Street Fighter 4
Street Fighter 4 is the game that was a breath of fresh air for the stale fighting genre. Aside from the 3d powerhouses like Tekken and Soul Calibur, 2d fighters were only played by the hardcore. Even Street Fighter 3 when it came out back in the day could hope to get the mass audience that 2 had.
Now Street Fighter 4 tries to reinvigorate things with an updated look, but same classic feel.
First of the graphics are great. For SF2 veterans it can take a while to get used to the new bulky character designs, but they grow on you.
The story is a complete throw away, even more so than previous Street Fighter games. Basically there’s an evil syndicate called SIN, and you fight them. Even the cut scenes have no substance, some are a little humorous, but most will have you cringing, I don’t know why they bothered with it.
The initial roster is made up of 16 characters including the 8 characters and 4 bosses from the original Street Fighter 2, as well as four new characters. The new characters include: El Fuerte, a speedy Mexican chef, Abel, an amnesic man with a connection to Charlie, Rufus, a huge biker who thinks he’s the best fighter in the USA, and Crimson Viper, a double agent for the CIA and SIN. You can also unlock additional characters from Super Street Fighter 2, and the Alpha series. These characters include Cammy, Fei Long, Rose, Sakura, Dan, Akuma, Gen. There are also 2 new unlockable characters, the boss Seth, and Ryu’s, previous thought dead, master/Akuma’s brother Gouken.
Instead of the flurry of super moves each character could do in SF3 and the Alpha games, now each character has one ultra move and one super move. There are two bars that fill up that allow you to use each. You can also do your regular special moves with more than one attack button to make them more powerful. This changes the priority of the move (a powered up fireball will go through a regular one to hit the opponent), and sometimes the move itself (Ryu’s spin kick, will act more like his old super move where he spins in the same spot if you power it up).
Also the throw buttons are now mapped to LP+LK instead of just punch up close. Also a new attack is called the focus attack and is derivative of Street Fighter EX 3’s focus move. You press or hold MP+MK to execute it. The longer you hold the stronger it gets, and it is also unblockable. You can even absorb one attack while charging it, so it makes for a useful defensive maneuver.
There are tons of modes as well. There’s the typical story mode, vs, challenge, and online.
The story mode is your typical beat 8 stages to see the ending. There’s an option where you can have online gamers challenge you while you play the mode (like in an arcade), but you’ll quickly turn it off since you’ll get challenged so often, you might as well just be playing online.
The story mode is also where my biggest complaint comes in. Specifically with the boss Seth. Flat out, he ruins the mode completely. He’s incredibly cheap and difficult. I can usually beat him on normal with my absolute best character (it’s an uphill battle), but I do still get smoked a lot, and even on the easiest difficulty I get my ass handed to me with any other character. It ruins the game because if you want to finish the mode, you’ll pretty much have to play on easy, but then all the other characters are so weak it’s not even fun to fight the first 7 battles.
Seth’s character design is a joke, he looks like a weird cross between Dr Manhattan (Watchman), and the Tyrant from Resident Evil. For a series that is supposed to be set the trends for fighting games Seth rips off everyone. It’s not your typical cleverly designed, tough but not cheap, Capcom boss. It’s your super cheap boss that can use moves from everyone in the game and can teleport back and fourth 10 times in a row, and will use cheap throws on you throughout the match, kinda boss. Nearly 50% of fighting games do this with their boss, it’s completely non-original. I feel like they just pulled to code straight outta Dead or Alive 4 for him.
The challenge mode is a combination of survival, time trails, and practice modes. Each of the sub modes are set up with a series of challenges that get progressively harder. The training mode is excellent as it teaches you how to do each players moves and really helps you learn the character you want. It’s not like most games that just throw you in a match with a CPU opponent and let you figure it out on your own.
The online mode works well, there are a couple lag and connection issues, but it’s a passable attempt. You can earn battle points for completing matches, and it’s a good system to gauging which opponents are around the same level as you which is handy.
There are tons of titles and icons to unlock. You can set one of each to your profile. It’s an interesting way to add some customization to your online personality.
All in all, I recommend this game to anyone who likes fighters. If you enjoyed SF2 back in the day, you’ll love this one. If you only plan to play alone, there’s a good bit of content here, but you’ll most likely get annoyed at Seth, so for real fun, bring a friend along or play online. Finally, because this is a fighting game that uses 6 attack buttons, and tons of moves that require you to press multiple buttons at once, you really need an arcade stick (or at least a fight pad) to get them most out of this game.
