It's understandable, but with the conclusion of every battle comes a yearning for more. It would seem that this yearning is cured as new matches start after cinematic sequences end, but it's not. A harder difficulty is available after your first playthrough, but some matches are still easier than expected, and even the hard ones leave more to be desired. The character-specific paths are also too short, and it's not just because of the same single-round configuration. At 3 - 5 fights depending on the character, it all ends way too fast. Couldn't they have found a way to add more fights at least into the character-specific stories? There aren't many things in Capcom's long history that I see as missed opportunities, but I see this handling of SFV's Story Mode as a missed opportunity. While I don't see the game itself as a missed opportunity, there are others who do. I believe that the mishandling of the Story Mode itself (essentially a replacement for Arcade Mode) unconcsiously influenced its lukewarm reception and content-related sentiment. It wasn't that Street Fighter V was lacking in content; the content was there. It was lacking in execution. The more we look at SFV in retrospect, the more we see that most of its cold reception was due to this. Strangely enough, though, Street Fighter V's biggest, most glaring flaw is almost never brought up.

That flaw is ranking. It's flawed and it makes people not want to play. It's basically a ranking system based on the idea of "one-step-forward, two-steps-back". It punishes more than it rewards, hitting the player with more demotions than promotions. It's incredibly difficult to rank up, especially since this type of ranking system encourages players to only use characters that are considered top-tier and/or unfair. Players are more desparate in SFV because the game doesn't do rank by character, but by user.

A ranking system that relies on network connection needs to recognize and account for the obvious issues of network technology. This is easily accomplished by reverting back to the most fair, balanced ranking systems that work on accumulated points toward incremental rank increases. SFV's ranking system simultaneously rewards and punishes all the wrong players. This is probably a reason why some long-time players didn't like Street Fighter V, and even as a die-hard Capcom fan, I can asbolutely see why. After working hard at improving strategies and refining a style, nobody wants to see all that time and effort taken away just because a few matches go wrong. Real-life examples are everywhere, but real-life MMA shows it best. Champions aren't suddenly demoted to amatuer fighters just because they lose a few fights, nor are they reduced to fighting rookies. In SFV, you're often paired with opponents actually ranked higher than the rank they're at.