Is this game any good? 4 and 5 kind of killed Street Fighter for me. Or maybe I'm just finally aged out of arcade fighters.
It's fast, requires a certain level of skill, and all the characters are well differentiated in the way they play and offer different approaches. I'd say it's one of the better fighting games released in the past 10 years or so. But like all modern FGs it is overloaded with scrub mechanics and the mentality to close the gap as much as possible between newbies and intermediate players. All the system mechanics promote scrub gameplay and are incredibly high reward for little risk. Drive parry being the main offender. In this game you get to parry by just holding down a button. And if you time it perfectly, you get to go on the offense, albeit you do reduced damage in the combo. But if you misstime it you can still normal parry and are safe. So there is no risk involved in trying to go for a parry.
Drive impact is a reversal attack that has armor that absorbs 2 hits... and if you hit the opponent near a wall you can go into a combo as he wall splats. Or if you absorb an attack with it and hit the enemy he crumbles, leading into a full damage combo. One of the most scrubby mechanics I've ever seen. Atleast there is risk involved as DI can be countered with your own DI, and thus giving you the opportunity to go into a combo. However this one move makes it so that normals that can't be special canceled are incredibly risky to use in neutral, as you need to be able to go into DI at any time. Low levels are also full of people spamming this shit. So you will need to be able to adapt fast or ragequit as everything you do gets you crushed and opponent goes into a combo.
Drive rush is another mechanic that lets you cancel moves into other moves and basically extend combos forever or go into a combo from any stray hit (as long as you have meter). It can also be used in neutral for a super fast dash, and it also slows time on activation and sometimes eats the enemys input. Its kinda like the yellow cancel they introduced in Guilty Gear Xrd, which was another unneeded mechanic. Anyway, Drive rush is one of the most used tools in the game and certain characters can punish you from half a screen away with it if you aren't careful. Drive rush into throw is another scary option. Then you have the separate super meter, which makes it so you only use it for supers and thus you are seeing 20 sec animation supers every game. And combined with drive rush it means any stray hit can lead into big damage. It's generally easy to do combos that do 40-60% dmg thanks to drive rush.
And looking at the characters, they are full of scrubby things aswell. Modern controls on its own is horrible enough already. Giving Zangiefs 1 button SPD or Ryu 1 button Shoryuken, doing autocombos for players etc. Then you have many characters with mobility moves that are perfectly safe on block like Honda headbutts, blanka rolls etc. Or Lily EX condor spire, a fast dash attack that goes through projectiles and is +on block leaving you guessing if she will command grab you or not (yes I know Lily is a shit character that's not the point). A lot of characters also seem to have command grabs in this game. JP has a projectile command grab (lol), Manon has a super fast dash command grab, and theres more. But what I wanted to say here is that mobility is very high and a lot of moves are super safe and it is not uncommon to completely destroy one round only to get completely destroyed in the next one. It's a very volatile game with a very high amount of guesswork in my opinion. More so than SFV imo. But it also plays faster and the characters are better designed and more fun imo.