I am a long-time fan of Capcom’s Street Fighter series, having hurled my first Hadouken all the way back on the Super Nintendo with Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and have loved the fighters ever since. These days, folks are mostly playing Street Fighter 6, but I’ve been dabbling back with its predecessor. Instead of pressing buttons and inputting directions on my controller’s D-pad, I’ve been playing cards and rolling dice with Kess Entertainment’s Street Fighter V: Champion Edition – Legends board game. While I may have had a fine enough time with it, it always felt more in line with another of Capcom’s series than it did with the one-on-one brawler that is Street Fighter.
Street Fighter V Legends is a cooperative board game in which one to four players work together to take down one of the heads of the evil Shadaloo organization, led by the evil M. Bison. Among them are Bison himself, Balrog, Vega, and Sagat. Each player selects a character to play as from the roster of the original eight world warriors: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile, Dhalsim, Blanka, E. Honda, or Zangief, with each character bringing their unique attacks that fans of the video games will instantly recognize.
With your character selected, you then get to choose a deck of cards that represents your fighting style – one of my favorite aspects of the game. In Street Fighter, the actions you can take on your turn are based on cards that you draw and play from these respective decks of cards, with each deck tailored to different strategies and named after common terms in the fighting game communities that have built up around the video games.
Take, for instance, the “Shoto” deck, which has more projectile cards, as though you are spamming Ryu or Ken’s Hadoukens. Or there’s the Rushdown deck, which is more about maneuvering around opponents and hitting them hard with attacks like the Cross Up.
On each turn, players place down and activate two of these cards from their hands, rolling dice to dish out damage, and with each card adding various resources to their available pool, which can then be spent to use their character’s special abilities. These resources include punches, kicks, and my personal favorite, joysticks. The six included decks offer some sense of asymmetry to how a character can play. I wish this was pushed a little farther to highlight further the different playstyles used in competitions, but their inclusion is still a neat easter egg that I appreciate.
Games of Street Fighter V take place in one of four possible stages that you build from poster-board tiles that come with the game. Each stage has some unique rules that go with it, as well. It would be too easy if the big bad were out from the get-go for you and your friends to take out. Instead, you need to prove yourself first and get strong by taking out various minions that spawn on the board, or fighting your rival (an AI-controlled Street Fighter character assigned to each player at the start of the game). Taking out these enemies earns you EX bars that can be used to upgrade your character’s abilities, putting you in a better spot for when the Nemesis boss character appears.
Bison, Balrog, Sagat, and Vega – the Nemesis characters – each have their own set of abilities that are triggered depending on what is pulled from the Nemesis deck, which also determines where new minions spawn. Once you and your team manage to deal enough damage to knock out the nemesis, you win – but if even one of your team is taken out, then it’s game over. The general flow of the game is pretty simple, and by the second or third turn through, everyone I played with had a good grasp on how the game worked, and things went pretty quickly.
Moving my character around, hurling fireballs, and beating up minions was fun, which caused my friends and me to, on more than one occasion, yell out the signature moves as we performed them. The lack of enemy variety is a bit of a bummer, with only three minion factions to pick from, each with only two options. That means you will quickly run out of new enemies to fight against, made worse by the fact that each game only has you go up against one of the three factions.
Maps aren’t overly large, which is nice. It’s never a hassle to get to the various objectives or wherever you want to go, and the additional few “Hard” Nemesis cards you can mix into the deck do increase the challenge, but I wouldn’t turn down more offerings or tweaks to increase the difficulty or complexity of the game. If you are just looking for a game to beat up thugs with your friends, Street Fighter is fine enough now and then.
I have played a good number of board game adaptations of popular video games, from Resident Evil to Slay the Spire, and even ones like Guilty Gear Strive that are also based on a fighting game. But Street Fighter V: Champion Edition – Legends feels the most disjointed and confused as to what it wants to be. Looking at just the gameplay, the concept of running around with your friends, taking out small minions before tackling the stage’s boss is far more in line with, say, Capcom’s Final Fight series of beat-’em-ups. A series, mind you, whose characters have made the jump into Street Fighter previously, such as the ninja Guy. But Street Fighter has always been about duking it out with your friend in a 1v1 fight, and by making this a strictly cooperative game, both of those core components of the game are missing.
This disparity includes even those little easter eggs that I mentioned, like the various fight style decks and joystick resource on the cards. These little nods will be appreciated most by members of the fighting game community and glossed over by others who would appreciate this game more for what it is, rather than the package we got that honestly feels like it simply got the Street Fighter V property slapped on top of a different game and called it a day.
