Kikouken.com - Street Fighter IV Review

Last update: 2/22/09

Street Fighter IV Review

Expect to see this picture A LOT on XBL...
srsly guys, pick someone else once in a while.

During the early and mid-90s, Street Fighter took the gaming world by storm, popularizing the fighting game genre and countless knock-offs. During the late 90s, though, all the craze moved into 3D and 2D games like Street Fighter began to be overlooked. The franchise was gradually reduced to a series of copy-and-paste crossover titles and while many of them were thoroughly entertaining, as time went by it became increasingly difficult to overlook the corners being cut. Upon the release of Capcom Fighting Evolution, it became obvious to all but the most blindly faithful devotees that Capcom was no longer taking their once-flagship franchise seriously anymore, and thus the 2D fighting giant died not with a bang, but a whimper.

Meanwhile, Capcom has tried to invest their energies in other franchises, with varying success, while completely ignoring the Street Fighter fans. While the animes, comic books, and endless merchandise have been nice little nods to the series, there was nothing to fill that enormous void in the holes of our fighting souls. We have tried to fill it with games like Tekken, Soul Calibur, KOF, and Guilty Gear, but we found ourselves in the gaming equivalent of getting drunk and having empty sex with a reasonably attractive chick because her hotter sister was no longer available.

Die hard Street Fighter fans like me have been waiting for literally more than a decade for the next "real" Street Fighter game. Now that most of Street Fighter's original fans are nostalgic-waxxing adults who are looking to escape from the soul-crushing realities of the adult world, Capcom has finally gotten its thumbs out of its ass, looked out their window, saw a horde of starved and desperate Street Fighter fans on their doorstep, and realized that maybe it's time to make a new Street Fighter game.

When Street Fighter IV was first announced, fans were cautious because we all remembered how disappointed we were when Capcom took all of their iconic, genre-defining characters, besides Ryu and Ken (and later, by popular demand, Chun-Li and Akuma), and abandoned them at a fire station in the middle of a cold winter's night and introduced a bizarre 50/50 mix of badass fighters and retarded mutants that looked like Darkstalkers rejects and dared to call it Street Fighter III.

However, this time around Capcom has recognized that alienating their entire fan base in the hopes of attracting a new, much larger fanbase is kind of like saying "hit me" to a blackjack dealer when you've already got 20, so they've embraced the very characters they couldn't get rid of quickly enough the last time around. In addition to all twelve of the characters from their original blockbuster, they generously included many of the most popular characters from their later additions. Here to challenge this all-star collection of fan favorites is a team of six new characters whose personal appeals range from too much market research (Viper) to not enough market research (Rufus, Seth), however for the most part they fit in rather well, especially characters with more believeable yet unique fighting styles such as Abel and El Fuerte, so I predict we'll be seeing more of them in future installments. Most of the new characters are rather fun to play as, although Rufus is pretty annoying even for a joke character. The final boss, Seth, is thankfully not quite as cheap as many other fighting game bosses, but is still frustratingly cheap and that frustration gets exaggerated tenfold when he unleashes a super move that sucks you into his belly and shoots you like a cannonball face-first into the screen like a goddamn Looney Tune. It's probably the most humiliating move in fighting game history, at least until someone creates a fighting game character who can take a third of your life by teabagging you.

Sometimes recycling is good.
This is not one such time.

The graphics combine 3D models with Street Fighter's traditional anime look for jaw-dropping visuals, which is long overdue considering that towards the end of its life in 2D, Capcom's fighting series made a habit of recycling ten-year-old graphics while making backgrounds using their best artists and the newest, fanciest computer technology for a very bipolar visual experience. Street Fighter's equally-classic knack for killer fighting music also returns. None of the stages have any of that wussy elevator music that plagued some of the later Capcom fighters, particularly Marvel Vs. Capcom 2.

Controller-wise, casual gamers who rely on their standard controllers can expect to hit a major learning curve, but I think at this point we've all become conditioned to expect that sort of thing any time we play a fighting game without using an arcade stick that always costs as much if not more than another god damn game. It took many, many hours of practice, but I've finally reached a point where I can get the 360 controller to obey my commands with an acceptable degree of accuracy. However, this probably also depends on which character you chose as your primary. Chun-Li is my main fighter and she relies mostly on an assortment of normal attacks, but other characters with more difficult motions, like Guile, Vega, and Akuma, will probably benefit greatly from a better controller. I haven't decided whether or not I'll buy an arcade stick. The only two options seem to be the official Microsoft one which is never in stock at any local retailer and costs an extra $10 in S&H charges if you buy it online, or the official SF4 arcade stick made by Madcatz, who are notorious for the horrible quality of their gaming accessories. The deciding factor for me will probably be how satisfied I am with how well I can compete with others on X-Box Live.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, the biggest differences between this game and previous ones are Focus Attacks. Focus Attacks are reminiscent of SFIII's parry system, but easier to use. Your character begins to charge for a single, short-range attack that breaks guards, does decent damage, and causes the victim to go limp, leaving them completely defenseless for a short time. Combine that with the fact that it also will completely absorb a single hit without taking damage or interupting the attack motion, and you have a very effective predict-and-counter tool at your disposal. I'll be interested to see how big a factor this becomes in PVP matches.

It's too early for me to judge how balanced the game is, but no matter how balanced a fighting game ever is, inevitably people will start to come up with tiers. The character most people seem to think is overpowered, aside from obvious ones like Akuma and Seth, is Zangief. I haven't fought any Zangief players yet but I can tell you he is surely a force to be reckoned with. His Banishing Fist is now a two-hit move, making Focus Attacks useless against it. Plus, it covers more ground and comes out faster. However, the range of his other attacks has been considerably nerfed, as has the damage done by his famous Spinning Pile Driver. The key to a good anti-Zangief strategy seems to be all about keeping him at a safe distance, but I guess that's not really anything new.

Final score: A big thumbs-up and a radiant smile!

I'm also not too keen on the fact that Capcom decided to continue the idiotic body-swapping crap they introduced way back in SF Alpha 3. Seeing as how it had never been mentioned in any of the succeeding games, even though they were non-canon spinoffs, I had hoped that Capcom had given up on that idea and taken Bison back to simply being a criminal warlord and not some cheasy comic book villain. Now I wouldn't be surprised if in Street Fighter V when Bison returns it'll be because the Bison that was killed in Street Fighter IV was really a Doombot.

All in all, though, the little things that annoy me about Street Fighter IV are greatly overshadowed by just how many things Capcom did right. If the current reception is any indication, Capcom appears to have their biggest hit in years on their hands, and all it took was a simple thing like listening to what the fans wanted. Who'da thunk?

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