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Street Fighter 5 tutorial hints at game’s deeper story mode

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Fighting games, particularly Street Fighter, have been legendarily bad at two things for as long as we’ve been putting quarter-circle together with punch – showing you the ropes and giving you something to do solo. This has been changing recently, particularly thanks to the efforts of Netherealm Studios and the Injustice and Mortal Kombat games which do a far better job of telling a story, even if it’s very silly indeed. The great hope is that Street Fighter V will be taking a lot from that.

Get up to speed on all the Street Fighter V characters.

This also backs up the assumption, based on returning characters, that the game may have started life as and retain some elements of a sequel to the Alpha series, a late-90s Street Fighter offshoot that acts as a prequel. Very little has been announced as to where it will sit in what is a somewhat convoluted timeline, but best guess based on what scraps we have received puts it between Street Fighter 4 and 3, the current endpoint in SF canon.

Presumably, this is not the full tutorial, given it doesn’t cover fireball motions, charge attacks or, well, anything more complicated than the basic systems. It’s a lot better than what we’ve had before, with SF4 sporting just a training mode and a few now very out-of-date combo examples. It’s worth noting that poor tutorials for complicated systems are at this point an e-sports mainstay – look at the likes of Counter-Strike, StarCraft, DOTA and so on – so it will be interesting to see how proper teaching, if it arrives, affects the level of pro play.

Street Fighter V hits digi-shelves on February 16th and there should be more beta action between now and then. The Capcom Cup this year is December 5th and 6th as part of the Playstation Experience and is predicted to be the place where the final character, Zen, is debuted and more details on the single-player modes are given. It should also be an absolutely incredible tournament, with the best players in the world competing for what will probably be the final SF4 grand championship.