Review: “Street Fighter IV”

Street Fighter IV, the six-button-mashing cash cow for Capcom is here, and already it’s being hailed as a successful sequel to the franchise by videogame critics. 

 Growing up during the second “golden era” of videogames, Super Street Fighter II Turbo was one of the Super Nintendo cartridges that nearly every kid on the block had. Each of my friends had their favorite characters, and looking back on the game, it is not too bold to call it a masterpiece. I couldn’t articulate at the time the artful balance the programmers put into it, but it is still amazing how they doled out a fair amount of strength and speed to its over-the-top characters. And who could forget Zangief’s dance with Mikhail Gorbachev at the end? Yes, it even had biting social commentary… or something.

The series itself has become something like the classic rock station that your dad made you listen to while growing up: it’s formulaic, filled with flash, and there may be horrible grammar involved, but dammit, it’s good fun. Street Fighter IV is actually the ga-tillionth version of a Street Fighter game. This is not, as some might think, the first Capcom foray into the pseudo-3D universe of Ryu and Chun-Li. The Street Fighter EX series was produced near the end of last century. Capcom attempted to shore-up fans migrating to new games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter. The polygons of the late 90’s had overtaken hand-painted 2D. These EX games were nominally successful, and offered some of the same gameplay features as Street Fighter IV. They, however, weren’t as pretty and finely-tuned as this new model is. 

The game is trying to be both faithful to the hardcore followers of the series: those that are willing to dish out a hundred Nixons or more for a fight joystick, and those like me who faded off after Dee Jay and Cammy came along. This is a losing battle every time a sequel comes along in any successful series, but Capcom seems to have tilted more towards the hardcore fans yet still created a fun game for everyone. That is, as long as you are playing against equally talented friends.

Graphically, the game is a knockout. It mixes a Viewtiful Joe-esque pseudo-3D cell shaded look, and a paintbrush motif art style that is a gut-check to the sensory organs. Though the stages aren’t any bigger than Street Fighter II, the backgrounds are random, and usually filled with lively animated people watching you pummel your opponent. The 3D engine is always running at a good frame rate, even when the visuals get to a Mr. Sparkle level of crazy. Every character this time around looks extra-bulky. What happened to Chun-Li’s legs? They look like she trained with Michael Phelps in the off-season (not that kicking that fast wouldn’t put a bit of mass on them, realistically).

The sound, however, was a mixed bag for me. The game doesn’t really over use a 5.1 surround sound plane – but it also doesn’t really need to. The sound effects are on-par with others in the series – but how exactly does one review punching and kicking noises, anways? How can I possibly grade what a magic ball of flame out of one’s hands should sound like? It sounds like Street Fighter! The music is a bit bland, but never in-your-face. The voice acting, though, sounds like it is straight out of Naruto. It’s too much attempting to sound badass, and fails too often.

The story seems to be that there are people fighting, and they think their fighting is the best fighting of all fighting, and they fight each other to see who’s fight is the fightiest. Also, fireballs. The story, who cares? Punch, punch, punch. Each character’s beginning and end movie is terrible, both in story and animation. In fact, the only movie highlight is the intro movie with a catchy J-Pop song.

As the series still plays similarly (in my opinion too similar) to the classic series began years ago, it is not hard to dust off a character like E. Honda and remember a few moves. This is where, I think, it becomes hard to critique rather than just form a personal opinion. Since games such as Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur IV have a deep fighting system with an abundancy of moves, counters, and parries, Street Fighter IV does not exactly keep up with these games in terms of move list, or depth. The game still relies too heavy on only a handful of moves that are, at-times, very tricky to pull off. Some characters feel way more powerful than others as well. If you were an expert at Street Fighter II, it seems like very little translation is needed to become an expert at this one. Although I have not taken this game online yet, it seems that only a handful of characters will be played regularly, and newcomers such as Abel will not see much action.

If we compare Street Fighter IV to its rivals like Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur IV, it’d be hard to argue that it’s more in-depth. Yet, Street Fighter IV, it seems, wasn’t attempting to be the deepest or most tactical fighter on the block. Instead, it seems to be in a unique “updated retro” game harkening back to the Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter II wars that claimed the lives of so many innocent teenagers. The game is probably getting too sparkling of reviews that don’t address the glaring flaw of charging $60 for a prettied-up retro game. So, is this game fun? Absolutely. It’s filled with pretties and punchies with fast and furious action. It also should fill you with the same complaints of the type of fighter that you had when you were younger. Is it worth the sixty dollar price tag? It depends on how much yearning you have to drag up a Blanka beat-down again. Since many of you will want to take this on Live right away, it may be enough reason to dust off the electric green guy, and bite your way to victory again.

(I didn’t make one Hadoken joke throughout. I win. Perfect!)