GBFV is a great game. As someone who had no prior knowledge of the series, the game does a solid job of making me interested in the cast solely based on their in-match interactions and designs alone.
For lack of a better comparison, the game feels like Street Fighter, but anime. It's slower than Blazblue and Guilty Gear, but it still feels fun to play. The combo limit and special cooldown system may look like a red flag, but it isn't as bad as it sounds. While specials may have a cooldown, this only really applies to the C and simple input versions of them. It isn't as limiting as it seems when you ah your cards right. You could quickly DP your way out of a sticky situation in exchange for not being able to DP for a few secs. You could save your C versions of specials for when you got the enemy in corner, where you won't have to worry about not using some specials for a while in exchange for a high damaging combo. As for combo limits, I'm not good enough where I encountered them often, but I'd say it's something you play around.
The soundtrack, I'm a little mixed on, but not in a bad way. There aren't any tracks that are downright bad. Some tracks have a decent beginning, and not much else. Some took a while to grow on me (Grynoth, Noble Exceution, maybe Arvess and Colossus). Just about every vocal theme that isn't tied to RPG mode are just great and easily the best tracks in the game (Peace and Quiet, Existence, Parade's Lust, etc.).
Despite all its positives, there's two big reasons why I don't recommend this game. First of which being the online. It has delay based netcode, which is a big no-no when it comes to FGs. Back when I played the game, there weren't a whole lot of players to play with. I got ranked matches every so often, but I often found myself waiting 2-5mins with no matches found. Lobby matches in my region almost never happened (I only found one once because there happened to be a lobby night in a Discord server I was in), and to get matches, I'd have to play in Asia. That somehow went mostly fine connection-wise, but it's not ideal.
The other big reason is Rising's release. Take most of what's good from this game, make it better, include all the previous DLC characters (which make up roughly half of this game's roster), include a F2P version, and you have a game that makes this one irrelevant.
Overall, a great game marred by its online, and overshadowed by its better sequel.
