Street Fighter IV 3D Edition
Capcom’s flagship fighting series is no stranger to the portable arena, and even less so to Nintendo’s consoles.
Beyond its sensational home console debut on the Super Nintendo, numerous instalments including Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 3 have appeared on Nintendo’s portable offerings. The problem is, none of them have been particularly good. While these have been serviceable translations of their console counterparts, for the majority they’re almost always a novelty created for fans looking to go on a bit of a nostalgia trip or grab the occasional quick fix.
At the heart of Street Fighter lies a competitive spirit; the desire to spend countless hours studying the game, learning its mechanics, practising combos until they’re committed to muscle memory and developing cunning strategies to outwit and outplay the opponent.
For the most part technical or hardware issues have always stripped the portable entries of the necessary elements to allow these to flourish… until now, that is.
3-DOKEN
Other than a few optional visual and control enhancements Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition is almost exactly like its home console counter-part – and that’s a very, very good thing.
If you’ve ever had even a passing interest in Street Fighter you’ll know exactly what the 3DS version has in store. Little has changed over the years, so whether your fighting spirit fizzled out with the arcade/SNES release of Street Fighter II or has burned bright to Street Fighter IV and beyond, the basic setup and gameplay mechanics will be immediately familiar, balanced and brilliant.
The 3D Edition of SSIV introduces two gameplay changes to the tried-and-true formula, both of which are tailored for its platform; the first is a new view which shifts the camera from the traditional side-on perspective and suspends it behind the shoulder of the character. This is where the system’s 3D capability earns its keep.
Street Fighter IV breathed new life into the stalwart cast of world warriors by swapping archaic sprites for intricately detailed 3D models, creating hundreds of unique character-specific animations and giving characters expressive faces that reacted to every punch, kick and fireball thrown.
In the traditional viewpoint the 3D capabilities of Nintendo’s handheld compliment Street Fighter IV’s already colourful art direction and exaggerated animations by introducing visual depth.
It looks fantastic; flicking the 3D slider up while in the traditional side-on view pushes the back wall of the arena further away, creating a noticeable distinction between the environment, the fighters and the stage props. It’s an undeniably cool visual trick, even if it is likely to lose its novelty after a few matches.
However, switch to the 3D camera view and it’s a whole different story. Balrog’s arms violently pull back towards you as he cocks his pythons back to throw a dash punch, Ken’s fist bursts into flames in front of you as he launches into a shoryuken and M.Bison menacingly slides towards you with an ear-to-ear grin of pure evil.
Backgrounds also benefit from the 3D visuals with furnishings such as barrels, tables and curious animals popping of the screen.
However, the 3D visuals do come at a price; the loss of animated backgrounds. For the most part this isn’t really a big deal but for stages such as Africa, where the invasive safari animals are a prominent feature, it can be distracting to see a hippo with his mouth open frozen in place for two 99 second rounds.
Playing the game in this mode also takes a little getting used to. Although the camera changes position the inputs for specials remain the same; for attacks such as the Hadoken – which requires a quarter-circle towards motion – this doesn’t pose a problem and in fact is actually quite intuitive thanks to the system’s Circle Pad. But playing as charge characters such as M.Bison or Guile and executing back forward motions takes a little getting used to.
The visual depth in this mode can cause some problems when trying to judge distance, which makes spacing tricky and basics such as throwing a bit of a risk to begin with.
It’s hard to tell just how close someone is when your character is covering up most of the screen and the opponent is dashing, running up walls and back-flipping constantly, and for this reason the hardcore will probably stick to the traditional view. Still, it looks lovely and those looking for a 3D thrill will certainly enjoy it.
The other big gameplay change in 3D Edition comes via its control scheme. The game offers two setups; Pro and Lite. Pro maps light attacks to Y and B, medium attacks to X and A, and hard attacks to the shoulder buttons or the two closest touch screen buttons. Although using this control scheme can be a little irksome at first, executing combos quickly becomes second nature after a little practise.
The Lite control scheme assigns special moves to four buttons on the touch screen, allowing players to pull off complex special attacks with a quick tap. This is an addition that is sure to appeal to those new to the series or gamers who might have been put off by the demanding nature of fighting game controls.
Despite this ‘dumbing down’ of the traditional control setup, being able to execute a Hadoken with the press of a touch screen isn’t a problem, and thanks mostly to the balanced roster of characters winning still requires a great deal of strategy and skill.
DEPTH CHARGE
Beyond the extra dimension though, the real thrill of 3D Edition is the fact that it’s just as content and feature packed as its console counterparts. As well as the single-player arcade mode, which pits you against a series of fighters before taking on Seth at the end, the game also sports a trial mode as well as separate versus modes for both viewing angles, online and offline.
Much like the console release the game also tracks a mass of performance statistics that keep logs of the player overall as well as statistics on each individual character, which is great to see.
The 3DS version also features Street Pass functionality in the form of the new Trophy mode, which allows you select a team of fighters, develop their statistics and unknowingly send them into battle by walking down the road.
When you next start up the game the trophies re-enact the fight by awkwardly bashing into each other until one of them comes out on top. Winning battles online and in the arcade mode unlocks even more figurines that can be viewed in the game’s gallery, as well as traded with other players – and there are hundreds of them.
Until both the system and title is released in Europe it’s difficult to make a definitive judgement on the Street Pass mode (what with lack of 3DS owners outside of Japan), but it’s exciting to see Capcom making use of the system’s feature-set in a clever way.
As for online play, what we’ve encountered so far has been simple and comprehensive, if occasionally laggy, which can be forgiven considering it’s not launched outside of Japan yet.
Getting into an online match is very straight forward, with options for Quick Match, Friend Match and Custom Match with a whole array of options.
Street Fighter IV 3D Edition’s online system is certainly well put together, however you can again expect to see much, much more on this in our European review.
One thing we can say for certain is that with this much content packed on to a tiny 3DS cartridge, SSFIV 3D really is like taking the best fighting game of the generation on the move. And that’s awesome.
Capcom has managed an incredible feat; it’s taken a deep, complex fighting game designed for arcades and consoles and crammed it onto a less-powerful portable platform without making hardly any sacrifices. If you’d have told us back in 2008 that we’d soon be playing this new, incredible-looking fighter on a handheld smaller than a notebook, frankly we’d tell you to do one.
If you’re a casual brawler who enjoys spending a few fun hours with a fighting game, then this provides the complete SSFIV experience with the series’ most accessible – yet strategic – control scheme to date, and some spectacular 3D visuals.
For veterans, it’s simply a blast. We wouldn’t be surprised to find a subset of dedicated fighting game players who compete exclusively on Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition a few years from now. It’s the same game of chess, albeit on a smaller board.
Article source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/291433/reviews/street-fighter-iv-3d-edition-review/