Finally got to play today after setting aside some time. Beat all of the story content and got about 600LP online before calling it for the day.
The game is good but I feel like something is really missing. I'm sticking to ryu / birdie right now, so maybe that's why, but I feel like the game feels a bit barebones.
I can't find a way to incorporate Ryu's VTRIGGER at all other than making people jump because they think I'm going to fire a hadouken. In training mode it's theoretically good because you can super off a fully charged hadouken being blocked, but the charged hadoukens are not very practical in real match situations. Right now, it's no where near as cool as Denjin Ryu in 3rd strike. I wish the hadouken would guard crush regardless of charge time, that would actually make it interesting. Ryu is a bit disappointing but I'll continue to use him for ranked while I still figure out some basic match up information. I feel like ryu has all the tools needed to win a match and has very little chance to be low tier, so he is a good place to really start finding each characters' Achilles heel.
Birdie is perhaps a bit more fun atm, but he is also pretty dead simple to play. His CA still does huge damage and has a bunch of ways to land it. VSkill is perhaps the most fun vskill in the game. All in all, good character but I feel like he lacks some fun combos or something. He lacks reliable wake up options sometimes, at least until he has meter. If you play against a birdie, I think it's good to keep that in mind.
Mika I played in the last beta (which was my first time playing sf5 outside of pax) and while she is a good character, I find her V skill annoyingly clunky and her damage is just not high enough. Frankly, Birdie has nearly the same number of tools but has more health and higher damage output. Having said that, I found some really cheesy set ups into her grab that can be super ambiguous. I feel about her the same way I felt about El Fuerte in SF4 -- she's a seemingly weak character who has some mixup gimmicks that may or may not make her really tough to deal with. Thankfully, though, you can actually try to play R Mika without relying entirely on mix ups and glitchy feeling combos, so that's good.
I guess I feel a bit weird about this game. When SF4 came out, I definitely remember feeling way more excited. I remember getting trounced in the imported arcade versions of the game but still being really excited. SFV moved in the right direction for some things, but feels like maybe it's trying a bit too hard to feel "esports" and "balanced" to the point where characters basically only have just enough tools to make them not terrible. I think that makes the characters feel really shallow.
It's definitely too early to tell for sure, but Im just not sure what to make of the game yet. I can't say I really feel like rushing back to play morr, at least not any more than any other SF game.
