Street Fighter X Tekken (2012)

SxT (PS Vita) is, in a phrase, a waste of potential. It's sad, but very, very true. With a cast rivaling that of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, some fan favorite characters, some odd characters for flair, and even two from Japan (on the Vita) you would think that this game has everything it needs to succeed, but sadly this game is destined to forever be nothing more than a broken marketing idea on the part of Capcom. Just on the surface the two worlds simply don't match up; they have very different game and fighting styles with the Tekken side being "slice of cake" realistic and the SF side being completely over the top. Note that with this I speak mainly of their move sets, and we can see who has the clear advantage here. Yes, the Tekken cast was given "Tekken step" in order to get around the SF characters' all-around better special move kits, but it just does not level the playing field. The story is shoddy, but I can overlook this: it's a fighting game, however what truly bothers me is the way the game handles endings. There are special premade teams in the game that give special endings, all of these are provided in the game, but there are also separate endings for each character (shoddy ones given using a few paragraphs of text); problem here is you get only one ending per team so you have to use that team twice unless you're using a premade, and even then those characters have their OWN endings as well, it's all a very tiresome process meant to artificially elongate the game. Once these endings are unlocked (save for the special team endings) you can never few them again which makes the player feel like he/she has accomplished nothing. The best you usually get for beating the game is a singular piece of artwork, a crappy "title" for your player card (oh boy) and a sense that you will never get that 10-20 minutes of your life back. In-game, the story isn't much better, sadly. Each character has a minuscule amount of moves (far less than usual for both sides) and only one super special which is extremely disappointing considering the typical SF character has at least 3, but again, I guess we're trying to level an already broken playing field here. What makes this situation worse is that the game is extremely case-sensitive, which makes performing any move higher than your basic special move a horrible experience. It seems the game designers realized this, but instead of fixing their mistake they just put in a function where you could hold a special move down in order to charge it to EX and then to a Super Special, this makes combat extremely irritating because the computer has millisecond super specials while your own takes about five seconds to charge. This same issue makes special functions added to game such as a counter-attack while blocking or a premade mini-combo seem nearly impossible to use as they require precise button pressing. In arcade mode you fight through about 8 levels, but every team you fight is premade, so there is no fresh originality of teams to look forward to for replay value. The only other thing to note here is that Capcom thought it would be neat to make certain menus ONLY TOUCHSCREEN; this was, needless to say, the worst decision ever made because all of the options on the screen are exceptionally small. The only other mode to make note of is Mission Mode where you test your skills against the CPU in certain special conditions, typically this ends up being a glorified survival mode and often comes down to testing your patience rather than your skill with some of the idiotic special conditions and massive spikes in difficulty they have added. In the end, this title looks promising from afar, but it truly is a mess and I cannot recommend it to anyone unless it's free or nearly so.