Fei Long, the hot blooded : Filming a Super Action Movie

Gonna burn some muscle.

Street Fighter 4: A BRAND NEW Street Fighter video game. That’s right, not a “Turbo Edition” of an existing one, not a crossover fighter with SNK or someone else with reused sprites from 1996, a brand new actual fighting game, and you can even unlock Sheng Long, the fighter EGM magazine made up for an April Fools joke back in 1992. Proof positive that a fly stepped on in prehistoric ages will have huge ramifications in the future.

Story : Street Fighter 4 takes place after the events of Street Fighter 2, and judging by how every character from Street Fighter 2 appears here without a change to their look, style or personality, it’s safe to say that nothing of note happened during Street Fighter 2. Well, Bison died and came back to life, and that seems to be it, so in case you didn’t dawn on this sooner, the Street Fighter story is equal to your typical children’s action cartoon, complete with obscenely muscular men throwing punches that their giant biceps couldn’t handle. I’ve seen a handful of Street Fighter animes in my life (and one really bad movie) so I’m electing to adopt the series “Street Fighter 2: V” as the official franchise canon, if just for the hilarious catchphrases and episode titles such as “The Natural Energy Wave: The Secret of the Natural Energy Wave” and “The Iron Man with the Secret Mission: The Ultimate Rescuers are Dispatched.” Speaking of which, when you play arcade mode, you are greeted with a unique anime cutscene introduction and ending for each character, and you’ll be lucky if the prologue and epilogue are even connected, as there’s often no rhyme or reason behind the depicted events. I’m rather partial to some of them though, such as Fei Long’s attempts to film a kung-fu action movie about fighting terrorists is being threatened by Bison’s real terrorists, and Zangief seems to insist that he protect kayfabe and prove that wrestling is real to little kids.

It’s funny how regression can be viewed as evolution sometimes. Just as how games like New Super Mario Bros and Mega Man 9 became hit sensations for stripping away all of the changes made in the last decade and a half to their forefathers, we have Street Fighter 4 working its ass off to erase the existence of Street Fighter 3 from the consciousness of the consumer conscience. The last Street Fighter game (well the last actual Street Fighter game) stuck with luscious 2D art and animation over disgusting but then-vogue 3D polygons (stressing the word polygon), disposed of almost all of the original characters in favor of some fresh and interesting faces and invoked a parry system that turned freak gamers with ungodly timing into quarter-dumping deities. It was bold in retrospect and several longtime fans will swear by its last revision, Third Strike, as the best fighting game ever made, but the absence of Guile’s manly backflips proved too unnerving for the mainstream audience.

The only mention of Street Fighter 3 in this game is a brief cameo by the Yin/Yang boys in one of the cutscenes.

In their stead, we get all 12 characters from Street Fighter 2, all fighting like it was 1994 all over again. They look the same, they act the same, they fight the same…or at least try. It would appear that old age has shortened the length of E. Honda’s arms as he doesn’t have the gusto to reach out as far as he used to for his thousand hand slaps. Inversely, recent steroid scandals have done little to phase Zangief’s resolve as the latest in performance enhancements allow him to walk through fireballs and piledrive opponents with Ivan Drago-like efficiency. And Balrog developed a personality beyond being a general goon. You can unlock other characters too, namely all the predictable fan-favorites: Akuma, Sakura, Dan (though Dan has never fit into a game more than he does here), Cammy, the previously mentioned anti-terror martial artist Fei Long, Gen for some reason, Rose for some other reason and SHENG….Gouken appears to be his name, and he makes a formidable impression in his first game after about 16 years of starring in assorted fan-fiction pieces.

I like most of the new characters, if just because they’re not Ryu clones but have unique fighting styles, though originality is not a strong suit in their design. C. Viper is an amalgamation of every single female character (and a few effeminate men) from SNK in every way possible. Abel’s fighting style is supposed to resemble that of some kind of jacked up mixed martial artist, except his backstory depicts him as made in a lab, so perhaps he’s a play on Fedor Emelianenko, but without the charisma. El Fuerte is the cooking El Santo, a luchador, following the recently installed guideline that every freaking fighting game franchise MUST have a luchador; though he’s less about grapple attacks than he is about running a lot and confusing opponents. Rufus endears himself to me the most; he’s a fat guy with victory speeches too long to be read within the given time (I’m sure one of them involves masturbation) and he’s got some fun surprise attacks in his arsenal. Finally, Seth, the final boss, is a big blue naked muscular man, and thus a ripoff of Super Smash Bros Brawl ripping off Watchmen.

The new characters are unique enough in their approaches that it gives whiny punks who cry for change (like me) something to experiment with while the rest of the world latches on to Ken. And I’ll admit that there exists the obvious advantage in using so many familiar faces in that anyone that’s played Street Fighter 2 can immediately pick up Street Fighter 4 and hit somebody with little a learning curve. Call an unfair advantage over the recent attempts at new and original fighters, the Arcana Hearts and Battle Fantasias and hell, even the Mortal Kombat vs DC Universes of the world. The gameplay mechanics here best resemble Street Fighter 2; as in, no illogical air-blocking or parrying, and thus the fireball becomes a tactical threat again. Despite the near 16 year old gameplay style, some new tweaks and in particular, the outstanding art direction, give Street Fighter 4 an aura of freshness to a long stale series. The painting-esque style, the brush-stroke effects, the over-voiced mid-fight trash-talk (which you can flip from English to Japanese if you’re trying to impress someone in your mind), the smooth animation and the dynamic facial expressions all work together to bring these age-old characters to life in ways that pre-drawn 2D sprite artwork never could. Even the recent remake Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix feels lifeless and pre-programmed in comparison.

About the gameplay tweaks; in the place of parries, there’s some kind of super EX attack that you charge up and release with the X and A…uhhh, I mean MP and MK buttons. This can absorb a single blow and still strike, and likewise can briefly stun your opponent or break their guard. These are more supplemental than mandatory (i.e. YOU DON’T NEED THEM) but they help if you know them. Your super meter is fragmented, and you can use smaller portions to release stronger versions of your special attacks or one big super special attack… which I guess is kind of like Street Fighter 3. On top of that, there’s a side meter that fills as you sustain damage, and you can unload a really strong, really flashy super duper death murder attack once it’s full. So the learning curve for a fighting game veteran is rather small, but I wish the game had some optional in-game tutorials to explain the newer concepts to new players, being that Street Fighter 4 is more or less the sole ambassador of the 2D fighting genre (to my dismay, getting someone to play Guilty Gear is easier said than done.) I know it’s rather old-school to force the user to read the instruction manual, but most gamers of this day and age would rather not acknowledge its existence. Manuals are a relic from an age where trying to explain concepts in games would waste precious bytes of data on the restricted memory formats of yesteryear.

The game has this large insistence on making the user unlock stuff, regardless of value. To unlock the hidden characters, you’ll have to find yourself beating mode with every existing character in the game. Fortunately, you can turn the difficulty down all the way, set each fight to one round and fly through a single character’s life story in five minutes. You have to go to Challenge Mode to unlock alternate character palette colours, costumes, concept art, movies and very useless crap…and this part is reluctantly important; you can create a virtual persona that solely consists of in-game one-inch avatars and pre-determined titles like “punch-drunk!” and “full of beans!”, both of which need be unlocked rather than just letting the players choose their own slogans and personalities.

There exists this long series of Survival mode challenges (beating opponents with a set time or health limit) and trial challenges (perform certain moves and combos for each character) within the game.  The former is flawed because each series of challenges is more or less the same, repeated 50 times over. The latter is flawed because the game offers no way to preview the combination you’re trying to execute (like in a Tekken or Virtua Fighter) and thus you have no frame of reference for how to perform the task at hand. Both of which are flawed because most of the rewards are crap; you can barely survive a 20-man edge of your seat gauntlet challenge and only unlock a single title like “master student.” And there seems to be hundreds of these titles and avatars in the game, crying out for you to unlock and spend an ungodly amount of time repeating the same 5 minutes of gameplay 50 times over.

So completionist freaks are going to have their hands full for awhile. The rest of the world need only bother with the other, more conventional fighting game modes. mode is what it is, though the AI can put up a bit of a fight. In a strange twist that I’m sure is meant to mimic the arcade experience of being challenged by random strangers, you can allow random players online to challenge you mid-game, which I quickly turned off being as how if I wanted to face human competition, I’d go to the ONLINE mode instead. Fortunately, once you do opt to play online, the experience is by and large lag-free, the human competition is more than game, and you can find hours of your life slipping by as you decide to go for one more match.

Truth be told, any issue I could nitpick about Street Fighter 4 won’t really present an effect on the desired gameplay experience of the player. Said desired experience being “unlock all the damn characters, then just play online or versus with friends until Street Fighter 4 Turbo comes out” And really, Street Fighter excels at being so friendly to play with others. You can gather a bunch of old buddies together from the Street Fighter 2 days and relive your memories with new technicolour visuals, or learn the new tweaks and challenge Kens from all over the world. Street Fighter 4 walks a thin tightrope, giving hardcore shoryuken.com forumites something new to tinker with, exploit and complain about while dunking quarters in the arcades for the next ten years, and providing the old fans a chance to sonic boom/flash kick their way back into the limelight.

Pros : The Street Fighter 4 intro cutscene is rather stylish.

Cons : The Street Fighter 4 main theme is some kind of boy band abomination

4 1/2 stars