Street Fighter II (1991)

I'm finally playing through Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and decided to beat the original Street Fighter II with all eight characters for the first time since probably my childhood. Especially coming after the original Street Fighter, this is a remarkable accomplishment of a video game, one that basically introduced fighting games in the way we know them.

What truly impresses me about Street Fighter II all these years later is just how distinct each character and fight is. There are a lot of fighting games where I feel like you just pick who you like best, then attack your enemy in basically the same way. But that really won't work here, as with each new fighter, you have to have a completely different plan of attack. Fighting someone like Vega might be easy with someone like Chun-Li, but extremely difficult with the distinct fighting styles of Zangief or Dhalsim. For such an early fighting game, it's a shockingly complex dynamic with these characters.

I also forgot how hard this game is! I cranked the difficulty down to the very easiest setting, and I still found this to be a struggle at times. Street Fighter II does not back down on you, regardless of how easy you want it to be. Even though I've played as these characters for 30 years, I still found myself having a hard time with at least one combatant per game. No wonder people were dumping quarters into the arcade machine in the '90s.

But still, after all this time, there are few fighting games quite as brilliant as Street Fighter II, and it truly set a benchmark for everything that came after it, and few fighting games have been as addictive. A tremendous landmark game.

Preliminary: Wow I can't even think of how I would've played the arcade version of this, nor what port I likely played, etc. but instantly remembered this character selection screen. And the first battle (I won btw :-p ) really was so impressive. The colors, the background, the character sprites. Incredible for 1991. No fighting game even came close up to this point. Period. It deserves the recognition for changing the fighting game world.

Wow I'm thoroughly impressed. And on the 2nd level (I like that you can see the areas being crossed off, and seems a reasonable length, tho I assume the difficulty will get too high for me like most early fighting games), I came upon special moves/powers, got a combo down patent, and discovered throwing my enemy into manipulable scenery. This seriously set all the precedents didn't it?! Definitely another game I need to play with my brother. Already struggling on the third battle, but will return to this tomorrow.

Day 2

Ahh I do wanna see myself actually beat a fighting game, but it's getting ridiculously hard and some of these opponents sure do a lot more damage than I do. I wish I hadn't accidentally picked Ryu at the start, but I also don't want to start over ha. That says something negative, sure, since don't find it fun enough to start over. The music isn't particularly amazing, tho feels very classic arcade. In the end though, I'm seeing this as a 4 star because it's so special, the first of a kind, such an excellent execution of a formula that would become so popular. And lol the bonus stage beating up a car.

Yeaaaa I've had enough after Battle 5.

Well actually I wound up playing a couple battles at 3 more characters (the green guy, the sumo guy, and Dhalsim, who I almost forgot was my go-to as a kid along with Blanka "the green guy"). It was fun stumbling upon their special moves. And I cannot wait to play this with my brother next week. He promised! Haha. Good stuff.

Look: 8.5/10 Nothing spectacular, per se, but really ahead of its time and set so many precedents. Plus, nostalgia for the characters!

Sound: 8/10 Good, classic arcade tunes. Tho nothing sentimental or special to me.

Play: 8/10 By far the best fighting game so far. Period. Changed the game. It'll never be a genre I love to play through because it's so rooted in difficulty, but this one was the first to get me to want to learn combos and whatnot like I used to do with Mortal Kombats as a kid.

Feel: 8.5/10 Precedent-setting, some nostalgia for me tho probly not as much as moset fans, and well, just an overall great Feel.

Attachment: 8/10 I know I will be playing this 2-player with my brother! How often I want to replay it solo is very questionable.

Overall: 8.2/10

(This is the 36th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Hey, we made it to 1991. This is the first game in my challenge that released in 1991, as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior graced console players (SNES) on February 6th of that year.

This game needs little introduction, as it changed the fighting game landscape forever. How has it aged though? Well, my subjective opinions on that are down below. Spoiler Alert: Plenty of games from 1990 aged poorly, some however aged really well. I would put Street Fighter II somewhere in the middle, though closer to the "aged poorly" side of things.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS

The game does actually have storytelling, but only a very brief cutscene when you win all battles with a character. Then you will be shown how the characters react to defeating M. Bison. The oddest one? Chun Li goes to her father's grave to tell him that she has avenged him by defeating M. Bison.... and that she can now go back to being a young single girl! WTF! So 90s.

So this does add some recognizability beyond their gear and special moves to these characters, but it's pretty limited of course and you only get the one cutscene per fighter. Despite this, some of the characters have "icon" status in video gaming, like Ryu or the aforementioned Chun Li. Hell, I've never played a Street Fighter game before this in my life (Tekken only back in the day) but even I recognized them immediately.

The manual includes a short bio on all of the 8 main characters and a list of their special moves and how to execute them.

There is good variety among these characters. Chun Li is speedy, Ryu is a martial arts expert who can also do a cool fireball attack (Hadouken!), Honda is a big sumo wrestler, Blanka has a low center of gravity, Dhalsim is a lanky piece of shit and Ken ... is another Ryu? Not sure why they made them so similar. If you listen to the experts, there are differences between the two, though I'm not sure how much that applies to Street Fighter II. I didn't play this game that much to be able to tell you whether there are slight differences in footwork and pace or whatever. But to conclude, there are a bunch of different characters here overall with different abilities.

There are also bosses, one of whom looks like Mike Tyson (which he didn't know about until recently funnily enough). Even more funny and interesting: Mike Tyson's character in the US is called Barlog. There is a different character called M. Bison who is wearing a red military uniform or something.

In Japan, M. Bison actually stands for Mike Bison and is the name given to the character that looks like Mike Tyson. They've changed names around when they localized the game out of fear that they'd be sued.

Less funny story: The M. Bison in the US version can fuck off kindly, man is he tough to beat.

GAMEPLAY

In this game, you can either play simple 1v1 fights or choose a character and then travel the world to fight all the other characters plus some bosses that are non playable characters, like Barlog, Vega and M. Bison.

Each character has a few special moves and their own stage. You fight until someone wins two rounds. By now this formula has been repeated a billion times, but of course by then this concept was never done as well as Street Fighter II did it.

And while I can see a young me putting a lot of time and effort into this to get better, the current me simply can't shake the fact that this game hasn't aged as well as some other titles have of this time, including F-Zero and Super Mario World, two other very early SNES titles.

Movement of characters is stiff and pulling off special moves was really tricky because a lot of the time I didn't feel like my inputs were recognized correctly. Or I was doing it wrong, I don't know. But even when I put the difficulty to damn 0, there were some enemies that just didn't let me breath for a second. Hit up, hit low, hit up up up, uppercut and while I learned to block attacks after a while, attacking windows felt so small sometimes and the opponent was able to block so many of my attacks that I had to resort to doing specific OP moves to get them off me. This is actually a gripe I had about fighting games back in the day and I guess will always carry with me, is that abusing the mechanics and quicker trigger fingers will often be decisive of outcome. Maybe this was done better in later entries, but once I got hit in a specific way, especially once I dialed the difficulty up a little bit, I often felt like I was hopelessly at the mercy of my opponent to ever get a chance to hit again. The game also has a feature where you get dizzy for a few seconds, which I think is really silly for a game like this and one I didn't like at all.

Animations and the different attack styles of all characters definitely do feel pretty advanced for a game of this time, so I gotta give credit for that. And now that I've played this, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how other fighting games that released in the coming years will compare.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE

Voice acting is limited to damage noises and "Hadouken!", which is enough to have it be iconic. Sound design I thought was solid and the soundtrack is about 40 minutes long and includes music for each character. Some of my favorites include the tracks for Guile, Ryu, Blanka and M. Bison.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN

I like the character design and the different styles of the backgrounds of the arenas that the characters fight in. I'd say the graphical quality is pretty good overall but nothing that will make you go "wow".

ATMOSPHERE

Seeing groups huddle around to watch you and your opponent fight is always awesome. But the stages themselves are otherwise very static, you can break a few barrels here and there but otherwise the environment you fight in doesn't change anything. The best thing the game does atmospherically during fights is have the tracks fit the "boss" of the arena. For example, Vega fights very fast and his track is also very fast.

CONTENT

You got 8 characters + 4 bosses. You can play any character in Battle Mode and face every other character. This will take you a good 20-30 minutes and you will be rewarded with a short cutscene that suits the character you fought with. When you win with Ryu for example, you get a cutscene where Ryu is supposed to be given an award for winning, but instead he is shown walking off into the horizon because ceremonies mean nothing to him and he is off to the next fight.

In addition, you can fight locally against a friend and adjust difficulty in the Options menu. Plenty of content here, as you get 8 different character "stories" to play through and will need to spend many more hours to properly learn how to fight with each character.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN

The structure of fights is pretty simple by today's standards. One v One fights, the first to two round wins, wins the fight. It's simple, but effective. You also can choose to play any character's story as I mentioned previously, and what I just said about the structure of fights applies here too.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION

Can't really do anything but give full grades for a game that has changed the shape of a genre like this. Few games accomplish for their genres what Street Fighter II did back in the day, even if it was the Arcade version and not the SNES version that I played that had done the deed.

REPLAYABILITY

Endlessly replayable to learn how to master this game, though that probably applies to back then more than it does to new players today.

PLAYABILITY

It works well from start to finish.

OVERALL

I can't say it aged as well as some other games from that time period but fighting games were not established at the time like platformers, so to have Street Fighter II take such a leap is to be respected, and it's not like you won't have your fun with it if you decide to play it today. The game delivers beyond expectations in the storytelling department thanks to endings for each character (and a hilarious/ridiculous one for Chun Li), has created characters that are still iconic to this day and has delivered multiple sequels since. And those sequels I'd probably recommend to you more than this game in particular, which I doubt will live on as a great game by today's standards rather than simply being an iconic old-school video game that propelled the medium forward in a big way.

World Warrior is a difficult piece to review - it lays an extremely influential foundation for fighting game design but needs a little more time in the oven for some truly satisfying matchups.

M Bison, the leader of the Shadaloo organization, sets up a world fighting tournament for the best fighters across many countries. It's a super simple story with cute (minding the stereotypes) endings for each character, and apart from that is pretty ignorable.

The player goes into 1-on-1 combat with three types of kicks, three types of punches, and a movement stick that can jump, block, and perform special movements, ranging from throws to two-second charge moves to the legendary hadouken and dragon punch. Each character has different fighting styles and combos of linked moves, though at this stage there aren't quite enough moves for most characters to feel flexible or satisfying. Ryu or Ken's journey may be manageable with a good balance of throws, projectiles, and punishing moves but characters like Zangief and Dhalsim will leave you wanting. Given that this is a multiplayer focused game, the AI is particularly nasty for single player, reading player moves and performing impossible moves in an instant. As much as one would rather focus on the multiplayer, this does leave out the four unplayable bosses and an ending. There are also three bonus stages (car smashing, barrel smashing, more barrel smashing) that are fun if you know the right moves or have the right character.

The graphics truly shine on this one. Updated from the first Street Fighter, stages are extremely well detailed, with plenty of moving background elements that react to your wins (and even have some destructible elements!) - each character is brimming with personality and is very expressive, making some of the most recognizable archetypes in video games. Music varies in quality but some themes (Guile's theme, Ken's theme, Balrog's theme) are extremely memorable.

Street Fighter II is a classic in the making, but it takes a visit back to the first iteration to see how much more making we need for it to be the tight ship we see today.

There are a lot of Street Fighter games out there, and a few of them are commonly considered to be The One (off the top of my head: Super Turbo, Alpha 2, and 3rd Strike). In another way, though, vanilla Street Fighter II is probably the most important game in the entire series, because it set the standard for the fighting game genre.

Continuing my Ryu journey, I played through SF2's arcade mode as the original shoto. He feels significantly better than he did in the original Street Fighter. His specials are much easier, if much weaker for balance reasons. Maybe more importantly, his normals all actually seem to have a real purpose, and with this game's much-improved walking and jump arcs, it's actually possible to observe what your opponent is coming at you with and react appropriately. It's still tough, though, and not very well-balanced. There are a few things that seem odd by modern standards. For example, Ryu's shoryuken doesn't knock down on hit, at least not a grounded opponent. Since the animation is longer than the hit-stun it causes, this move is actually unsafe on hit; you could land it and still be punished.

I actually really liked the fights with the four unplayable bosses. They felt pretty unique but still much more fair than the opponents in SF1. Sagat in particular made me feel like I was on even footing, having a proper martial arts match. The only fight I was really stuck on for a while was, unsurprisingly, Bison, henceforth "Dictator". Psycho Crusher comes is so fast I don't really know what to do other than block, and that crazy stomp thing always mixes me up. He also seems to cause a ton of dizzy, I'm not sure if that's a special boss thing or what. I did manage to finish it though, to see Ryu's famous absence at the awards podium. A good time overall, although I can see why SF2 had so many re-releases with tweaks and new mechanics.