Street Fighter: The Movie

Don’t let the title fool you, I’m not going to start writing about movies any time soon.

There are plenty of video game movies out there, most of them terrible.  There are probably even more video games about movies.  But what about video games about movies about video games?  I can only think of one.

Street Fighter: The Movie is the fighting game you weren’t sure you needed, or even wanted.  I can’t imagine what was going through Capcom’s head when they green-lit this.  Think of it like this: imagine that someone decided to write a book called “Lord of the Rings,” but it was based on the movie, which is already based on a book.  It wouldn’t make much sense at all.  There would be some differences, sure.  But would it really be worth your time?

While you think about it, let’s talk a little bit about the similarities between SF:TM and Super Street Fighter II.  It’s got all the same characters (Sans Fei Long, the only character that wasn’t in the movie), who have all the same moves.  The controls are exactly the same, weak, medium and strong punch and kick, up jumps, hold back to block, you know the drill.  It’s not just the special moves are the same, all of the regular attack animation are almost identical.  So, why bother?

The gimmick here is that they motion captured and digitized the actors and backgrounds from the film.  And you know what?  It actually doesn’t look too bad.  Everything still has a choppy outline and the details are a little fuzzy, but overall its kind of interesting.  It’s also cool when you consider that you’re playing as the late Raul Julia or Jean Claude Van Damme as  characters in a fighting game.  Thinking about it in those terms is really the best thing the game has going for it.  If you think about it as “Guile fighting M. Bison,” you are just going to feel like you are playing a weird looking, inferior SF II clone.  But if you think about it as “Frank Dux fighting Gomez Addams,” now that’s awesome.

But at the end of the day, you are still going to notice the difference between this and SF II.  The biggest?  SF:TM is realllllly slow.  The digitized characters may use the same moves as their pixelated counterparts, but everything is slowed down drastically.  The controls are generally responsive, but every animation takes so long to complete you will feel like you are just jamming on buttons.  And while the controls for the regular attacks are responsive, the inputs for the special moves rarely work.  The rotations are okay, but the timing on the charge moves are off.  The hit detection is also a little wonky.  I won’t necessarily say its bad, its just weird compared to other Street Fighter games.  And that’s what someone who is going to play this will expect, because, you know, its called “Street Fighter.”

The game modes are pretty standard for a fighting game from the 90s, arcade versus and some other throwaway stuff. The one unique mode is called “story battle,” where you play through fights related to scenes from the movie.  After each round, you get a still shot from the film with text before you are given a choice of where to go next.  Each action you take makes Bison’s hostage timer go down (it makes sense if you saw the movie) and its game over if it hits 0.  

There are two issues here.  First, the still images.  The PS1 and Saturn were both capable of video cutscenes, so I don’t understand why they weren’t used here.  They used scenes from the film during the opening, so they could have tried to squeeze some video in.  Second, and more importantly, you can only play a Guile.  I know he was the main character, but you should really have been able to play as the other characters.  It was doubly frustrating for me, because I’ve always been terrible with Guile (and all the charge characters, for that matter).  I barely beat this on normal difficulty.  Had I been able to play as Ryu or even Ken, I would have been able to beat it blindfolded.  

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to see this game has a relatively poor reputation.  Just like Street Fighter the Movie (The Movie), Street Fighter the Movie (The Game) is pretty much universally hated.  I, for one, don’t understand the hate.  I have never been a movie buff and part of the reason for that is I just can’t handle the holier than thou, highfalutin critics.  I don’t care if a movie has a trillion stunning jump cuts, I want it to make me laugh/scare me/have cool action, etc.  

Look, in no universe would I call Street Fighter a “good” movie.  It could have less to do with the game, the plot is nonsensical, the dialogue is ridiculous and they cast a guy with a thick Belgian accent to play an All-American military officer.  But it’s a fun movie, its ridiculous because its supposed to be.  It hearkens back to a simpler time where not every film had to either be “The Shape of Water” or risk being buried on the internet before it even comes out.  Just relax, turn your brain off and go along for the ride.  Forget about gratuitous fish sex for a minute and remember how great an actor Raul Julia was, how much ass Jean Claude Van Damme kicked, how underrated Ming Na Wen continues to be and how much fun stupid one liners are.  

The game is a bit like that too.  It was a launch title for the Saturn and PS1 and did go a ways in showing what those systems could do.  It may have been a dumb idea, but it wasn’t a bad game.  The problem here though is that its just so inferior to the source material on which it is based.  Digitized graphics or not, experienced gamers are going to expect something on the level of Street Fighter II or Street Fighter Alpha (also a launch title I believe) and this doesn’t measure up.  Even though it isn’t the worst game by any means, there are just too many better options in the franchise.  It’s fun for a quick laugh, but there isn’t much of a reason to play Street Fighter: The Movie today.    

6.5/10

Version Differences: One quick caveat here, there was also an arcade version of this game.  Even though arcades were more of a novelty by 1995, I did spend a fair bit of time at any one I could get my parents to take me to, so I have some experience with some of the more common cabinets.  I played a decent amount of the arcade version of Street Fighter:The Movie and it is far, far superior to the console versions.  Consoles had almost caught up to the arcades by this point, but they still had a ways to go and this was proof.  The graphics are way better, the backgrounds are cleaner and the frame rate is way faster.  This makes, the control feel much tighter.  Throw in another character, one of Bison’s soldiers and you have a much better package.  You want to skip the console versions, but the arcade version is absolutely worth a playthrough today.  8.25/10.