Super Street Fighter 4 Review

Fighting games were a staple in every arcade in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.  A lot of series have come and gone through the genre.  Mortal Kombat, Samurai Showdown, Marvel vs Capcom 2 and King of Fighters have had players constantly putting up quarters and challenging others in the arcade for almost two decades.  All of these games success was made possible by one predecessor; Street Fighter 2.  The age of arcades have sadly come and gone in most places in America now.  With the decline of arcades came the decline of new entries into the genre as well.

However in recent years, fighting games are back and back strong.  Just in 2009, we saw the release of King of Fighters XII, Tekken 6, and the brand new Blazblue.  They all shared varied levels of success and acclaim thanks to online play and a brand new fighting game audience.  Just like in the late 80s, the game that has brought about the resurgence of popularity to fighting games throughout 2009 and 2010 is another iteration of the Capcom classic, Street Fighter.

February of 2009 saw the release of Street Fighter 4 for PS3, 360 and PC.  Street Fighter 4 brought back a familiar game mechanic and familiar characters with 4 new characters to the series, a new look, and a few additions to the fighting game engine.  With a familiar feel, easy to understand controls, and the innovation of online play, the game was a rabid success.

Capcom knows a thing or two about remarketing an existing Street Fighter game and getting people to buy it all over again.  There were over 7 iterations of Street Fighter 2.  Now just over a year after the console release of Street Fighter 4,  Capcom has decided to let the money spigit keep running with the release of Super Street Fighter 4.  Is this new version worth your money if you’re a fan of fighting games?

The story of Super Street Fighter 4 is set between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3.  Seth, the head of an evil crime syndicate called S.I.N starts a world fighting tournament to get information on the abilities of the best fighters in the world while drawing out his enemies so he can eliminate them.  Boring?  Yeah it is.  This is a fighting game.  Sometimes they have a good story but most the time they don’t.  This is one of those times that the story just doesn’t come through.  If you want a story, RPGs have a ton of it, get one of those.  The story is pretty weak for this game in that regard.  It’s just a symptom of the fighting genre.

The fighting system has a very familiar feel to anyone who has ever played a 2-d fighting game before.  Super Street Fighter 4 puts two players head to head in a one on one battle in a 2-d plane.  A player picks one of 35 different characters.  Each character has different set of special moves, normal moves, super and ultra moves.  All the characters play really different.  Even

characters like Ryu, Ken, and Akuma have very different strengths, weaknesses and overall strategies despite the fact that each character has very similar special moves and normal moves.  Once the players pick a character they are put in a contest for a set number of rounds.  The players use their characters strengths and special moves to reduce the opponent’s life bar down to zero.  When a player reduces their opponent’s life to zero they win the round.  Whoever wins the set amount of rounds first (usually two) wins the match.

It’s a timeless system that’s been around as long as fighting games have been around.  Street Fighter 4 has introduced a few unique things to a system. In Super Street Fighter 4, you have two bars that build during battle.  The super bar builds whenever you do a special move or whenever you block a move or your attacks are connect or blocked.  The bar is divided into four sections.  You can use one of these four sections to do a more powerful version of your regular special moves. This is called an EX move.  Ryu’s EX fireball will hit twice and knocking down and do more damage while his regular fireball only hits ones and does not knock down.  If you build up the super ball to full you can use your characters super move.  These moves usually do a lot of damage and can change the tide of a battle.  This adds to the strategy of if you should use your bar for EX moves or simply build up for the super and forego EX moves all together.

The second bar is for your ultra move.  The bar builds when you absorb an attack with a focus or when you take damage.  When it fills past half way you are given access to an extremely powerful move that can usually turn the tide of, or outright win, a round.  New to SSF4, is the fact every character has two Ultras now that the player must choose from before going into the match.  Different Ultras have different properties and uses so it’s usually a matter of strategy which one you pick.

The ultra moves are Capcom’s way of making sure that the battle isn’t over until it’s over and let’s a player come back at any time.  It also has the added effect of doing high damaging, bass ass combos with a simple command.  Can’t beat that!

The biggest new feature of SF4 is the Focus System.  Focus is a move that every character can do by pressing Medium Kick and Medium Punch together.  You can charge this move by holding the button up to three levels.  Each level of the attack has different properties.  The first lets off a quick attack and if it interrupts the opponents attack, they go into a crumple state where they can’t defend themselves leading to a huge combo.  Level two lets you get the crumple state when you hit the opponent even if you don’t get a counter hit.   The level three is an unblockable attack that crumples and allow for a combo as well.  The focus attack also can absorb one attack allowing you to use it as a defensive tool that can generate an offensive strike. When you absorb an attack you will take a small amount of temporary damage which will build back over time.  However if you are hit before your temporary damage has recovered you will permanently take the damage.  This adds a level of risk to using focus to absorbing to much damage.   At any time you can dash forward or back before you let go of the focus attack to cancel it into a back dash or forward dash.  You can also cancel some special moves and normal moves into a focus attack by using half of your super bar.  This allows for large damaging combos or to make moves that are normally punishable safe.

These new features fully flush out the Super Street Fighter 4 system and make the game feel like a unique game even though it shares many of the elements of the previous Street Fighter games.  The familiar and easy controls let players of all levels jump into it.  The focus system and super and ultra bars makes sure that people have access to a lot of mechanics to master in case they want to take the game beyond a casual level.

Super Street Fighter 4 has five different game modes to keep people engaged.

Arcade lets players take a character through a series of battles against the computer.  Arcade always ends with a rival match against another character with a very loose story sequences and a battle with Seth, the games boss, afterwards.   Beating this mode with different characters unlocks different beginning and ending cut scenes involving their stories. The story is by far the weakest part of Super Street Fighter 4.  I find this mode to be pretty boring as you can set the AI’s difficulty anywhere from autistic child mashing frantically on the controller to cheating ass robot difficulty with little in between.  Fighting games are best played with other people.  Fortunately Super Street Fighter 4 gives you plenty of other options for just that.

Versus mode is the true meat of a real fighting game.  This mode allows for you to play against the computer or another person in a local offline match.  Get a group of friends together, grab two controllers and let the shit talk fly.

If you don’t have real friends in real life but your Xbox Live friend account is stacked, than Network mode is for you!  Network Battle Mode allows for you to connect to the online network and challenge players from all over the world.  The online play for Super Street Fighter 4 is actually pretty good.  There are some issues with lag when playing someone far away.  Normally you can find a pretty good connection and play a pretty good game.  Super Street Fighter 4 has added a lobby system to their online suite to simulate the feel of everyone standing around the arcade

cabinet, watching matches and waiting for their turn as the winner stays on the fight the next person in line while the loser goes to the end of the line.  There is also ranked battles where you can gain, or lose, battle points as you try and increase your online ranking.  There are online leader boards and rankings that can be seen through the network mode as well.  There is also a team battle and tournament mode to the online suite to give you multiple options to play, even when you are playing alone on your couch.

Challenge mode and training mode rounds out the suite of modes available in Super Street Fighter 4.  Challenge mode puts you through a series of challenges with a character that range from doing their basic special moves, like shooting a fireball, to doing long and complex combos that involve supers, specials and ultra moves.  This is a great place to learn some basic combos and get some ideas to form combos of your own.  Training mode lets you take a character into free practice and play with practicing combos or testing out situations with another person on the controller or the games record and replay feature.  For anyone serious about competitive fighting games, this will be the mode you are in the most to perfect combos and test out different situations.

The graphics of Street Fighter 4 were great and the visuals on Super are even better, if only slightly.  The characters are rendered in really good detail and the movements of normal and special moves are fluid and very well presented.  The Ultra moves especially, are a showcase of the graphical power of the Super Street Fighter 4 engine and have a flair of their own.  The new backgrounds introduced in Super are very detailed and have a lot going on in them.  In the Africa level, you see the animals gather and interact with each other and what is going on with the fight on the screen.  A lot of detail has gone into the new presentation in Super Street Fighter 4.  With all the detail however, it never detracts or distracts from the action on the screen, which is a pleasant plus.

Super Street Fighter 4 has added a lot of added content.  The game adds 10 new characters to the cast of Street Fighter 4.  Two of the characters are brand new to the Street Fighter universe.  Juri and Hakan make their Street Fighter debut in Super.  Juri is a taekwondo martial artist while Hakan is a Turkish oil wrestler who ‘oil’s up’ to greatly increase the range and strength of his moves.  Makoto, Dudley, and Ibuki are the new additions of Super Street Fighter 4 from street fighter 3.  Guy, Cody and Adon have been added from the Street Fighter Alpha series.  T-Hawk and Dee Jay round out the new cast as additions from the Super Street Fighter 2 cast.  On top of all the new characters to try and experiment with, the rest of the cast has undergone several balancing tweak to make the overall game balance stronger than in Street Fighter 4.

In the end Super Street Fighter 4 has a lot to offer.  I’ve played video games competitively for almost a decade now and I play Super Street Fighter 4 with other hard core players and new players alike. This game definitely has an affinity for fans of fighting games regardless of their skill level with a ton of things to learn and grow into if you want to go from noob to winning tournaments.  With all the addition of content that has been added to Super Street Fighter 4, it is definitely a good value for all of those who owned Street Fighter 4 and enjoyed the experience.  For those who are interested in Street Fighter but don’t own Street Fighter 4, Super Street Fighter 4 is a definite must buy at 40 bucks.  The experience is definitely better with other people.  If your friends are over at your house or on Live or PSN, you’ll find you never run out of people to play.

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