with them alone. Essentially, M. Bison, F.A.N.G, Vega, and Balrog are who the fate of this game’s story hinge on. Based on the prologues and the story previews we have seen so far, all these characters have arcs with personal stakes, but most importantly, they’re fun and interesting to watch. Before the story mode is actually released, I thought it’d be fun if I gave a bit of a run down on who these men are and what sort of role they can play in the story.

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Street Fighter V’s F.A.N.G is the Best New Fighting Game Character in Years

kennyu4 4 Comments

It’s no secret that I love Street Fighter V‘s new character F.A.N.G. As the main villain’s second in command, he’s flashy, he’s flamboyant, and he’s very committed to giving enemies and allies alike a hard time. But when I wrote about how great of a character he was before, it was after a superficial assessment. Back then, he looked like a character I would love, and his apparent personality suited me fine. He also had an amusing obsession with the number “2” (an aspect of his personality that inks its way into his gameplay). But after experiencing the prologue stories that Street Fighter V had at launch (with a more involved story mode coming in June via DLC), I was shocked to discover that F.A.N.G is one of the greatest new characters created for a fighting game sequel in existence. Obviously, he’s different from the rest of the Street Fighter cast (he was explicitly created with that goal in mind) and that freshens up the roster, but F.A.N.G also happens to be the fighting game lore equivalent of an L-Block. Besides having a unique play-style revolving around the usage of poison (a series first), he also completes the puzzle that is Street Fighter‘s story. He himself has perhaps the most developed and nuanced character arc in the series (all told within a prologue story that spans 5 minutes!), his existence answers so many questions about the Street Fighter‘s primary antagonistic force Shadaloo, and his interactions with other members of the cast help develop them further. In many ways, he’s the most important edition to the series to come in this installment of the Street Fighter.

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Mind Spill December 20th 2015: Street Fighter Edition

kennyu4 4 Comments

With this edition of Mind Spill (and the next one to come) I’m going to be focusing on fighting games primarily because a lot of news happened for both Street Fighter V and Super Smash Bros. Some of the news was good, some of it bad, a lot of it I still don’t know what to make of, but today though, I’ll be focusing mainly on Street Fighter.

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We Don’t Need Tight Execution for Our Fighting Games

kennyu4 1 Comment

Street Fighter V is on its way, and in its wake came a large discussion about the nature of execution requirements. To sum up, should combos be made easier or remain as they were in Street Fighter IV (not so easy)? This question has caused quite a bit of division, and here I will share my thoughts on how things should be done. First, we should go over the basis of both these viewpoints.

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