Actually I had a small amount of free time today to try SFV so I did. Obviously these are just initial thoughts as I probably only spent an hour trying it and I'm sure some things will come up later with it but as just a quick initial glance..
I tried the Arcade Mode twice. Arcade Mode in this game has different paths, all based on previous Street Fighter games. The characters you can select to play as are different based on which path you choose. For example, Cammy is available in the Street Fighter II path but not the Street Fighter I path. Also, the stages you fight on in that mode are based on what they were in their respective games. It's a pretty nice touch. It also seems like the last boss is based on their respective game bosses IF they're in the game (a lot of them aren't, of course). Also, something that's kind of cool and increases replayability a little bit, is after you win each match you get to choose your next opponent most of the time (choose one out of two usually). So if you see a character pop up that you hate fighting, like Ryu, you can choose the other person. However each person is worth a different score for beating them so if you're going for the high score you would choose the person with the highest amount. Finally, with that mode, the barrel stage has returned as a bonus stage but it's a little different this time. Now you have an enemy CPU there who's trying to keep you from breaking the barrels (or at least distract you, if not outright stop you). It's much harder to clear that stage with a perfect now (IMO of course).
I am happy to announce that it seems Capcom has fixed the difficulty issues. If you recall, Ultra Street Fighter IV had difficulties that was all over the place. I used to set that game to "easiest" and sometimes it would take me a freaking hour to clear Seth due to outright haxx (i.e. although I had it set to easiest it was acting like it was set to the hardest). I set the game to easy here and breezed through it. No problems at all. Most of the time the AI barely even did anything. I got several perfects and never came close to losing even once. That makes me happy because sometimes I just want to play the game on easy and not worry about losing or getting frustrated. Obviously I'll probably bump it up to normal now that I know that (so at least the AI will try to fight lol) but it's a relief after USFIV. I was seriously afraid it'd be another situation like that. Now that easy really is easy it means Bri can play too and have fun with it rather than throwing the controller at me two opponents in.
With all that said.. let's talk about the Fight Money. That's the in-game currency that you can't (currently) buy with real money. It's used for a variety of things. You can use it to purchase new characters and stages (the ones that you CAN purchase with real money, it's neat that you can buy them with the in-game currency though), enter in some of the other modes, and a few other things (like changing your online nickname). It's a lot like Zenni from Dragonball FighterZ except much harder to get. Unfortunately, Capcom has decided to make it very annoying to collect a decent amount of it (and you need a ton of it if you want new characters or costumes, each character was 100,000 FM). You can't get it from playing arcade mode or story mode (apparently you could originally but after the Arcade edition they removed that option). Now there's weekly missions, some of which only give 50 FM.
At the moment I have 2750 FM which sounds like 'oh wow, that's a lot considering you played an hour' but 2000 of that came from one mission. The missions can vary too. One was to perform 10 normal throws on an opponent but had to be done online. Another was a simple "try out training mode" and the one that gave 2000 was a weird one. It required knocking your opponent down on a certain stage enough times to cause a background element to do an animation. Basically on Blanka's stage, the Brazil stage, there's a fruit stand in the background and a toucan. If you knock your opponent down on that side of the screen a few times the bird flies down and attempts to steal a piece of fruit that fell over. Most of the time it's not successful but occasionally the bird gets a piece of fruit. The mission was to get the bird to have a piece of fruit. It took a few tries before I finally got it to happen lol.
Of course the missions change after a few days (I think it's weekly) so the mission will probably be gone before anyone else gets the game.. but maybe it'll rotate back in.
But the point being, it's not easy to collect fight money and at least one of the modes requires you to spend 2500 to even attempt it. If you lose you just lost 2500 FM and have to spend it again to repeat. So with that in mind, I won't be attempting to get the Gloria costume (as it's in that mode and has to be done weekly meaning I would need 10k FM to get the costume assuming I win each time on the first try).
Anyway, the first impressions is that it's pretty awesome. I'm glad I got it. Even if I never get the fight money or go online, there's a huuuuuuuuge story mode that I haven't even started yet and arcade mode is more than enough to keep me busy for a long time. And like I said, the fact that easy really does mean easy means I can really enjoy this one. So I'd recommend it if you like Street Fighter. I'd say get the Arcade Edition though as it contains a code for the first two season passes which adds a lot of characters (I feel like the base game really doesn't have that many). I might actually get the season 3 pass once it goes on sale just so I can have Blanka and Sagat lol.
I'm sure I'll come post more when I get to play for longer and try out the story mode.
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