The final character in Street Fighter 5's launch roster, the newcomer F.A.N.G, was announced At PlayStation Experience in San Francisco over the weekend. With this also came the reveal of the first wave of DLC characters and further news regarding the Street Fighter 5 business model and season pass.
F.A.N.G is an interesting character. towering over the other fighters, F.A.N.G is the second in command of the Shadaloo, replacing Sagat. He uses poison attacks and his long reach to zone the opponent out and also sports good movement options. He boasts some rather unique tools, including a command move that can slide under projectiles, poison effects and a cross up V-reversal. We also see a rather grand new stage in the background of the video, featuring statues of the other Shadaloo members, including the yet unreleased Balrog.
F.A.N.G's V.Skill 'Nishodoku' is a 'slow moving poison projectile' that, when it hits, slowly depletes the opponents health. His V trigger produces a lingering poison cloud around him that consistently deals damage when the opponent is near him.
The teased first wave of DLC characters shown in the Dhalsim reveal trailer have been confirmed. The datamine was shown to be correct with Alex, Guile, Balrog, Ibuki, Juri and Urien joining the cast post release. The characters will be purchasable with real money or via the in game currency 'Fight Money', earned by completing daily challenges or winning ranked matches. The season pass is also now available in North America and will include the pack of six DLC characters with 'premium costumes' as well as avatars for the PS4 users. The season pass will cost $29.99 on top of the base game.
Finally, the price of the purchasable Zenny currency was announced. A few of the purchasing options were detailed on the Capcom Unity blog and can be seen below.
- 100 Zenny = Purchase for $0.99 / €0.99 / £0.79
- 550 Zenny = Purchase for $4.99/€4.99/£3.99 (receive a 50 Zenny bonus)
- 1200 Zenny = Purchase for $9.99/€9.99/£7.99 (receive a 200 Zenny bonus)
- 4000 Zenny = Purchase for $29.99/ €29.99/£24.99 (receive a 1000 Zenny bonus)
According to Capcom, post-launch characters will cost 600 Zenny and each premium costume 400 Zenny when bought separately.
Quick Take
Playstation experience saw a wealth of news for Street Fighter 5. F.A.N.G is an incredibly unique design who seems far more jokey than Capcom's usual characters. Resembling sort of a cross Choi from King of Fighters and Waluigi, he featured a very unique moveset. I for one am excited to see Capcom take a new, if baffling direction on its character designs. The DLC characters were slightly less of a shock to the system with the rest of the classic Street Fighter 2 cast returning as expected along with some fan favorites from 3rd strike and Street Fighter 4. Overall this seems like a solid first wave of characters. The Fight Money/Zenny system I have mixed feelings towards. From this early on, the system does seem like a vast improvement over the Street Fighter 4 model, with the community not being fractured due to some people not owning the latest version of the game. Also, the ability to earn these characters by just playing the game is a fantastic way of rewarding dedicated players. However, we are still yet to see how feasible it will be to buy content using only Fight Money. For me personally, $4.99 per new character is a reasonable price to ask for new characters, with games like Skullgirls asking the exact same price. This doesn't change the fact that we know, from datamining reports that the character assets already exist and the consumer is being sold pretty important DLC before the game has even been released.
