The video arcade is an interesting phenomenon that I’m sure
will make for a fascinating history lesson to kids in 75 years, much like speakeasies
did for my generation. Growing up in the 80’s, I never knew a world without
them, and kids growing up today will never know a world with them, barring some
miraculous revival that I find extremely unlikely. I
shouldn’t get too wistful. After all, I directly contributed to its demise.
For me, like much of my generation, Street Fighter II was a defining game. I lined up amongst the throngs, eagerly throwing up my quarter to try and take down the king of the seedy, dimly-lit hall. I treasure the memories, but the minute it came
out for SNES, I did everything I could to get my hands on it, and once
we could have a reasonably equivalent facsimile of the real thing at home
without pumping money into it, it was on, not in a fashion entirely unlike
Donkey Kong. Even with my one-year-old baby brother conked out on the couch across the room, we
packed everyone in the neighborhood into our den for boistrous and quarter-free winner-goes-on
sessions.
Well, it’s 17 years later, that baby brother is about to
graduate from high school, but Street Fighter is back, and it seemingly hasn’t
lost a step. The fundamentals feel almost eerily familiar, and yet the game is
fantastic. What is it that makes Street Fighter’s base mechanic so compelling
that 17 years later, a new game can take the world by storm by building on the very
same fundamentals? I’m by no means an expert when it comes to this stuff, but I’ll
try and take a stab at it.
I wrote in the past about the boldness it took from Keiji Inafune
to remember the true quality of Mega Man and make a game that bucked
years of wrong turns and recalled the Blue Bomber’s strengths, even if it took
going back to a title that felt 20 years old. In my column on Mega Man 9, I intentionally
avoided the 8-bit presentation, because while I most certainly enjoyed it, it
was a statement of another kind entirely, and I believed the true genius of
Mega Man 9 would have been just as achievable no matter what presentation was chosen. Yoshinori Ono has proven me right, as his lavish big-budget
next-gen Street Fighter IV succeeds because of many of the same lessons that delighted me so
thoroughly about Mega Man’s return.
While there are several complex fighters that I really do
love, Ono seems to have realized that much of Street Fighter’s strength is derived from its simplicity. In games where the command list for each character is 20 pages long for each
character, I always end up focusing in on one character pretty much exclusively,
not because I’m closed-minded, but because the amount of work required to even
understand the strategic place of each character is too intimidating. In
comparison, the variation and uniqueness of the characters in Street Fighter II
are within players’ reach the first time they play a character. Meandering up
to a vacant SFII machine for my first play, and picking Dhalsim on a whim, I
was able to grasp made the flexible Indian special as compared to each of his
opponents almost immediately. I didn’t know how to do yoga fire, or yoga flame,
but I quickly figured out how to stretch, and just how that would help me get
to victory.
The basic mechanics, the rhythmic cadence of blocking and
timing strikes, the rock-paper-scissors mechanics, they’re all available for even the newest, most amateur player to learn and enjoy. As my friends and I learned our
small complements of special moves, the depth of play available to us grew, but
the game remained balanced and fun, because even though my Shoryuken packed
a mean wallop, my opponent had his Hundred Hand Slap ready to go. When we added
the combo layer on top of that, the game remained balanced while adding even
more depth, and so on. The fundamentals of movement, striking, blocking, and
timing were as relevant in a game between total novices to those with a mastery
of all of the techniques that they could come up with.
Street Fighter didn’t always retain this simple elegance, even
if it did weather its loss better than many fighting game franchises. Just like the
complexity that was added to Mega Man throughout the years did not contribute
to his strengths, Capcom’s efforts to spruce up the Street Fighter in the later
half of the 90s had often obfuscated the strengths that caused the rise of the game
in the first place, working in complex, regressive techniques that worked
against the game’s fundamental strengths.
In producing Street Fighter IV, Ono never let his focus slip
from the rock solid base that made its legacy so legendary, and the end product
is worlds better for it. While as an advanced, veteran player, I appreciate
that the existing design is instantly familiar, the accessibility that drew me into the game in the first place is still just as present. Picking up Crimson Viper, I could immediately get a
feel for her before learning my first special move, and how she felt different
than Rufus, or El Fuerte. Just as in Street Fighter II, the advanced layers of
Street Fighter IV don’t fundamentally change the lower levels. The special
moves still fit on one page. Grasping each of the higher layers and working it into my game is an easy,
fluid experience.
While I’ve heard repeated claims that this system is dumbed down or stuck in 1992, after having a decent amount of time with it, it actually feels as if Ono went through the later Street Fighter games' designs and found
a way to fit the best of their mechanics into the existing system without
breaking or detracting from anything in the existing system at all. Alpha's Super Meter,
SF3’s EX moves, and limited parrying are all there, they’re just retrofit so as
to add and not to interfere. Incorporating each of these layers feels as
natural as learning your three special moves with Ken, and used right, they can
change and enhance the game just as dramatically. The game isn’t dumbed down,
it’s just well-designed. There’s a lot of depth to be uncovered as you
learn and master each of these techniques, but its genius is that at it’s heart, the game never forgets that it's Street Fighter, and that’s all it ever needed to be.
I’ve been
around long enough to know that everyone’s perspective of fighting games varies
wildly, and the discussion from the real enthusiast community exists on a
completely different plane than I approached this from. How do you read Street
Fighter’s design? Do you see the same thing I do, or am I way off and you see just another dated fighter?
I'll admit it; I wasn't originally drawn to 
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