Street Fighter V: Champion Edition Review

Street Fighter V, you either love it or hate it. A lot of people involved in the fighting game community will tell you that Street Fighter V is one of the worst versions of Street Fighter out there, an unbalanced mess of a game that has been slowly distributed piece by piece for nothing more than to boost CAPCOM’s profits each year. Yet others will say that it is a fun experience that gives Street Fighter the unrivaled king of fighting games crown time after time. Whatever your opinion, it seems that since Street Fighter V first made its way to arcades, PC, and PlayStation 4 back in February 2016, it’s still getting updates as its predecessors did way back in the day. Is Champion Edition the end of the Street Fighter V line? Or is it just another stop while CAPCOM works out more ways to pinch dollars from your pocket? Let’s find out.

Note: If you are interested in the original Street Fighter V review, you can check it out here.

Name: Street Fighter V: Champion Edition
Platforms: PS4 (reviewed), PC
Game Type: Fighting / DLC
Developer: CAPCOM
Publisher: CAPCOM
Release Date: Feb 14, 2020
Price: $24.99USD (Upgrade Kit) / $29.99USD (Retail Edition) / $34.95AUD (Upgrade Kit) / $39.95 (Retail Edition)

So What’s All The Hubbub Bub?

As mentioned in the opening, Street Fighter V has had an interesting shelf life. Besides being the first Street Fighter game in a while to come out exclusively on a single console, the game has had a mixed reception. After the stunning return to form that was Street Fighter IV in 2008, we thought there was no place but up for the long-running fighting game franchise. But alas, things did change very quickly. After Ultra Street Fighter IV became a thing, people were wondering if we had just been hit with a new version of the Street Fighter 2 era, where the game would get little updates bit by bit as the name grew ever longer, except thing time we were paying for each new upgrade. This bodes true for Street Fighter IV, but it didn’t last too long nor did it take too much from our wallets in order to obtain it.

In February 2016, Street Fighter V arrived on our PlayStation 4 consoles and we were impressed for the most part. It looked like the great Street Fighter IV but for some reason, it wasn’t anything like what we had seen before. Where the home console version of Street Fighter IV had an impressive 25 characters at launch, Street Fighter V only had 16. Then we saw the reason why. CAPCOM had entered the dreaded realm of Season Pass content. With each Season Pass (4 in total), Street Fighter V grew into a more fleshed-out fighting game, but each time it expanded, so did the cost price for the Season Pass content. CAPCOM tried to lessen the blow to our wallets with the introduction of “Fight Money”, an in-game currency that would build up over time that you could spend on stages, music, costumes, and characters. The only problem was that is the rate at which you got fight money was so slow it forced you to buy the Season Pass just to stay competitive since the new characters would change the tier system on which the characters are based in the fighting game community.

Fast forward to 2020 and the 4th anniversary of Street Fighter V and we have an updated release of the game. With Street Fighter V: Champion Edition, you get all of the past Season Pass content giving you all the characters released right up to the new version of Seth that came out on February 14th, 2020. You also get all the paid DLC stages and costumes (with exception of the costumes involved in the CAPCOM & EVO eSports events, paid promotional items like the Red Bull variants, and Fighting Chance outfits) when you pay for either the retail version or the upgrade kit that CAPCOM had released for all past edition of Street Fighter V. In addition to all the paid content, there is a free component to this which is the newest version of character balancing and the addition of a second V-Skill for every character, which can vastly change up how a character is played.

Ready… FIGHT!!

The gameplay in Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is still very straightforward for most of the usual Street Fighter players. It’s still a best-of-three-round contest and the person who can drop the other player’s life bar to zero is the winner. But that’s just the basic version of events. Each character in Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is different depending on how they are designed. Some characters are straight-up face-smash characters who do high damage but also have the drawback of having low variability. Others are ranged characters who rely on keeping their opponents at a distance. Others are trap characters who can use tactics to keep their opponent cornered or bounced around like a pinball through wall mechanics. Others are just cheap mother fuckers who play characters like Sagat and Guile because fuck you for wanting to have fun in a game.

The main new addition to the Street Fighter series is the “V-Gauge”, which builds as the player receives attacks and adds three new techniques: V-Skills, V-Reversals, and V-Triggers. V-Skills are special attacks unique to each fighter; for example, Ryu can parry an attack while M. Bison can reflect projectiles, some of which build V-Gauge when successfully performed. V-Reversals allow players to use a section of the V-Gauge to perform a counter move whilst being attacked. Finally, V-Triggers use the entire V-Gauge to allow the player to perform a unique ability, such as a temporary damage boost for Ryu’s energy balls or added hits to Chun-Li’s attacks. Additionally, the Stun Meter, which has been present since Street Fighter III, is made visible under the health bars in this game. The Stun Meter increases when receiving consecutive attacks and will cause the player to become stunned if filled; thus, it encourages players to play offensively when the opponent’s Meter is close to full. The game also features an interactive arena, showcasing special animations when a player is defeated at the edge of the arena.

There are also three main types of game modes in Street Fighter that everyone likes to play, and one that only sadists like to play.

The one that the sadists like to play is the challenge mode, where players get to risk fight money in challenge fights that unlock something like a special costume if you beat a character that has the costume but their difficulty is on level 8000 out of a possible scale of 10. Personally I tend to avoid these challenges because they cost a lot of fight money and more often than not, require you to beat the character many times over for a chance at getting the costume award.

The three more normal methods or game modes of play consist of more traditional fare. These are Story, Arcade, and Online.

The story mode is a combination of two separate story modes. The first is the overall story involving Charlie Nash and his attempt to take down Bison after his own death, and a god Necalli who is on a mission to destroy the Satsu No Hadou, the chi force used by Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Gouken, etc. This takes place using a whole bunch of different characters in a 5 chapter story that gives you a series of events that happen between Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter III (Street Fighter IV takes place in the middle of the timeline with Street Fighter III being the final point in the timeline. It gets confusing. But so you know, the timeline is as follows: Street Fighter, Street Fighter Alpha series, Street Fighter II series, Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter V, Street Fighter III) with the reveal of the beginning of the events leading into Street Fighter III and its main boss Gill being revealed. It’s a nice little crossover story but if anything, the Udon comic books do a much better version of these events than the game does.

The second story mode is a smaller self-contained story mode with you playing as each individual character going through their own parts of the larger story in about 2-3 fights and about 3-5 chapters each telling the events of why they are around and what they did during the bigger overall story. Some of these range from interesting and fun to downright stupid and/or boring. But each one gives you a decent amount of fight money upon completion of each story so there’s that reason to give each character at least one run-through of their story mode.

Finally in the single-player section is Arcade, a mode that was brought back into the game by pure demand of the fan base. Originally Street Fighter V was meant to be a strictly online fighting game, a building block for online tournaments, and training everyone who was playing the game to be some sort of eSports competitor. Well not everyone liked that idea since arcades is where Street Fighter found its fame and people liked the idea of having a single player challenge to play while either waiting for someone to come along and challenge the player or if the player just wanted to train away from the issues of the online mode. But this time around CAPCOM changed the arcade mode.

Rather than the traditional arcade more where you fought one fighter after another till you hit the boss character, CAPCOM decided to make a group of different selectable arcade modes based around the previous Street Fighter games in the series and let you play through those. Meaning that if you picked Street Fighter, for example, you would only play against characters who were available in that game. If you picked Street Fighter II, then you got those characters only, and so on. Each era of Street Fighter is represented here, so you could pick from Street Fighter, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter IV, and Street Fighter V; each mode ends with a boss fight, usually against Sagat, M.Bison, or a rival respectively (Unsure that with the inclusion of Gill and Seth in the update that he/she/they show up as the Street Fighter III and Street Fighter IV bosses) or Shin Akuma if you meet specific conditions. The arcade mode is the most fun out of the lot since it’s what Street Fighter has been about since the beginning.

Now at long last, we get to talk about the online mode… This is where a lot of people get annoyed with Street Fighter V. CAPCOM is known for having very bad servers where it comes to online games, and Street Fighter V is no exception. The Street Fighter V network code is still one of the worst on the planet, making getting matches with good latency almost impossible even inside your own country. A lot of the time you are having to fight against people with great latency (aka those in Japan or the USA, where CAPCOM host dedicated servers) or those who have shit latency (aka everyone else) and have to sit through some of the most painful, delayed and janky online gameplay I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if it’s CAPCOM’s idea of running servers that “predict” button presses by delaying 8 frames of data at a time, then fixing it once you actually make a decision, or it’s just the fact that CAPCOM doesn’t care about anyone outside of its favorite countries. The network for Street Fighter V is terrible at the best of times, which makes it hard to get a good series of matches going.

Aside from that, the online mode of Street Fighter V is well known to be a training ground for competitive games only, so good luck if you just want a fun casual match. These days, only the most hardcore and dedicated players in the fighting game community play in the online mode. You’ll often find the matchmaking to be terrible as you’ll either come across someone who is several tier rankings above you fighting on their main account, or someone on a smurf account playing low tiers for a laugh. It’s impossible now not to get discouraged to keep playing when going online due to the community being for the elite only now.

Look At All Those Pretty Muscles

If there has been a couple of consistent things in Street Fighter V that have carried through to Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is the graphics, which is some of the best that has been done in the series to date. The fighters have a good mix of realistic looks with muscles well defined and noticeable, but at the same time keep the over-the-top cartoon-style look that has been a part of the series since the original Street Fighter II. Where the biggest improvement has come graphically is the backgrounds in the stages. In places like E.Honda’s bathhouse stage, you notice reflective water on the ground that updates with camera movements while steam moves around the room too. It’s really in these stages that have been remade from the original Street Fighter II days that you’ll notice more details than those that have been made specifically for Street Fighter V, but at the same time the newer stages have their fair share of great details that go into them. Every stage in Street Fighter V has small interaction elements built into them that you might get distracted for a moment by something unexpected. Not to mention some of the side-stage transitions upon knockout are amusing and fun too.

That Sounded Like A Hundred Hand Slap

Sound in Street Fighter V comes in a couple of different styles; the first being the sounds of the battle itself, and the second is the soundtrack. Many long-time Street Fighter fans know that the soundtrack for past Street Fighter games is the stuff of legend, with remixes of those stage soundtracks still being made today. However, Street Fighter V has so much generic synth-pop junk in the soundtrack that nothing stands out as memorable, let alone stand on the same level as past soundtracks. There are attempts here and there to remix past themes into something new and interesting, but most fail completely.

As for the sound effects, they are good enough for something that sounds recycled from Street Fighter IV. Fists connect with a smack instead of a thud, but given that this is meant to be more like cartoon violence it’s enough to let it slide. The stand-out for this part is the voice work. The voice work is nice and clear, and also comes in many different styles of English with accents or Japanese, which is a real shame since you have characters from all over the world and you can’t give characters like Dhalsim and Zangief their native language options? It’s been over 25 years Capcom, surely you can drop a few extra dollars for proper and accurate languages for the fighters after all these years.

Continue?…

The big question here is if Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is worth the money and also playing at this time? Well honestly, not really. But… Your value in buying Champion Edition comes from where you are in the way of Street Fighter V content. If you bought the base game and still have it or traded it in, then it’s worth buying fresh in order to get up to date with the current content. The game has changed enough to be beginner-friendly in the single-player modes and those will last you for a while before you make your way online. If you have bought any more than the first Season DLC pass, then I’d be angry about this edition. Even at a low price point, you end up dropping a lot more money into the game than you should. The extra content is not enough to be worth paying an extra $25AUD in order to catch up. Finally, if you are a hardcore player that is trying to break into or keep training in the competition scene, then, of course, you’re already going to have all this content at the full retail price.

Gameplay-wise, Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is a solid game, but still full of balancing issues. Beginning players will have a fun time with all the single-player story modes and arcade mode to use to train themselves up, but ultimately it’s all about becoming competitive in tournaments or online, and since the net code is still broken after almost 4 years there is little chance that issue will change at all. If you’re outside of the USA or Asia (Korea/China/Japan), you’ll find that connections will never work in your favor, making going online pretty pointless and leaves you with local network tournaments as the only way to test your skills and that sucks. For friendly gameplay, Street Fighter V: Champion Edition is still pretty solid, but who plays locally in a room together these days. Oh, and fuck cross-play because it’s extremely laggy thanks to trying to merge two different online protocols into one badly optimized net code.

If this is the end of Street Fighter V, then this edition is a good one to go out on. Over the last 4 years, the game has been nothing but a mess from start to finish. Online still doesn’t work for anyone outside of the USA or Asia, and even then it’s still not that great. Outside of those areas, you are screwed completely. Locally things have been tacked on overtime to make a decent story mode, then the return of arcade mode abet gimped into smaller segments. It seems that CAPCOM had a specific focus for Street Fighter V and was forced to add things that they didn’t want to because the fans wouldn’t buy their overpriced DLC packs otherwise. Finally, your enjoyment of Street Fighter V: Champion Edition will depend on how you liked or hated the original Street Fighter V. If you didn’t like it back then, you won’t like it now and vice-versa.

Review Disclosure Statement: Street Fighter V: Champion Edition was provided for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.