A mate of mine once told me that no Street Fighter game is perfect the first time around, and that the re-releases were a good thing, because it helped develop the series into some of the best fighting games ever made. And he’d be right – it took Capcom five re-releases to get the quintessential Street Fighter II in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and only two for the still mind blowing Street Fighter III – 3rd Strike. The difference with those games compared to Street Fighter IV? The advent (or misuse) of Downloadable Content, wherein you don’t need a new disc to sell to get the latest version. But god bless Capcom for trying, because just over a year from the original console SFIV release, we have the latest version – Super Street Fighter IV, and it’s as good as you’d expect.
In terms of new stuff, there’s quite a significant chunk of new content here. Let’s begin with the 10 new characters, whose addition bumps up the total playable characters in the game to 35, only the second highest count of characters in a Street Fighter game; Street Fighter Alpha 3 takes the cake, with a total 38 playable characters in its most recent version. The eight returning characters all bring a welcome breath of fresh air to the game, and actually fit in rather well with the Street Fighter IV aesthetics and gameplay styles.
In particular, the Street Fighter III additions (Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley) are the most welcome here, and fit in fantastically – and are really quite fun to play as. Though it is rather curious as to why the remaining (and least popular) of the Super Street Fighter II ‘New Challengers’ T.Hawk and Dee-Jay were added. It’s not because they’re not interesting characters to play as, but out of all the characters you could possibly pick from…T.Hawk and Dee-Jay? Really?
In any case though, the two completely new characters – Juri and Hakan, bring a lot of great charm and interesting gameplay styles to the game. In particular, Hakan is very to play as. His Turkish Oil Wrestling skills make for a weird and flat out awesome show, and bring a bit more of an interesting wrestling approach to players than something standard like Zangief. While Juri isn’t as unique to play as, she’s a great character in her own right, and quite fun to mess around with. As a character, her ‘evil and loving it’ shtick is really quite welcoming and refreshing to see.
The other big focus to Super Street Fighter IV is in its online mode. Previously – there were only two options for online players, to play a ranked battle or to not play a ranked battle. Here, the non-ranked battle option has been removed, and has been replaced with two new options – Endless Battle and Team Battle. Endless Battle is effectively a ‘quarter-match’ mode, wherein winners of matches stay on, and take on all comers in an effort to stay on as long as possible. Once that player loses, they move to the back of the line as new challengers take on the new winner.
As for Team Battle, it’s really quite self-explanatory. Players form teams of up to four a side and battle it out. In both this and Endless Battle mode, you’ll get to watch the other players fight it out, so it allows you to get a chance to see how other people play their characters and give you time to develop effective strategies to defeat them. A newly added Replay mode also allows you to watch and upload replays to help further determine strategies. All of the additions are great, and really do add a lot to building up SFIV as this online gaming juggernaut, stopping short of creating a form of social network within the game that could make for some very interesting stuff. Couple that with a soon to be released Tournament Mode, it’s great to see Capcom really taking the online modes seriously.
The other changes/additions aren’t as significant, but are still pretty rad. All 35 characters now have two ultra-moves instead of one (with the exception of Gen who has four!); there are new prologues and epilogues for each character in arcade mode (yet are all uniformly terrible); the car destruction and barrel busting mini-games from Street Fighter II have returned and are kinda fun to check out; and as to be expected – there’s a whole bunch of rebalancing, removing the game of its quite infamous “Ken Fighter IV” stigma.
It’s actually quite hard to find any actual negative or weak elements in the game, since everything here is still fantastic or has been improved substantially; the only complaints are more nit-picky than anything else. For instance, one can look at some of the feature set of the upcoming home release of Blazblue: Continuum Shift, and see some of the great things that Arc System Works have added that would’ve been perfect here in Super Street Fighter IV; such as a tutorial mode that teaches players game concepts as well as moves, a proper storyline that’s actually half decent and not completely throwaway, and an Fight Request- esque feature (i.e. the functionality wherein you can be challenged at any point by an online player in SFIV Arcade mode) that works in all game modes. While SSFIV is still a great game, one has a feeling that there’s still more that Capcom could have added, and pray won’t be adding in a new iteration of the fighter.
Visually, it’s practically the same as vanilla Street Fighter IV. This isn’t a bad thing, because the game still looks stunning, even two years on from its original release. All the new backgrounds and character animations look fantastic and gel well within the existing backgrounds and character animations.
Cody’s ready to beat the crap out of someone.
The same goes with the aural element. Well…almost. All of the new music in the game has a much more techno/trance feel to it, and while there are some great tracks (all of the remixed tunes and some of the new music is fantastic), the rest of isn’t as great. It has a very weird 90’s style thing going to it, which doesn’t really suit the game. All the new voice acting is quite decent, though if you have an aversion to English voices where you have the option to swap, the ability to swap voice tracks individually for each character returns, and it’s just as awesome as it was in vanilla SF4.
As to be expected, Super Street Fighter IV is another solid revision of what was one of the best fighting games to date. It’s still quite accessible & familiar, and has that little smidgen of depth that all great fighters have. All the new additions and rebalancing is very welcome and appreciated, though one most wonder whether or not Capcom could have gone a little deeper and added some more defining feature sets. Be that as it may, Super Street Fighter is very heartily recommended.
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