Yesterday’s winter update wiped out the Street Fighter 5 community as Capcom introduced a lot of exciting road changes for the game’s fifth and final season, but there’s a new addition that has our attention with a grip certainly stronger than all the showcases of characters combined: V -Major.
Fans have been asking for a defensive mechanic for years to shake the Street Fighter 5 too offensively, and V-Shift is looking to check that exact box … and maybe some.
We’ve already learned a lot about what this new mechanic is, but we still have a lot of questions, as the devil is so often in the details with these things. It’s impossible to say exactly how much V-Shift will change the flow and feel of SF5 until the FGC gets its hands on it directly, but there are good reasons to speculate that the goal may evolve to be almost unrecognizable after February 22nd.
Given the images we have, we delve into the most likely and significant alterations that this hybrid will cause between the Street Fighter 3 stop and the invincible later scripts from Street Fighter 4 to Street Fighter 5.
What is V-Shift?
If you use a V-Shift in SF5, your character will blink blue and move quickly backwards at the price of a V-Gauge bar. Your character will be invincible on throws, projectiles, and blows during this move, and if you call for your change to occur just when an enemy’s incoming attack is about to strike (it seems that except for regular throws), it will reimburse you half a bar of V-Gauge and enter a slow motion state where you will get great benefits.
Seeing your opponent’s flair in slow motion will allow you to react with the best punishment for the situation, and this can be done with any of your character’s techniques that may come in time. or using a V-Shift Break: A forward launch attack that falls and can only be performed after a successful V-Shift.
Incoming attacks with a quick recovery are unlikely to be too susceptible to Shift punishments, as we should see a V-Shift character that an opponent breaks during the showcase, but larger attacks with more recovery are likely to be less and less The update has been implemented.
General changes
Given that Shift costs V-Gauge and can be performed at almost any time in the game, we will naturally see less use of the V-Trigger, as players will be inclined to use their caliber to escape sticky situations.
We’ll have to wait to see the prevalence of mechanics during the game, but there is certainly a scenario where the goal of the game changes a lot to build on this new tool.
V-Shift seems to be a counter-current against obvious neutral attacks, and will likely make players do much more hesitation and thought before throwing big buttons or special highlights.
In fact, SF5 is famous for allowing riders to use powerful tools because they have too low a risk, and this can change the nature of much of the game’s overall risk and reward dynamics.
Changes to Neutral
A bit similar to the SF3 stop, this will add a universal option based on players ’abilities to predict and react to their enemies’ moves. Now, instead of waiting for and keeping unavoidable powerful heavy buttons or quick special attacks that can be safely and advantageously canceled in V-Trigger activation, we will have a more useful response to these scenarios.
We saw in the moving showcase that V-Shift has an interesting effect on incoming attacks that can be canceled in a special way. Ryu pulls out a mean kick that is bent over technically blows while Rashid changes it, but Ryu is still able to cancel his fireball, which means the shock absorbers in neutral will be slightly altered by this.
Necalli, for example, likes to save himself the step behind some of his normals, as he is relatively safe. If he does and his opposition changes one of these normal ones, however, the blow will continue to come out in slow motion and they will have all the time in the world to see it and punish it.
In addition, slow-moving projectiles such as Laura’s Trumpet, Dhalsim’s Critical Art, Ed’s V-Trigger 1, or Guile’s light Sonic Boom can be changed, meaning that some of the traps these attacks create greatly they may well have to reinvent themselves. It looks like it will also provide a new escape route for unavoidable but non-blocking stunning situations, such as with G’s Critical Art.
Changes to closed quarter skirmishes
V-Shift seems to have some direct implications on how extremely common pressure interactions in SF5.
Basically, it adds a very viable new option to the mix, as proponents can use it to thwart plot traps, and an important part of the goal of Street Fighter 5 has always revolved around the great advantages of having advantages of plot in the face of your enemy.
Photo traps, which have so far been entrenched in the muscular memory of many players, can now be counteracted with V-Shift.
We saw it escape three frame gaps during the winter update transmission and this is already huge, but if it works the same way for two or one frame gaps, the SF5 pressure set could be turned completely in the head.
Persistent questions
As already alluded to, we are really intrigued to know exactly how quickly invincibility starts when activating V-Shift. This will greatly affect its usefulness and we sincerely worry a bit that it has the potential to make the game too defensive if it is too versatile.
Can it be used on waking to evade virtually every option? This would seem to quickly break the game if true, or at least get rid of the pressure of waking up to an astonishing degree.
We also have to ask ourselves what types of counters will be possible if players gasp when an opponent chooses to change. Can you catch and get more reward than the opponent’s simple meter loss? After all, players continue to earn the reward of escaping the pressure even if they don’t get the slow motion effect and the possible punishment.
Maybe the jumps or forward scripts will be able to hunt down the V-Shifts, though it doesn’t seem like the maneuver has recovered enough to be punished very hard in the images we’ve seen so far.
We also don’t know what the tickets are for Shift and Break, nor whether a successful Break produces real or gray damage.
Final thoughts
There are still many tons to answer and unpack for this mechanic, but he seems to be sure that it will change the way SF5 is played a lot.
We’ll probably see a lot of strategic throws and hits as V-Shift adds risk to many important moves that needed it, and it could be that we really breathe a sigh of relief when opponents activate the V-Trigger simply because it takes that option off the table.
Many community members are already speculating that this will be an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of zoning characters like Dhalsim or grapplers with a weak defense. In theory, you can get rid of a key weakness that are based on strategies against these characters.
That said, let’s talk about a game that is about to be re-imagined with a lot of new variables. The way these variables affect things in a vacuum is different from how they will act together, so it’s almost impossible to know how things will break down until we have enough time to experiment directly.
One thing is certain right now and that is that Capcom has brought new potential and a lot of intrigue to the final chapters of Street Fighter 5. Hopefully, this adds to the kind of balance and nuance we expected to see in SF5 and provides a big boost to Street Fighter 6.