Shooooooryuken!
Exquisitely balanced. Incredibly deep. Absolutely gorgeous. Relentlessly addictive. Insanely fun. Street Fighter IV is all of these things. It's also quite possibly the best fighting game ever made, and marks the return of the king.
Published: February 17, 2009
The same character models used in-fight are what's presented when zoomed in close for cutscenes that play out when your selected character fights their rival before the final boss fight, and here you'll see some pixilation in the textures (Sagat's scar comes to mind -- especially because he actually points at it when talking with Ryu pre-fight) and just a few of the background sprites (yes, there are some) lack some of the clean lines that you'd hope for when the camera holds on them for just a bit too long during end-match poses, but these are seriously minor little niggles and really just something I felt I had to include lest the rest of this review be nothing but gushing praise.
The audio in the game is just as good, with the usual requisite punches and kicks, done up in a cartoony kind of splash rather than anything gory, but of course it works. Both Japanese and English voices are also provided and, once you've unlocked the option by finishing Arcade Mode with a certain character, you can actually choose which voice to use on a per-character basis, a great little touch. The English dubs for the characters actually tried to incorporate some accents ('Gief's Russian bark, Rose's gypsy-like huskiness, Cammy's British cadence, though it's a little odd that Dhalsim speaks perfect American English, but hey whatever). Street Fighter IV's aural standout, though, is the music, which tiptoes around and updates some of the classic tunes from the old-school games with reverence, yet mixes in entirely new ones that never seem out of place. In fact, even after two dozen hours, I still loved hearing the Trance-y anthem and its treble dropout that plays on the cruise ship stage. It's all amazing stuff, it really is.
Now, I wasn't just throwing around a bunch of terms a few paragraphs ago with the expectation that everyone reading this would know what I'm talking about. I'm fully expectant that there will be newcomers to the game, and Street Fighter IV welcomes them with open arms, allowing you to quite literally learn every single basic move, super move and ultra move, plus a set of seriously effective combos in the game's supplied Challenge Modes, which reward you with special icons and titles that you can assign to your online persona as bragging rights. There are hundreds of these things in the game, and unlocking them all will require not only a savant's skill, but months of daily practice. Throw in Survival and Practice Modes and you have almost everything a newcomer could possibly hope for in getting to grips with the controls and at first seemingly daunting number of moves.
Luckily, what at first seems like an unwieldy number of options for each character quickly shows its simplicity. Of all the basic twenty-some fighters, only one, Gen, has two pages of moves (because he has two different stances, swapped between by tapping all three punch or kick buttons), and just as they did in the older games, most characters share basic quarter-/half-/full-circle or back/forward/up/down charge moves, meaning once you've gotten the timing down with one character, it's quite easy to jump into with others.
If it's easy to understand the basics, actually learning the more advanced moves follows one of the most gradual and intensely addictive curves I've ever seen in a fighter. You can button mash to some extent with limited success, but the first "tier" of advanced moves -- throws, taunts and EX strikes -- are done by simply pressing both light, hard or medium punch and kick buttons at the same time. It takes a bit of getting used to (and, for those record, can be a bit tough if just using a standard controller, but do yourself a favor and get a proper fighting stick anyway; no self-respecting world warrior would be without one), but like everything else in the game, it has a reason for being tweaked from the old ways.
The biggest is that nearly everything in the game centers around the availability of the almighty EX move. Powered by the Super meter (which, when full, allows you to unleash a more powerful version of a normal attack by doing a quick double-move motion and a single punch or kick button, depending on the move), the EX attack has three levels to it. Just tapping will allow you to essentially bust through any one move.
