Yesterday’s Winter Update surprised the Street Fighter 5 community as Capcom introduced a ton of exciting changes on the way to the fifth and final season of the game, but there is a new addition that has our attention with an arguably stronger control than everyone else. the combined character displays: V – Change.
Fans have been calling for a defense mechanic to shake off the excessively offensive Street Fighter 5 for years, and V-Shift seeks to check the box exactly … and maybe a little more.
We have already learned a lot about what this new mechanic is, but we still have many doubts, because the devil is so often in the details of these things. It is impossible to say exactly how much V-Shift will change the flow and feel of SF5 until the FGC gets its hands directly on it, but there is good reason to speculate that the goal could evolve to become almost unrecognizable after February 22.
Given the images we have, let’s dive into the most likely and significant changes that this Street Fighter 3 parry hybrid and invincible Street Fighter 4 indents will cause in Street Fighter 5.
What is V-Shift?
Using a V-Shift on SF5 will cause your character to flash blue and quickly recede to the cost of a V-Gauge bar. Your character will be invincible to pitches, projectiles and strikes during this move, and if you time your Change to occur as soon as an enemy’s attack is about to hit (except for regular pitches, it seems) you will receive half a bar. V-Gauge and enters a slow motion state where you gain great advantages.
Seeing your opponent’s scent 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 can arrive in time. or through a V-Shift Break: a forward attack that knocks down and can only be performed after a successful V-Shift.
Oncoming attacks with rapid recovery are unlikely to be very susceptible to Shift punishments, as we saw a V-Shift character break from an opponent during the showcase, but larger attacks with more recovery are likely to be less and more distant from one to the other. . update is implemented.
General Changes
Given that Shift costs V-Gauge and can be executed almost any time during the match, we will naturally see less use of the V-Trigger, as players will be inclined to use their Gauge to escape complicated situations.
We will have to wait and see how prevalent the mechanics are during the game, but there is certainly a scenario in which the game’s goal changes strongly to be based on this new tool.
V-Shift seems to serve as a direct counterattack to obvious neutral attacks, and will likely cause players to hesitate and think long before using large or obvious special buttons.
In fact, SF5 is famous for allowing careless use of powerful tools because they come with very little risk, and this can change the nature of much of the overall risk versus reward dynamics of the game a lot.
Changes to Neutral
Somewhat similar to the SF3 parry, this will add a universal option based on the players’ abilities to predict and react to the movements of their enemies. Now, instead of waiting and holding unavoidable long-range heavy buttons or quick special attacks that can be safely and advantageously canceled by activating the V-Trigger, we will have a more useful answer for these scenarios.
We saw in the showcase that moves that V-Shift has an interesting effect on incoming attacks that can be canceled especially in the block. Ryu gives a medium squat kick that technically smells like Rashid V-Shift him, but Ryu is still able to cancel in his fireball, which means that the buffers in the neutral will be a little nerfed by this.
Necalli, for example, likes to protect his steps behind some of his normal ones, as he is relatively safe on the block. If he does so and his opposition changes one of these normals, however, the trampling will still come out in slow motion and they will have all the time in the world to see and punish him.
What’s more, slow projectiles like Laura’s Thunderclap, Dhalsim’s Critical Art, Ed’s V-Trigger 1 or Guile’s Sonic Boom can be shifted, meaning that some of the traps that such attacks create may have to be reinvented. It also seems to provide a new escape route for unavoidable stun chip out situations, but not en bloc, as with G’s Critical Art.
Changes in closed skirmishes
The V-Shift appears to have some direct implications for how the extremely common proximity interactions in SF5.
Essentially, it adds a new and very viable option to the mix, as defenders can use it to thwart frame traps, and a large part of the goal of Street Fighter 5 has always revolved around the great advantages of being in frame advantage in your enemy’s face.
Frame traps, which are practically cemented in the muscle memory of many players at this point, can now be fought with V-Shift.
We saw him escape from three frame gaps during the winter update flow and that’s already huge, but if it works the same way for two or one frame gap, then the SF5 pressure game can turn completely upside down .
Persistent questions
As already mentioned, we are really intrigued to find out exactly how fast invincibility sets in when activating V-Shift. This will greatly affect its usefulness and, honestly, we are a little concerned that it has the potential to make the game very defensive if it’s very versatile.
Can this be used when waking up to avoid virtually all options? That would seem to break the game quickly if it were true, or at least get rid of the pressure to wake up to an impressive degree.
We should also ask ourselves what types of counters are possible if players sniff when an opponent chooses Shift. Can you bait him and get more reward than just losing your opponent’s meter? After all, players can still earn the reward of escaping pressure, even if they do not achieve the effect of slow motion and potential punishment.
Perhaps forward jumps or dashes will be able to hunt the V-Shifts, although it does not seem that the maneuver has enough recovery to be punished too harshly in the images we have seen so far.
We also don’t know what the inputs for Shift and Break are, nor do we know whether a successful Break delivers real or gray damage.
Final thoughts
There is still a ton to be answered and unpacked for this mechanic, but it seems almost certain to change the way the SF5 is played strongly.
We are likely to see a lot more strategic pitches and jabs as the V-Shift adds risk to the many big moves that need it, and we may actually breathe a few sighs of relief when opponents activate the V-Trigger simply because it takes that option off the table. .
Many members of the community are already speculating that this will be an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of zoning characters like Dhalsim or grapplers with weak defense. In theory, this can eliminate a fundamental weakness around which the strategies against these characters are based.
That said, we are talking about a game that is about to be rethought with a ton of new variables. How these variables affect things in a vacuum is different from how they will act when they are together, so it is almost impossible to know how things will move until we have enough time to experiment directly.
One thing is for sure at this point, and that is that Capcom has brought new potential and a ton of intrigue to the final chapters of Street Fighter 5. Hopefully, this adds the kind of balance and nuance that we expected to see in SF5 and provides a great boost for Street Fighter 6.