Its been quite awhile since a new, proper Street Fighter has been released. The first game came out in 1987, and failed to make a huge splash, it wasn’t until Street Fighter II came out in ‘91 that the series hit its stride. The game was a not only a huge hit with the casual crowd but also won the series a massive cult following. Capcom then took SF II and tweaked it seemingly constantly. Different, retooled versions such as Super Street Fighter II, Championship Edition, and Hyper Fighting were all various versions. Eventually Street Fighter III came out, but failed to reach the peak of its predecessor.
More versions and several crossovers were produced until eventually Capcom gave us what we weren’t even sure we wanted anymore: Street Fighter IV. Ditching the more complicated aspects of some of the later games, IV is a true successor to SF II. Its easy to jump into for the casual, but insanely deep for those who wish to ruin their lives learning all the intricacies of punchin’ dudes.
So, with the exception of a few new attack types and super moves, Street Fighter IV plays incredibly similar to II, so much so that those who haven’t played a game in the series since then should be able to jump back in with relative ease. This is coming from someone who hasn’t cared about the series in a long damn time. But only after playing IV for a short amount of time, I was totally back into the swing of things.
On to what’s new with the game. The first thing you’ll notice is the look of the game, it looks like a strange cartoon/painting come to life. There’s even an “ink” with some of the attacks. The animation is fluid and overall the game looks fantastic. Along with this are some new characters to beat on (or get beaten on by) that range from CIA agent with a c-cup and lack of shirt buttons to a French MMA fighter with amnesia…awesome. Most of these characters fit in pretty well with the main cast, which consists mainly of the roster of SF II. That being said, the anime story segments for each character in arcade mode is terrible, and serves only to bring things to a quick halt even though they are relatively short.
A must for any modern fighting game is online capability, and Street Fighter IV’s is excellent. I’ve heard some complaints about setting up tournaments and viewing current matches, but it’s not something I even would have noticed. The game offers ranked and player matches, both of which work very well. The only real issue is the fact that 75% of people playing this game use Ken, and dammit do he & his uppercut get old fast. Despite that, I can’t find a real major flaw with the way the online works in this game, but be forewarned, the first few times you play with dudes online you will get your candy-ass handed to you. Simple fact.
So, if you’ve read this far you should know that overall this is just an exceptional game. It looks great, it plays great, the voices are cheesy & hilariously dumb, and it has one of the best bad songs ever as its theme song. That’s it, so go out, go buy it, get online and throw down son.