The Impact Factor

A Musical Of Punches: Disjointed Narrative and Street Fighter V

Perspectives

Abstract: Street Fighter V’s long awaited story mode is terrible. The writing is poor and the plot is something you’ve already seen a thousand times. The narrative and gameplay poorly align, transforming the story mode into a bizarre musical where punches and shoryukens are the songs. Like many other games, Street Fighter V makes the mistake of relying too strongly on film as the model on how to shape its story. When video games lean into what makes them unique from movies, like their interactivity and perspective, their narratives can succeed.

Let’s not beat around the bush here, Street Fighter V’s story mode is bad. Almost unplayably so. It is a huge bummer. As a kid that grew up glued to the shiny Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, I spent hours creating the world of Street Fighter in my mind. From character dialogue to stages to moves, I used everything I could to create the universe. Given my past experience with Capcom fighting games my expectations for Street Fighter V’s story mode were quite low. It promised to be a step above the comic book freeze frame storytelling of Capcom’s games past games, with 3D models and dialogue and a compelling narrative. I suppose it delivers two of the three.

As of writing this, I’m a little past the story mode’s halfway point. What I’ve experienced so far is 90 minutes of stilted dialogue and haphazardly assembled vignettes that roughly come together to form a narrative. Street Fighter V’s story mode represents so much of what has been wrong with narrative in video games. The writing is god awful. The plot is something a middle-schooler could have whipped up on a lazy afternoon. The action is disjointed—characters hop around with little to no sense of geography or time, motivations shift dynamically and without purpose, and every scene is just an excuse to hobble together an eclectic group of characters to, you guessed it, fight each other. Street Fighter V’s final offense is one that’s been committed over and over again in video games: the gameplay and story are totally disconnected.

Guys, please. Street Fighter V's story isn't worth the fist bump.

Street Fighter V’s story mode is broken up into two discrete parts: non-interactive cutscenes and fights. Never do the two really meet. The narrative heft is put forward in the cutscenes. The Shadaloo bad guys explain why they want to EMP the world, the good guys talk with one another to plan how to stop the evil organization, etc. The fighting, however, exists almost totally outside of the story. In fact, most fights in the story feel forcefully injected between the plot that’s taking place. Characters will get mad at one another at the drop of a dime, or out of the blue will demand a test of a fighter’s skill. Anything to get two people to clash. Playing through the story mode is a strange experience. The shift between cutscene movie and fights is jarring. Many characters come across as trigger-happy psychopaths looking for any excuse to hadouken one another. Street Fighter V’s story mode never lets characters earn their right to fight one another, nor does it skillfully blend fighting in with the larger narrative.

I'm sure you can guess the outcome of the scene by now.

In many ways, playing Street Fighter V’s story mode is like watching a musical. The characters go about their business until BAM, they suddenly need to fight. Like a musical in which people suddenly need to sing. This isn’t the first time this particular dissonance between gameplay and story has been compared to theater. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright described how he approached blending the titular character’s fights into the film saying, “We thought it should play out like a musical in a way in terms of the fights are not dissimilar to the songs.” Scott Pilgrim leaned heavily on video games as an influence. This approach worked for Scott Pilgrim, perhaps given the strength of the writing and directing of the film. It doesn’t change the fact that the fights are jarring, dislodging the viewer (if only momentarily) from the experience. That jolt has a more profound impact when playing a video game like Street Fighter V. The player agency in the action combined with the general interactivity of video games make it so that, when gameplay is inelegantly inserted into game’s narrative, you’re thrown pretty far off from the experience.

Scott Pilgrim is a good musical of punches. Street Fighter V is not.

Street Fighter V also suffers from a problem very recently highlighted by the great Brad Bird. Bird shared his concerns about using video games as inspiration for filmmaking and storytelling in a recent interview. The director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles cited video games’ point of view problem. He said, “I feel like video games are a bad influence for storytelling because they are not directed points of view. They are about floating around universes…a lot of times it’s just motion.” Story mode in Street Fighter V is all about universe and not about a singular, or cohesive, point of view. Perspective shifts happen every couple minutes. Huge fluctuations in characters and tones and locations happen so frequently it is easy to get lost in the fold. By giving every character equal representation in the plot, no one matters. The end result is schizophrenic and astonishingly boring. There’s nothing compelling you to get attached or to move forward.

As inflammatory as Bird’s statement can come off, he does hit on a truth that video game narrative creators need to realize. Simply adapting a film approach and applying it to video games rarely works. It is immediately obvious that Street Fighter V wants the story mode to feel like a movie. Fortunately we already know how well a Street Fighter movie works, and it’s not very pretty. Games have long thought going the Hollywood route is the way to bring great narratives into video games. Rarely is that the case. Only the true masters of the craft can get away with this approach, like Naughty Dog with The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Nearly every other film-inspired story mode in video games comes across, at best, like a good “B” movie. It’s a point of view problem, it’s a length problem, and it’s an interactivity problem.

Unless you're Naughty Dog, your studio might want to think twice about
making your story "cinematic."

While Street Fighter V fundamentally misunderstands what makes a video game story great (hint: it’s not about making a musical of punches), other games shape narrative construction to fit the unique vehicle that is video games. In response to Brad Bird’s statement about video game narrative, creative lead at Naughty Dog Neil Druckman tweeted, “Someone needs to play Brothers [A Tale of Two Sons] or Ico or Papers Please or Portal or Inside or The Secret of Monkey Island or…” Druckman is right and Bird is wrong. There are fantastic narrative in games. Druckman’s list has something in common, though—none of these games structure their story like a movie. Video game narratives work when they lean into the interactivity inherent in games, and from the unique perspectives games can offer the player. Certain narrative devices like environmental storytelling work so well in games, even outshining their film peers. Games like Gone Home and Portal and Ico and Firewatch have fantastic narratives that would never work the same way on film. Video game narratives have the potential for greatness when they are designed from the ground up to be a video game narrative, not a movie facsimile.

The best video game stories adapt narrative structures to fit
the interactive medium they exist within.

For my love of Street Fighter and its characters I’ll fight my way to the end of Street Fighter V’s story mode. I owe it to my arcade heritage and my fondness for the fighting game community. I just wish Street Fighter V was more Shadow of the Colossus and less “action-movie the fighting game musical."