Street Fighter 5's Story Will Be Very Different Than Past Games

One of the weakest points of Street Fighter's illustrious history has been its story. It's been hard to tell who exactly wins what and what happens to whom. Capcom hasn't really taken the story all that seriously but they seem to want to change that with the new game.

Gamespot took note of an interview that Capcom producer Matt Dahlgren had with HipHopGamer where it was revealed that the game will have a different take on the story. Dahlgren stated...

Hm, interesting. I wonder what that means?

The past Street Fighter games has pretty lousy stories, mostly because throughout the arcade mode there were just snippets of interludes describing what the character was doing or what they were on about. But there was rarely any character dynamics to give players a reason to care about why they were traveling the world and fighting. Outside the game there are all sorts of detailed stories for each character, but rarely does this translate into anything fleshed out in the games, unless you count Charlie, Akuma, Sagat, Ryu and Abel.

In recent times developers like NetherRealm Studios and Namco have really stepped up their game. Well, technically Namco had always stepped up their game along with SNK. In fact I would argue that SNK probably ranks top for having the most character driven stories in their fighting games along with Namco. You can definitely get a feel for the characters and their motivations in games like Tekken and the King of Fighters.

NetherRealm Studios really put a serious focus on the story in their two most recent entries, being Mortal Kombat 9 and Mortal Kombat X. Mortal Kombat 9 was a retelling of all the previous games leading up to Mortal Kombat X, and the latter started an all new story with many new faces and a few old ones.

One thing worth noting, though, is that story was never put above and beyond the actual fighting. King of Fighters, Tekken and Mortal Kombat still have some of the best fighting mechanics in gaming today.

Capcom will be challenged to match a story mode that – if it doesn't surpass its competitors – at least rivals the the competition in terms of quality and coherency. Visually they already have a very distinct style with Street Fighter V, so the question will be if they can wrap some decent characterization around those visuals.

For now we don't know anything about the game's actual story or who the final boss will be, but Capcom has been focusing more on refining the gameplay and getting feedback from the beta tests. Speaking of which, there will be another beta test inbound this month for Street Fighter V on both PC and PS4 as the game preps for its early 2016 launch.