Update: Capcom has published the whole tutorial video in English. Now you don't need to know Japanese to understand why Ryu spent so much time staring at his fist in the early days of his training.
Original story: So this is rather unexpected and decidedly brilliant. Rather than simply dropping noobs in at the deep end (as I did with three of our best, in a bootcamp tournament recently), Street Fighter 5 will have a rather more sophisticated way of showing beginners the ropes.
Revealed via a video released to Capcom’s Japanese channel, instead of the traditional, sterile dojo and endless purgatory of repeated practice stick-waggles, SF5 will teach the basics by way of a training system set way back in the early days of the series’ chronology, when Ryu and Ken were but fresh-faced teens under to stoic tutelage of Gouken. You’ll learn the ins and outs of Street Fighter 5’s new, overarching systems – as well as more obvious stuff like, er, blocking – by way of a fully-voiced, manga-augmented training story, as the two spar and develop aside the picturesque splashiness of the Forgotten Waterfall stage.
What does the story entail? It’s hard to say, exactly, as it’s currently all in Japanese, but it certainly involves a lot of stirring music, and quite possibly Ryu in a collapse of confidence, which he’s pulled through by his master and adopted fight-brother. It’s enough to get me moderately choked up, but then I am a massive Street Fighter lore nerd. Honestly, we exist.
Does this, though, perhaps hint at a bigger story mode? It would be rather odd for Capcom to apply this kind of lavish treatment to the game’s tutorial and nowhere else. Following the last two Mortal Kombat games’ rightly celebrated narrative set-ups, rumours have abounded that Capcom might do the same with Street Fighter 5, and this has just got a whole lot more excited about the possibility.
