Fighting game community X has been sharing a sudden wealth of Street Fighter 5 clips and sequences, and while it’s not necessarily stated in a direct fashion, it seems this turn towards recent nostalgia could be at least partially the result of a wave of distaste for the current center stage game: Street Fighter 6.
Enter long time FGC member Maximilian Dood with some wisdom from over the years as he discusses in his latest video how we’re collectively going through a more or less routine process that every franchise entry experiences. The prominent streamer exemplifies this by talking about the transitions between multiple franchise entries, starting with a game those of us in the “09er” group tend to hold in high regard.
In short, the next Street Fighter game will never be as good as your first. We have a particular fondness and rose-colored glasses for the entry that got us hooked, and that makes enough logical sense before we even delve into particulars.
Max interestingly tries to pinpoint the more general patterns of truth at play between any given Street Fighter transition. That is, how subsequent entries tend to be based around being answers to the problems and issues in their direct predecessors, and how that tends to manifest from the point of view of the emotional consumer.
We tend to remember the most fun or engaging aspects of older titles that aren’t in the active spotlight anymore while highlighting the most prominent drags and missteps that are frustrating audiences of the current, main title.
We conveniently forget the flaws of the old and the wins of the new alike, and thus we get an idea, in a nutshell, of why the good old days are permanently better than whatever is in front of us now.
There’s a lot more to the discussion as Max puts plenty of more specific examples on the table to inspect, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions in the comments once you’ve had a chance to hear what he has to say.