Street Fighter

 After damn near 30 years of gaming, I finally got the chance to play the original Street Fighter.

As a kid, I always thought it was weird that no one ever talked about Street Fighter 1, like, ever. We always just called Street Fighter II "Street Fighter" since it was the first one most people experienced. It was the game on all the store shelves, it was the in all the arcades, it was basically everywhere. Most of us never even knew there was a Street Fighter I, much less what console it was on (the Turbografx 16, for the record) or where to find an arcade cabinet. I learned about it for the first time via the Street Fighter II Turbo/Champion Edition players guide, where it's referenced in the history section. But it wasn't until this past week that I was able to actually get my hands on it, thanks to finally caving and getting the SF 30th Anniversary Edition.

It's always interesting to go back and look at first games in well-known series' to see how their respective groundwork was laid. Oftentimes, these games couple obviously compelling gameplay elements while also suffering from issues that have yet to be worked through by designers and developers. The original Final Fantasy is a deeply flawed game, but it's still a blast to play despite its glaring technical issues. Whether you are playing the NES original or one of the many remakes with quality-of-life improvements added, you can see exactly why everyone loved the game so much, why it became so popular and how it directly led to a long line of topflight predecessors. The same is true of Mega Man, the first game is very rough around the edges but it's easy to see its influence and understand why it spawned eleventy billion spinoffs and sequels. These games are flawed, but still fun to play, even if titles that followed them up made drastic improvements in the technical and gameplay departments. A lot of series firsts may be more influential than essential at this point, but they are still very good games. And Street Fighter 1...does not fall into that category. Simply put, this game is awful and while I can see the mechanical resemblance, it's absolutely shocking that it is the progenitor of a game I called objectively the greatest of all time.

You only have two playable characters, with Ryu selectable as the first player and Ken as the second. The arcade mode is pretty standard, you play as Ryu fighting through a series of opponents from the U.S., U.K., Japan, China and Thailand. You will face Street Fighter stalwarts like Mike, Joe, Retsu, Geki and Lee. A few characters did eventually make their way back into the series, with Birdie, Gen and Adon all returning in the Street Fighter Alpha games. Defeat all of these opponents and you will be met with a much more recognizable foe, Sagat, who serves as the final boss. It seems a little light, but that was relatively standard for the time. There weren't really too many one-on-one fighting games at the time, so there really aren't many contemporaries to compare it to. But the character design in general just isn't very good. These guys are as generic as they get, Mike and Joe look and fight exactly like you would think characters named Mike and Joe would, though Mike is obviously an early version of Balrog. Birdie and Adon were probably the most interesting characters (besides the three main SF characters) and it makes sense that they eventually brought them back, but the rest of these guys are as generic as generic can get. That's especially jarring coming from a series that created so many unique and memorable characters.

But that is far from the biggest issue with Street Fighter. That would be the controls, which are among the worst I have ever experienced in a video game. Remember how I said the control in Street Fighter II is near perfect? Yeah, that's not the case here. Sure, it's the same scheme and SFI has to be given credit for establishing the then-innovative control scheme we have all come to know and love. Three kicks, three punches, weak, medium and heavy, hold back to block, we all know it. But the problem with SFI is that the controls barely work. Everything is super delayed, I felt like I had to press a button three or four times to just throw one attack. And the movement? Don't even get me started. Ryu feels like he's moving through clay, and you have to lay on the joystick just to get him to move ever so slightly. It's one of the slowest, least responsive video games I've ever experienced in my life and it ruins the debut of a control scheme that's so well designed that it's still copied to this day. I honest to god thought my controller was broken it was so bad. There are special moves, Ryu and Ken both have their trademark Hadoukens, hurricane kicks and dragon punches. But good luck activating them. I only know its possible because I've seen gameplay footage of it happening, I never once successfully fired off a special move. I think part of this is by design, as the special moves take a ton of health away from opponents.

That would be all well and good, but every attack is so powerful it doesn't really matter. I had Mike drain my life bar in three normal attacks, and not even fierces, just strongs and shorts. That is absolutely ridiculous, especially knowing how hard it is to react to everything and how difficult it is to move. The hit detection is horrible, hitting people and getting hit felt like it was almost random, I would be winning rounds and all of the sudden I would just take three to five hits and lose. I felt like the best strategy was just to get one or two hits in and turtle up for the rest of the round. Many of the opponents have projectiles and it's almost impossible to close distance on these guys, especially since you can't consistently throw out hadoukens. At least it's balanced, Ryu and Ken also hit like trucks, but it leads to some really short, boring rounds. The invincibility frames on hit also don't seem like they make any sense and I always felt like I was punished way too harshly for trying to be aggressive. Part of that is on me, I kept trying to hit SFII combos and forgot I was playing SFI, but it was still unbelievably frustrating.

The graphics are below average, but passable for the time period. The character models look good and they are actually animated fairly well. The backgrounds, however, look like they were just still images copied and pasted into a Microsoft Paint document. The Mt. Rushmore background is particularly hilarious. It's not the worst I've ever seen, but it's shocking how bad some of these look when compared to the iconic stages presented in SFII. The character portraits aren't the greatest, but they definitely established the series' style going forward. Seeing Ryu as a ginger is kind of funny, I'm going to guess that wasn't intentional. The post-fight pictures are somewhere between hilarious and disturbing, with your fallen enemies looking more like they've been in a serious car accident rather than a fist fight. The sound though? It's uniquely terrible. I guess it's not the sound so much as it is the voices. I can't even really do justice to how abysmal these samples are, it's like nothing I've ever heard. Every character has the same phrases and voice on the post-fight screens, and all of these sound the same. Every single one sounds like someone who has been ripping shots for hours trying to read a cue card while someone holds a pillow over their face. The announcer sounds like he's trying to say "you win" with a hundred marshmallows shoved in his mouth. I know it was the late 80's, but there were way better examples of voice sampling in games at that point. I don't know if the whole package is worse than Rocky and Bulwinkle in the auditory department, but the voices are definitely as bad as anything in that game.

I really wish there was more to say about the first game in an iconic series, but there just isn't. Street Fighter did get relatively popular, though it wouldn't gain the massive amount of traction of its successor. Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I know it made its way to a lot of home computers, so maybe it was in more homes than I'm giving it credit for and my own bias as a non-PC gamer is shining through. But that doesn't change that it never made its way to any of the major home consoles of the time...and maybe that was for the best. Street Fighter is not a very good game at all. It's not an "aged poorly" thing either, this wouldn't have been all that much better in 1987 than it is now. I find that to be common when it comes to bad controls. Graphics, sound, story, gameplay, all of those things age and different gamers from different generations are going to have different opinions on those things. But bad controls are bad controls, no matter when a game came out. Control schemes can be subjective, sure. But if a game that was as stiff and unresponsive as this came out today, it would get hammered for having bad control. If it came out in the 90's, it would get slammed for having bad control. Hell, if it came out in the 70's it would get slammed for having bad control. As I think I've made pretty clear, I'm not a big fan of the "aged poorly" argument. There are tons of series firsts I would absolutely go back and play. The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Mega Man, I could list them all day. Those games are all worth going back and playing. But Street Fighter is absolutely not. Maybe fire it up once as a curiosity, but after that, stick with Street Fighter II if you want your old school SF fix.

3/10