Sometimes you fight three battles in a row with small 30 second clips in between, while other times you spend nearly 20 minutes listening to laborious exposition and watching go-nowhere plotlines. The balance between cinematics and fighting is wildly uneven as well. While the beauty of Mortal Kombat’s storylines is how seamlessly they transition from cinematic to fight, Street Fighter V lacks that smooth consistency, placing momentum-killing loading screens before every brawl. But, ironically, much like all the “me too” fighting games that came out in the early ‘90s riding on Street Fighter’s coattails, this entry apes the style of NeatherRealm’s stories without really understanding what makes them work. Capcom certainly took cues from those titles, stitching together fights between story-advancing cinematics that drop the player directly into each encounter.

I don’t think you can speak honestly about Street Fighter V’s story mode without comparing it to the recent efforts of NeatherRealm’s Mortal Kombat and Injustice games.

Street Fighter V: A Shadow Falls (PC, PS4) If Capcom were feeling at all smug about Comcept’s “better than nothing” goof, it had better take a long look in the mirror. Still, even acknowledging those difficulties and grading on a generous curve, Street Fighter V’s long-awaited story mode, A Shadow Falls, is so disjointed, eye-rolling, and clich é that it’s difficult to find nice things to say about it. A certain threshold of cheesiness is to be expected.

It’s a tough needle to thread, and a reason why I’m generally pretty easy on fighting game plots. Then you need to construct a plot that will have every conflict lead to, and be resolved by, two people punching each other. First, you start with a cast of disparate oddballs, karate-wizards and leggy Interpol agents, each with odd backstories that you have to find a way to weave together. I’m sure it’s difficult to write a compelling story mode for a fighting game.

Street fighter 5 special move sensation