Balrog and ibuki impressions and review and other random stuff

I spent roughly seven hours playing with Balrog online in ranked matches in Street Fighter V...normally guys who cares about their points and is learning a new character will play in casual matches before taking said character in rank matches but I am little different. Ironically, I do hate losing points as much as the next guy but I will care more in honing my skills faster in that environment as opposed to casual matches due to the higher stakes involve.

I like Balrog's design. They did a great job with his visual design, his moves, and his classic Street Fighter II Vegas stage is my best stage so far.  In respects of Balrog's move set, on the other hand, I do not like the lack of a proper reversal move -- the only reversal he has is his V-reversal is his headbutt which used to be his command normal. I think limiting his headbutt to a V-reversal and not giving the character a proper reversal attack was a bad move from Capcom. Outside of that,  his normal attacks are OK and he has a cool set of mix up attacks and he is a lot of fun to play with but he had more options in his SFIV iteration.

I like Street Fighter V better than I like Street Fighter IV but some characters like Balrog, ibuki, and Zangreif for example had more moves in their repertoire. Although the visual aesthetics in SFV are ten times better than SFIV, some characters' moveset feel degraded in comparison.  

The massive update is finally here and it is OK...the game feels more complete than it ever did before despite the update giving us more bugs a couple more online bugs -- points are not  being computed in the display prompt screens post online matches but the player is still being credited, thankfully -- the error messages are annoyingly distracting. Additionally, Rage Quitters have yet to be properly penalized, and the player's online profile is still incomplete. The game still has a lot of work to be done but it is better game today with 20 unique characters and extra content.