Every hardcore tournament player I have met has never cared about stories lines at all. If the character is decent looking and has a interesting fighting style and the game plays awesome then that is a good fighting game. Stupid story lines just get in the way of people selecting a character, "Oh my God, Ryu lost to Ken, F*CK Capcom for that! Guess I better start learning Ken now, he is a better fighter because the story said so!" that is just plain retarded. Fighting games are all about VS battle, if it has a wonderful storyline and crappy game play then the game is SH*T. There is NO WAY anyone is ever going to convince me that story lines truly matter and really affect the game play in a fighting game. The simple look with the characters in VF5 enable the player to customize them to there liking, make your own storyline. If it was an RPG I would understand, I noticed a lot of younger gamers tend to care about story lines in fighting games.