REVIEW: STREET FIGHTER IV
On PS3, Xbox 360, PC. Developed and published by Capcom
C1 regular Lisvender weighs in with his thoughts on Street Fighter IV…
Hidden somewhere on Green Emperor Way, where tower touches midday sun, there’s a perverted church to Street Fighter. To enter it, you must stand before its doors and perform a double fireball motion followed by three punches. The altar is a stone effigy of John Choi. The congregation is a swarm of obsessive little worshippers who fell in love with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and then immediately abandoned it when the Second Coming, also known as Street Fighter IV, arrived.
Street Fighter’s story is tragic. It birthed the genre that is now controlled by its zealous, anal fans. Like Japanese RPGs and space shoot-em-ups, fighting games are meticulously vivisected and judged by fans who complain when the games show any motion toward modernity. Thus we see the backlash that resulted when Dragon Quest IX was announced as an action game. Thus we continue to get King of Fighters games, even though no one really cares. Thus we get the Street Fighter strategy guides that detail frame-counting and space controlling, like we’re learning freakin’ chess or something.
And thus, we get Street Fighter IV, a fighting game that won’t adapt to work with modern controllers that use four face buttons, analog sticks and triggers, and then we get complaints that the controllers suck for not being made to work with Street Fighter.
Street Fighter IV is not that great. It’s the same one-on-one, six-button fighting game that we’ve been playing in various incarnations since 1991. You choose a character and duke it out with another character. Every fighter has three different punches and kicks operated by single button presses, special moves that require weird controller motions followed by single button presses, and super moves that require irritatingly long controller motions followed by multiple simultaneous button presses. Super Moves are just souped-up special moves that do a lot of hits without any additional input, and that inflict a win-guaranteeing amount of damage.
You can link certain attacks to create combinations, and if you’re really good (or really anal), you can perform combos that start with regular punches or kicks, continue with a special move, and then end with a flashy super move. The game is about adjusting your position and timing your attacks so you can catch your opponent off guard and capitalize with those combos. Oh, and you press Up to jump and move away from your opponent to block. It’s nothing we haven’t done before.
It’s certainly pretty, what with its fancy 3D graphics and particle effects, and its nifty art style that’s both cartoony and surreal. I like the weird, ink-splattered look, and the exaggerated expressions that the characters make. One of my favorite things about the 2D Street Fighters was that you could see Ryu’s trip-face, or Blanka’s bulging eyes, or Cammy’s bouncy boobs in sharp relief.
I really don’t like Cammy’s bouncing boobs, but they are pretty hard to ignore.
I was worried that such details would be obscured in 3D, what with all the visual effects, increased animation, and the varying angles. Not so. The characters make all the great, goofy grimaces, grins and guffaws that I remember from the early days of Street Fighter II, and I really enjoy them. Capcom does some terrific facial animation.
What I don’t understand, then, is why they added anime sequences to the game. Whenever you select a character in Arcade Mode, you’re treated to a 2D cutscene that reveals that character’s motivation for entering the Street Fighter tournament. I don’t much care about the storylines of fighting games, but I could have been swayed if they were presented with as much skill as the game’s 3D animation. Unfortunately, these anime scenes are dull and poorly drawn. You can skip them anyway. So what’s the point of them, other than to appease the uberfans? My guess is that Capcom wanted to make the game feel more “fleshed-out,” so as to justify the sixty-dollar purchase of a threadbare product. See? It’s not just a simple arcade experience we could have sold over Xbox Live Arcade! There’s a STORY!
I can’t argue that the 3D graphics don’t look great, because they do. I wouldn’t feel right, though, if I didn’t describe one of the problems caused by this new look.
Judging distance is a pretty important skill in Street Fighter, as you need to know the ranges of your attacks, the arcs of your opponent’s jumps, and how to adjust the speeds of your projectiles in order to maintain control of the battle. To do this, you need to have a steady, side-on view of both fighters at all times.
Well, Street Fighter IV wants to be fancy, so it presents fighting stages that curl and twist as the fighters move back and forth. The camera will rotate slightly at times to adjust to this, and that causes your perspective to be temporarily skewed. When you’re viewing Ryu slightly from the rear, you’re not going to have a perfect idea of how far he is from Ken, and therefore you won’t know if your jump kick will reach him. You have to wait for the camera to align itself to the proper side-on viewpoint before you can make your attacks effectively. It’s not a constant problem, but it happens often enough to be irritating, and it’s such a fundamental issue that I’m disgusted Capcom didn’t notice and rectify it.
The fancy 3D style also causes certain moves, moves that only require one bit of input to create a fancy attack, to be presented in a “cinematic” style. When Zangief or Abel grabs you with one of their special spinning throws, you’ll be treated to a lengthy, stylized closeup of your character getting tossed and slammed into the ground. Like the fabled summon spells of Final Fantasy games past, these attacks look cool the first time you see them in action, but when the computer uses them on you again and again and again, you’ll start to wish that Capcom hadn’t been so eager to show off.
In fact, the 3D show-offery slows the whole game down. When a fighter is knocked out, the KO image stays on the screen for far too long, especially when it’s a super finish. Before every match you get introductory cutscenes of the two fighters, where the characters run, jump, or stand around taunting each other. When you near the end of Arcade Mode, you have a “Rival Match,” which pits your fighter against someone he or she supposedly has a special vendetta against. The introductory cutscenes for these matches are even longer than the usual ones. They look good, and some of them are even funny, but they get old fast, and before long you’ll just hit Start to skip them so you can get on with the fighting already. Why can’t you turn them off? Why are they even there?
Like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, another overhyped cash cow fighting game, Street Fighter IV tries to show off its value by forcing you to unlock many of its characters. You have to beat the game with specific characters to unlock them. You can set the game to Easiest difficulty, and make every match a 1-round win, and then blaze through the Arcade Mode to do this, but it’s still a lengthy and unnecessary pain in the ass. And yes, Seth, the game’s final boss, is still a jerk, even on the Easiest difficulty, because the AI has failed to evolve over the past ten years. The computer knows how to interrupt your every move with something faster, more powerful, and more annoying. The AI does this with all the characters, but Seth is especially bad because he has several moves that do ridiculous amounts of damage, and a whole lot of the aforementioned “cinematic” moves that involve watching your character getting thrown, kicked, spun around, sucked into a vortex, and then smashed into your TV screen. You need incredible patience to put up with the blatant cheating that this game throws out.
Online play? Oh yeah, there’s that too. You can accept fight requests from random online players as you slog through Arcade Mode, though I don’t recommend this because you may not get stable connections. For some strange reason, Street Fighter IV’s matches are more prone to lag than those in the recent SF2HD, so you’re better off manually searching for matches with high stability. Make some time in your schedule before you settle in for online fighting, though, because the match searches in this game take an extremely long time. By the time the match list appears, odds are that the lobby you select will be full. We’re not talking Gears of War 2 wait time, but it’s still pretty bad.
The matches themselves remind me of Gears of War 2, though. Whereas in GoW2, players eschew the fundamental cover-based shooting in favor of charging up and pounding each other with shotguns, in SFIV, strategic play is thrown out the window, and the two fighters just bounce around poking.
In Street Fighter, every attack has a level of priority that determines what happens in the case of simultaneous strikes. If one fighter throws out a high priority attack at the same time that the other throws out a low priority attack, the high priority attack will hit, and the low priority one will be interrupted. In the case that two attacks of equal priority are thrown out simultaneously, both characters will be hit.
A poke is an attack that has very long range and very high priority, which makes it difficult to get around. Constantly tossing out pokes is a low-risk, high-reward strategy that many gamers adopt and never let go of. Vega the bullfighter, Sagat the kick boxer, and M. Bison the dictator have tons of these moves, so a majority of your online matches will be against these three characters. So much for skill!
I enjoyed playing Street Fighter IV when I first played it. I really did. Then I spent some enough time with it to discover that, in spite of what Capcom and the big gaming websites want me to believe, it’s just another fighting game. I know this has been a long review, so for those of you with ADHD, here’s the tl;dr limerick version:
After ten years, here’s Street Fighter IV
It’s got 3D, but then not much more
If you want punches and kicks
Just get HD Remix
And shove Street Fighter IV out the door.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Lisvender
