As a game: decent. As a package: trash
Many have maligned Street Fighter X Tekken, especially in the Fighting Game Community. I find however, in the core of it, the most important part, it's quite decent. Maybe even a little more than that. Okay, so I'm far from the type who will play this for 36 hours a day and find all of these crazy glitches and infinites, but then again if I were the type I don't think I'd end up enjoying any game. What is here is a solid, playable game, and I find that the Tekken characters were pretty well-adapted to work in the Street Fighter mold. I'm a bit disappointed that it's just a modified Street Fighter 4 engine, but to be perfectly frank, things could have been a lot worse.
The cast surprised me a bit, as when the game was first announced, I didn't expect to see many outside of the SF4/Tekken 6 cast. The Tekken side didn't stray too far, with only Ogre (and technically Jack-X) as the only new character(s), but the Street Fighter side of things found room to cram in four characters that weren't in SSF4, and we like that. The guest characters were seen as a negative point in many players' eyes, and I've got to admit there's some weird choices, but you know, to complain about them is like looking a guest horse in the mouth. If you have a Sony system, you're getting five extra characters for nothing. Of course, I do feel bad for the owners of other consoles who are pretty much getting one put in the bum for guest characters these last few years.
Now to the points of contention: As a fan of story in fighting games (yes, we do exist), and as someone who likes completing the game as every character and seeing their endings, I was sorely disappointed to find that we can't save the endings to view again in a gallery. This is 2012 and that crap doesn't fly anymore.
The other thing I hated was the whole DLC debacle. Sure, it's a lot cheaper than it could have been (most fighting games charge $10 per character for DLC), but seriously, $20 for something that was on the disc when I bought it? Look, I understand the concept of how you only are "buying" the disc and the content is pretty much only leased to you and so forth... but they really had no reason to do it this way. They could have at least given you a code for the characters if you bought the special edition (even if it was only redeemable when the characters were "unlocked" later for everyone via money), but no, they couldn't even bother. With Harada giving away free DLC characters for Tekken Tag 2, it only highlights how ridiculous of a folly this is.
So overall, the game is fun and playable, especially in versus mode, but really, as a complete package, they shot themselves in the foot with that.
I would have given this a 3.5, but I'm knocking a point off for the on-disc DLC debacle. To hell with that noise.
