So, the last time we talked, we got into some of the main reasons Street Fighter IV was not only good for fighting games, but good for the games business as a whole.
Today will be different. Today, we get some things off our chest.
I am not a Street Fighter IV hater, but over the course of the last seven years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I never want to play it again. In fact, at my normal weekly Street Fighter gathering, a guy convinced me to jump off of Third Strike to play him in SF4. Fair enough, I thought; you took your beatings from me, so I'll give you that same courtesy. The second the menu screens faded into memory, I knew that this was not the experience that I wanted to re-live. Going through them piecemeal will help to explain things a bit more clearly.
First, get a load of this:
What you're seeing is a roster of 44 characters, many of whom share a distinctly similar method of playing the game at its core level. This is a bloated mess. I give Capcom its due credit in that it balanced a roster of such preposterous size well enough so that more than only a fourth of the cast is viable (like in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2), but for a one-on-one game like a mainline Street Fighter, this is straight up too much. A glut like this will scare off new players, while more the more seasoned are only apt to find one or two main characters and stick with them over time. Sure, that policy isn't exactly new or bad for pro-level competitors, but smaller rosters give more incentive to become skilled with a larger section of the cast, making tournaments more enjoyable for spectators to both watch and participate in for the hope of a counterpick overcoming impossible odds. The best we really got with SF4 was this, which is honestly pretty great, but this is about as rare as finding a turtle that shits out solid gold ingots on your front porch.
On a more fundamental level, SF4 had a real problem with movement. Dashing was slow and didn't cover very much ground, and matches tended to feel like a crawl going from previous Street Fighters to this. I personally cannot stand it, but I give SF4 a pass here. The reason here is purely speculative, but after reading an interview with the Soul Caliber people a few years ago about how they slowed down SCV's gameplay to accommodate for the advent of network play, I got the feeling that Ono and the teams at Capcom and Dimps did the same for SF4. Since arcades weren't exactly common around the world at that point and online play did much to rebuild the FGC, I call that a hell of a net positive. Still, as a Third Strike player, I can't help but feel as though SF4 moves like two people throwing rocks at each other in a fish tank, which is certainly not for me.
Here is the great offender, though:
At around 2:30 in this video, legendary Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara demonstrates the absolute gulf between those of casual, and even competitive interest, and the very, very small population that will play this game at the top level. Go to any Street Fighter IV tournament video on the internet, and you'll find something roughly similar: a string for normal and special moves broken up by the occasional dash cancel. To the layman, it's just a guy hitting buttons. To the trained eye, it's ridiculous in its timing and stupid in execution. It is the 1-frame link.
1F link combos aren't exclusive to Street Fighter IV by any means, but they are as common in upper-tiered play as a low forward to a fireball in every fighting game in two dimensions. It's the process of attacking an opponent, and then quickly throwing out another attack that will connect before the opponent's animation resets from its hit stun. It's 1000% more difficult in execution than it is in explanation. Being so rife with them, SF4 players studied less of the fundamentals of spacing and gameplay to rifling through spread sheets of frame data to see what move connected to what.
Worse, this practice of overworking led to diminished returns in use. SF4 has insane damage scaling, which is the the game's way of making each subsequent move in a combo do less damage than it normally would outside of a combo. Basically, it means that if I hit you with three hard moves in a row, you won't be down to 50% of your health. SF4 took this to something of a hilarious extreme in the wake of this 1F link nonsense. That Daigo combo up there? Check out how much damage it actually does. In most Street Fighter games --including the newly released Street Fighter V-- one could logically do the same amount of punishment in a jumping hard punch, a low hard punch, and then a dragon punch. A lot less work for the same result. In that respect, I never wanted to put in the work it takes to do these goofball string combos. I never felt the need to.
So, Street Fighter IV, you're a swell game, but you're a swell game that needs to take a break from the spotlight, and I'm glad we have a new Street Fighter to take your place. I realize that this is all just my personal beef with what amounts to a very good videogame, but that's why this is my blog and not yours. So there.
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