About This Guide

This guide is the product of an on-site collaboration between Prima authors, veteran fighting gamers who’ve mashed out cheap stuff since the late ‘90s (if you liked our BradyGames Ultra Street Fighter IV Bible, then hello, good to see you again!), and the staff of Capcom USA, almost all seasoned fighting game players themselves. The purpose of this guide is to serve as a helpful reference to Street Fighter veterans, and as a centralized and in-depth jumping-on point for SF newcomers.

The first section of the guide is a Primer for SF veterans. This section contains the most obvious and important differences between SFV and other SF games. Immediately following the Primer is the Glossary, which defines every important concept discussed in character chapters. Even if you feel like you know every SF term there is, take a moment to flip through and skim terms and you might find a few items that serve as interesting refreshers or perhaps just SF trivia. At the very least, you’ll almost certainly want to take a look at the movement tables, and the V-system explanations. The Glossary is alphabetical for ease of use.

The character chapters are the meat of the guide. These contain full frame data and move descriptions, as well as suggested objectives, in-depth strategy for each range, and combos for any situation. After the character chapters, the guide concludes with a chapter about Matchups and Versus/Online Play, containing articles about character/player archetypes and at-a-glance tips for fighting against every member in the cast.

Combofiend’s Corner

Peter Rosas, Associate Producer

One of the core design pillars of Street Fighter V is accessibility. We wanted to make sure that this was a game that anyone could pick up and be able to access the deeper aspects of the characters very quickly. This is what led us to make V-Skills and V-Triggers accessible by pressing either together or together, respectively. That said, we also wanted to make sure that there was always something to learn. Even if players are able to execute V-Skills and V-Triggers, they will have to learn how to properly utilize them.

Besides being accessible, we also wanted to make sure everything in Street Fighter V was very understandable. Things like backdash invincibility and focus attacks that were present in Street Fighter IV were very hard to understand if you weren’t a Street Fighter IV player. By removing things like this, it creates an experience for both the player and spectator that are very easy to comprehend. However, we also understood that removing backdash invincibility limited the number of defensive options in the game, making it feel a bit regressive. To that effect, we put in V-Reversals as a way to stop the opponent from attacking you.

Lastly, we wanted to make sure that, there was something for our more seasoned players to explore. This led to the inclusion of Crush Counters. Since Crush Counters allow players to set up more damaging combos if they hit the proper attack, we felt that this would make Street Fighter V feel extremely tense at higher levels of play.