Franchise Reboots Entry #26: Street Fighter IV

Remember
when fighting games were all the rage during the 90s. You either do or don’t,
but reading stories about it is always interesting. After Street Fighter II became incredibly popular in arcades worldwide,
fighting games began to dominate a good portion of the space within them. The
face of arcades changed in terms of which audience their owners wanted to
attract, because they knew where the money was. The youngest audience still
came there since it was a place parents could send them for a while so they
could kill time (which is really pretty irresponsible, but that’s another
story), but the older audience that liked to have fun on a puzzle game or
pinball game was slowly being pushed out for a “hipper” one.

 

Fighting
games were the majority of what you’d find in arcades for a while, but like all
trends, it also died…and took arcades with it. A lot of gamers like to blame
this on one problem and one company, but there’s no quick and simple
explanation for it. Too many fighting games and updates to said games were
coming too quick for most gamers to keep up (some of which were big fans of the
genre), but they didn’t thrive on consoles because it was a lot harder to
gather a bunch of friends over than it was to get competition in an arcade. And
online play over consoles was very much in its infancy.

 

We live in a
pretty different world now, one where online play is much easier to implement
for console games. It’s the reason why some working for Capcom thought it was a
good idea to revive the Street Fighter franchise with Street Fighter IV. The brand had disappeared for a little over
eight years before IV resurfaced in Japanese arcades in July 2008, a franchise
that was still clinging to life because of rereleases of older titles. Not only
was the game a hit when it releases on home consoles in February 2009 (in the
west, because traditional fighting game software sales never rebounded in
Japan), it also helped revitalize both consumer interest in fighting games and
tournaments.

 

Capcom went
a little further back to the basics with SFIV, a decision made after mulling
over precisely why the brand was put to sleep for so long. Street Fighter III is a fantastic game — in fact, it’s better than
SFIV in some ways — but consumers found its “Parrying” system far too
intimidating to master. SFIV uses a “Focus Attack” system that doesn’t rely on
timing as much as its predecessor’s main mechanic, but it’s also a risk since
it involves temporarily sacrificing a character’s vitality. If they’re hit
while said vitality is recovering, they’ll lose that and more.

 

There’s the
concept of Ultra Combos, which are definitely a comeback mechanic and in ways
reward playing sloppily, though it takes effort to land it as well.

 

SFIII may
have had some of the prettiest, most beautifully animated spritework ever seen
in a video game, but it’s something no company will ever try again considering
how much money Capcom lost on the game. SFIV’s graphical style utilizes
polygons and achieves a look that’s far more realistic than any of its
predecessors, but also eschews its complete approach to realism due to how
animated its characters are. It nearly achieves a perfect balance between the
two, though some of its characters are admittedly a little too muscular.

 

It seems
SFIV was successful too! Capcom has made two more updates for the game in Super Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition.
The latter is getting a small update in Super
Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition 2012, which will be released as a free
balance patch for consoles sometime this winter. They’re doing a nice job
keeping the community alive amidst plenty of competition — though some of them
were taken aback by AE not being as well balanced as SSFIV.

 

Even if you
don’t like SFIV because of how lenient its inputs are, or if you think there’s
too much turtling, you have to appreciate it for bringing the fighting game
genre and tournament scene back from the dead (though it wasn’t entirely dead). The few employees in
Capcom that thought it was a good idea 
to revive Street Fighter were right, and the fighting game genre is once
again one of the most profitable for the company. But for how long?