Should You Buy Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition

When I first spoke about Street Fighter 5 back when it came out, that whole experience taught me a really valuable lesson; I really shouldn’t complete forming an opinion on a primarily multiplayer game that hasn’t yet had the time to let its audience mature. And now, here we are five years later, and my opinions on Street Fighter 5 have radically changed. Well, what feels like Street Fighter 5’s final hurrah, Champion Edition, is finally here, and I tried to figure out if Street Fighter 5 is any good these days. Well then, let’s get to it, shall we? Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition - is it worth your time and money?

V-Skills and V-Triggers

While Champion Edition definitely brings some changes to gameplay in the form of new, rebalanced V-Triggers and V-Skills, that’s really not what Capcom’s selling you on. Instead, the whole point of Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition is that it’s an easy all-in-one package that will get you access to every character that has been released for Street Fighter 5 over its five-years-long life. Ultimately, this means that Capcom’s looking to get new players on to their fighter, and maybe even revive the interests of players whose interest may have lapsed over the game’s lacklustre launch.

But sadly, it doesn’t really do much to address fundamental problems Street Fighter 5 has been suffering since its original release; it’s really difficult to get into. And I don’t mean that players are just so much better. It’s just that the game’s way of onboarding you on to its systems and characters leaves a lot to be desired. And I think the problem still falls squarely on to the fact that Capcom still hasn’t been able to figure out a good way of tutorialising. Which is a real shame when you look at the downright fantastic strides the fighting game genre as a whole has made over the last decade. I mean, when you look at the insanely in-depth tutorials in stuff like Skull Girls and Killer Instinct, Street Fighter 5 really doesn’t have much of an excuse.

I believe a lot of this comes down to the fact that Street Fighter 5 was always built as a multiplayer game first, and single player second. And really, why wouldn’t it? It is a fighting game, after all. Arcade, Survival, and a mediocre, short Story mode are all it would need, right? Sadly, this lack of single player content directly leads to the poor tutorialising I talked about earlier, and it’s even less likely than ever to meaningfully expand the playerbase. Any new player’s going to finish the Arcade and Story modes and hop online, and get instantly destroyed by players who’ve been playing Street Fighter 5 for almost half a decade, and those players aren’t really likely to return. Though, to be fair, players getting too good at the game isn’t a problem in and of itself; Street Fighter 5 is just content to not give you any real tools to start improving your game.

But...

The lack of tutorials is far from the only problem Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition has. The online architecture is really bad. What originally started as a joke back in 2015 went on to become less and less funny as time went on. It’s 2020 now, and Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition has no excuse for its netcode being as bad as it is. And on a minor issue that isn’t really the fault of Capcom or the game itself, fighting games are an incredibly niche genre in India, and getting a match online not only takes upwards of 10 minutes, it’s also bound to be an incredibly laggy and all-round horrible experience.

Harp as I might about all of Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition’s problems, I still can’t deny it’s a downright incredible package. If you’re one of the few Street Fighter 5 players out there who continued playing the game but didn’t really buy any of the character or costume DLCs, Champion Edition is fantastic value. And the fact that you get 40 characters with most of their costumes, along with a bunch of stages to fight in certainly makes it one of the more robust fighting game packages out there.

So, should you buy it?

If you haven’t played Street Fighter 5 before, I honestly wouldn’t recommend it now. Sure, the pricing and the overall package of Champion Edition is a great value for money, but you’re not really going to be able to play online. Combine that with the rather sparse single-player content, and you’re going to be limited to playing local multiplayer. And Street Fighter 5 has never been the kind of fighting game you can just spring on a friend who could jump in and have a good time. It needs a lot of dedication and practice to really start getting the hang of things, so casual play goes right out the window. The only person I could honestly recommend Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition is the rare Street Fighter 5 player who doesn’t have all the DLC yet. If you're in the market for a solid 2D fighting game, unless you have a lot of nostalgia for Street Fighter, just play Under Night In-Birth instead. That one's still the best one of these out there.

PC - Rs. 2,499 - Don’t Buy

PlayStation 4 - Rs. 2,499 - Don’t Buy