Yesterday’s winter update blew away the Street Fighter 5 community as Capcom showed off a ton of exciting changes on the way to the game’s fifth and final season, but there’s a new addition that grabs our attention with arguably stronger grip than all character showcases together: V-Shift.
Fans have spent years asking a defensive mechanic to shake up the overly insulting Street Fighter 5, and V-Shift seems to be checking that exact box … and maybe some more.
We’ve already learned a lot about what this new mechanic is, but still have a lot of questions because the devil is so often in the details with these things. It’s impossible to say exactly how much V-Shift will change the power and feel of SF5 until the FGC gets their hands on it, but there’s good reason to speculate that the meta could evolve to become nearly unrecognizable after February 22 .
Given the footage we have, let’s take a look at the more likely and significant changes this hybrid of Street Fighter 3’s parry and Street Fighter 4’s invincible backstripes will cause in Street Fighter 5.
What is V-Shift?
If you use a V-Shift in SF5, your character will flash blue and quickly run backwards at the expense of one bar of V-Gauge. Your character will be invincible to throw, projectiles and attack during this move, and if you take the time to allow your Shift to occur when an enemy’s incoming attack is about to strike (other than normal throws, it seems), you get half a euro back. bar of V-Gauge and go into a slow motion state where you get big benefits.
Seeing your opponent’s scent in slow motion allows you to respond with the best punishment for the situation, and this can be done with any of your character’s techniques that you can achieve in time or via a V-Shift Break: a forward attack that drops down and can only be performed after a successful V-Shift.
Incoming attacks with fast recovery probably won’t be too prone to Shift penalties as we saw a character V-Shift and an opponent’s Break during the showcase, but bigger attacks with more recovery will likely be less and further between this update is implemented.
General changes
Since Shift costs V-Gauge and can be performed at almost any point during the match, we will of course see less V-Trigger usage as players will tend to use their meter to escape tricky situations.
We’ll have to wait to see how common the mechanic is during gameplay, but there is certainly a scenario where the game’s meta shifts greatly to be based on this new tool.
V-Shift appears to serve as a strong counterbalance to clear attacks in the neutral position, and will likely cause players to hesitate and think a lot more before discarding big buttons or obvious specials.
Indeed, SF5 is notorious for allowing the cavalier use of powerful tools as they carry too little risk, and this could very well change the nature of many of the game’s overall risk-reward dynamics.
Changes to Neutral
Somewhat similar to SF3’s parry, this will add a universal option based on players ‘ability to predict and respond to their enemies’ movements. Rather than waiting for inevitable, far-reaching heavy buttons or quick special attacks that can be safely and cost-effectively canceled in V-Trigger activation, we have a more useful answer to these scenarios.
We saw in the showcase that moves that V-Shift have an interesting effect on incoming attacks that can be specifically canceled on block. Ryu sticks out a squatting medium kick there technically while Rashid V-Shift shifts it, but Ryu is still able to cancel in his fireball, meaning buffers in the neutral position are slightly fueled by this.
Necalli, for example, likes to buffer its stump behind some of its normals because it’s relatively safe on block. However, if he does this and his opposition shifts one of those normals, the stump will still come out in slow motion and they’ll have all the time in the world to see it and punish it.
Additionally, slow-moving projectiles like Laura’s Thunderclap, Dhalsim’s Critical Art, Ed’s V-Trigger 1, or Guile’s light Sonic Boom can be shifted, meaning some of the traps that create such attacks very well may need to be reinvented. It also seems to provide a new escape route for unavoidable but non-blocking situations, as with G’s Critical Art.
Changes to Skirmishes in Close Quarters
V-Shift appears to have some direct implications for the way the extremely common close-up pressure interactions in SF5.
It essentially adds a new and very viable option to the mix as defenders can use it to thwart frame traps, and much of the Street Fighter 5 meta has always revolved around the big frame advantage perks in the face from your enemy.
Frame traps, which have been almost cemented into many players’ muscle memory at this point, can now be countered with V-Shift.
We saw escaping three frame gaps during the Winter Update stream and that’s already huge, but if it works the same way for two or one frame gap, SF5’s pressure play could be turned upside down.
Dragging questions
As already mentioned, we are very intrigued to find out how quickly invincibility starts when activating V-Shift. This greatly impacts its usefulness, and frankly, we’re a bit worried it has the potential to make the game too defensive if it is too versatile.
Can this be used on awakening to bypass almost all options? This seems to break the game quickly if true, or at least take away the wake-up pressure to a dizzying degree.
We also have to ask ourselves what kind of counters are possible when players sniff when an opponent chooses to Shift. Can you lure it and get more reward than just losing the opponent’s meter? After all, players can still get the reward of escaping pressure, even if they don’t get the slow motion effect and the possible penalty.
Perhaps forward jumps or dashes will be able to chase V-Shifts down, although it doesn’t look like the maneuver has enough recovery to be punished very harshly in the footage we’ve seen so far.
We also don’t know what the input is for Shift and Break, nor do we know whether a successful Break deals actual or gray damage.
Final thoughts
There’s still a lot to be answered and unpacked for this mechanic, but it seems almost certain that it will radically change the way SF5 is played.
We’re likely to see a lot more strategic throws and jabs as V-Shift adds risk to many big moves that needed it badly, and we may really breathe a sigh of relief when opponents activate V-Trigger simply because it pulls this option from the table.
Many members of the community are already speculating that this will be an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of destination characters such as Dhalsim or wrestlers with weak defense. In theory, it can eliminate a major weakness that strategies against such characters are based on.
That said, we’re talking about a game about to be reinvented with a bunch of new variables. How those variables affect things in a vacuum is different from how they behave when they interact with each other, so it’s almost impossible to know what things will look like until we’ve had enough time to experiment directly.
One thing is certain at this point, and that is that Capcom has brought new potential and a ton of intrigue into the final chapters of Street Fighter 5. Hopefully this will add the kind of balance and nuance we hoped to see in SF5 and deliver a great boost for Street Fighter 6.