Street Fighter 5's fan-made 'Mysterious Mod' has ideas so good Capcom should steal a few

Capcom continues to rebalance Street Fighter 5 regularly, but fans also have some neat ideas of their own.

The latest fan effort for rebalancing and reimagining Street Fighter 5 is so impressive that Capcom itself might want to sit up and take notice - a lot of the ideas featured in Street Fighter 5: Mysterious Mod would work well being added to the game proper. Here it is in action:

Broadly speaking, Mysterious Mod aims to fix some of the more significant issue and fan complaints with SF5 that have persisted even as the game enters its third season of balance changes with the recent patch and release of SF5 Arcade Edition.

That involves major changes including revamped defense to prevent things like ambiguous mix-ups in the corner that allow you to force your opponent to play a fifty-fifty guessing game of which side you plan to hit. Thanks to changes like this and the addition of invincible backdashes defensive play is far more viable than in SF5 as it stands.

In other places the game more closely resembles Street Fighter 4, Street Fighter X Tekken and the over-the-top SF4 Omega Mode, adding in things like a cross-up Tatsu kick for Ryu and ensuring that light moves can link directly into medium moves. There's also changes and new mechanics around the SF5's V System, allowing that to be used in interesting ways to extend combos.

Characters even have new moves and supers - and in a particularly nerdy fighting game fan touch I want to note that they've given Cammy the overhead kick that Orchid has in Killer Instinct - because of course. Here's a showcase of all the new super moves so far, many of which are surprisingly animated for a fan-made mod.

I really like the current version of SF5 and elements of this mod do in places look a little too much like anime fighter or Versus Series levels of shenanigans (IE, not very Street Fighter) but in other places this mod makes really smart decisions that Capcom might actually want to pay attention to as they look to continue to balance SF5. The combos in the video run long and it's unlikely you'd ever see such optimized combos in a match given the execution and in-game resources required to pull them off, but the point is they're possible - and that's a level of freedom that hasn't yet been offered in SF5.

Of particular note is how Chun-Li in the video above rather resembles the Chun shown in the earliest SF5 footage before Capcom seemed to decrease the ability for players to work out free-form combos with wall bounces and the like. It's like a merge of the two ideas, even, with the free-form potential shown back in 2014 matched with the final, faster speed of the final SF5. That original footage looked great, and it might be time for those features to make a return to SF5. Hopefully Capcom is watching and taking note of the positive community response.

Even if Capcom pays no attention, SF5 owners on PC can grab the Mysterious Mod online for themselves already - and there's even online play, with the mod creators planning tournaments to test the balancing.