It plays well and I still enjoy it. Hell the customisation options are better and refined than SCIV. But personally, the reason why I find it lacking and lost it's "Soul" is after 4 main games of epicness, this one is quite a significant change to almost everything about it.
The announcer is very dull and boring, especially compared to the OTT and meme quoted nature of the previous games.
Even worse, the music itself is just not as good and that is one of the most defining and standout points of the previous games. Nearly the entire soundtrack of the previous games is really good, it sets the scale and themes of each character, stage and the fantasy of the period setting in the most epic and bombastic balance of
and
.
They went too Orchestra and Western with SCV where it's so toned down and background filler-esque sounding to the point they aren't even memorable. Junichi Nakatsuru was generally the composer for the previous games and in V, he's relgated to mainly the main menu and character select themes which if you are a fan of his previous work, you can still sense his particular style just a little bit. But that's about it. Hiroki Kikuta does some decent work and tries to make some tracks in the traditional SC-sound, but it's just not enough.
Now gameplay wise, they have tried to balance it a bit and make less clone/variant characters, which was quite a problem with the previous games (SCIV is notorious for that). Even if they are also just rehashed movesets, I find it still plays well. It might get a bit complicated with the way extra mechanics and meter is handled too, but that's fighting games for you.
Serious fighting game fans may not care about this, but for the larger casual base and fans, you can see why this game kind of failed for that majority. Course we all know about the general concensus on the "kids" of the established characters and no more big b00bie MILFs.
I'll dare say that SCV is like the SFIII3S of the SC series in terms of a new generation and some departures of old well loved and established conventions.
So yeah, that's my near essay thoughts on it.