FGC #557 Street Fighter: The Movie

If you are concerned about your own struggles with imposter syndrome, please remember that even the big guys aren’t always confident.

Let’s talk about Street Fighter’s identity issues.

A long time ago in an arcade long forgotten, there was Street Fighter 1. The year was 1987, the cabinet was initially based on the concept of pressure-sensitive buttons, and the game… was not that great. Technically everything about Street Fighter was there: Ryu, special moves, boxers marginally based on Mike Tyson; but something was missing. Some particular, undefinable trait was absent from the original Street Fighter formula (it was probably Zangief), so, while Street Fighter was not remembered as a complete bomb, it isn’t remembered as the origin of the genre either. And then someone tried to make a sequel, and we were graced with… Final Fight. What? You were expecting Street Fighter’s nigh-holy descendant? No, much like Devil May Cry accidently being born of Resident Evil’s attempts to iterate, Final Fight was the next mutation of Street Fighter’s gameplay. And, despite the fact that the two franchises should have swapped names right then and there, we would still have to wait a little for Street Fighter 2.

And the secret truth of Street Fighter 2? It is now abundantly clear that no one at Capcom had any idea as to why it was successful.

Street Fighter 2 was popular when I was a kid, and I know that time seemed to flow relatively differently when I was a child. I am aware of this issue, but I’m still pretty confident in saying that between the release of Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3, approximately 12,000 years passed. But don’t worry, children of tomorrow, we had routine Street Fighter 2 content during that time. There was Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition (play as the bosses, even if some are broken!), Street Fighter 2: Turbo (maybe Dhalsim is teleporting on purpose now!), Super Street Fighter 2 (now with four new butts!), and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (one more angry butt!). The same basic gameplay carried the title forward, though, so if you were a Blanka main (because you were awesome), all you ever got out of these upgrades was like one new move, and the ability to make Fei Long feel bad for existing. Which is great… For Capcom, at least, because they could still earn your quarters through releasing the same game over and over again. There was no risk of Street Fighter 2 accidentally becoming Final Fight: Streetwise if you never even tried to make a new Street Fighter sequel. No need to distill the essential “what works” of Street Fighter 2 if you just keep releasing Street Fighter 2: Now with Super Moves. Capcom is happy to see the quarters, you’re happy to play a game that is familiar, and E. Honda is happy just to have a steady paycheck. Everybody’s happy!

But, in the midst of Street Fighter mania, someone had the bright idea to exploit the most popular videogame in the arcades not for a sequel, but a movie. A movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, and Royal Trumpeter #3 of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A movie that, as a result of drawing from a game that had the barest of bones of a plot to begin with, could be anything. Or it could just be Van Damme flip kicking for two hours. Who cares!? Street Fighter: The Movie was not constrained by its source material like some franchises, so it had the potential to be the greatest “videogame movie” of all time.

And that “greatest videogame movie of all time” would inevitably be… Mortal Kombat.

Street Fighter was a bit of a flop.

Apparently the production of Street Fighter was a legendary disaster, so it’s really little surprise that the whole thing turned out a bit off. What’s more, the direction seemed to go well out of its way to include every Street Fighter that had appeared in Street Fighter 2 (give or take the one that was actually supposed to be a movie star), which mean that a lot of characters were adapted in unfortunate ways. Vega is a cage fighter, and Sagat is an arms dealer? Okay, it’s a little GI Joe, but it could work. But Balrog is a camera man in Chun-Li’s employ? That is less defensible. Dhalsim becoming a scientist is a vague stereotype upgrade (at least he isn’t wearing skulls like a necklace anymore), but Zangief as a mindless minion works dramatically less so. And Ryu and Ken go from franchise heroes to… karate hobos. Granted, that’s always been kind of Ryu’s thing (dude probably has an awful credit score), but he’s more of a grifter than the world’s greatest fighter in Street Fighter: The Movie. And, given one of Street Fighter 2’s paramount attributes was allowing the player to choose a “favorite character” out of a very varied (and international!) cast, the fact that the movie reduced most of those luminaries to be sidekicks to one of three “real stars” was a roundhouse to the lil’ Bison.

And then came the videogame tie-in…

You may be thinking that, given Street Fighter: The Movie existed only because it was based on one of the most popular videogames of the time, it did not need another, additional videogame exclusively based on the movie itself. But you’d be wrong, apparently, because Capcom commissioned Street Fighter: The Movie for arcades. And please note that this Street Fighter game was not actually developed by Capcom, but Incredible Technologies, the maniacs behind Time Killers, BloodStorm, and Peggle: The Game Inexplicably Not about Pegging. Why do such a thing? Well, at the time, Mortal Kombat was starting to eat Street Fighter’s lunch, so why not make a Street Fighter title with digitized actors, extra violence, and have it all thrown together by some nerds in Chicago? It worked for Midway and Mortal Kombat, so why not the game that popularized the genre in the first place, too?

Well, it might not work because it sucked, for one thing.

Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Arcade Experience is not the Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat title that was so clearly intended here. This is Street Fighter x Pit Fighter. It’s sloppy. It features (almost) all the familiar Street Fighters and their familiar moves, but in a world that juggles just a little too easy. It feels weightless. It feels… wrong. And the many ways it deliberately apes Mortal Kombat feel particularly slapdash as well. There is an original character that seems to be born of a teenager’s notebook doodles (Blade! He has blades! He’s secretly Guile’s brother!), and he’s got three different color swapped buddies that really stretch the definition of “different”. There’s a stage that is an obvious cross between MK’s The Pit and Shao Kahn’s arena of Mortal Kombat 2. Sometimes digitized human spectators explode. Why? Don’t worry about it. And, while this game does seem to put more of an emphasis on uppercuts, it doesn’t feel enough like Mortal Kombat to warrant the many ways it feels like a lesser Street Fighter 2.

So, naturally, when Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game was ported to the home consoles, Capcom tossed the arcade version in the garbage.

At a time when home consoles were finally reaching that coveted echelon of “arcade perfect”, the concept of anything about Street Fighter: The Movie being arcade perfect was wholly dropped. Now appropriate for a movie game, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Home Game featured a dedicated “story mode” that would not be seen again in the franchise until Street Fighter 5. You can guide Guile through different locations and scenarios, and fight your way up to beating Bison. It’s… not very good, but it feels more like a justified videogame of a movie than its arcade counterpoint. And speaking of being a videogame, this version drops the physics of the arcade version, and returns to gameplay that is virtually indistinguishable from Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Give or take the impact of real digitized actors and actresses versus the stretching and shrinking of animated sprites (yes, Virginia, Ryu’s fist is normally an object of variable size), this is Street Fighter 2, the game you all know and love.

Well… I mean… mostly…

Dhalsim didn’t make the cut. It was probably too hard to figure out a way to make his stretching appear real (short of strapping Roshan Seth to a rack). In his place, there is Sawada, an original character from the movie that also appeared in the arcade game (though with different moves). Blade and his arcade buddies are missing, so sorry if you enjoyed their edgy (ha!) presence. And if you’re playing on the Playstation 1 version (a game that was literally a launch title for the system), well… you’re going to have a bad time. The Playstation wasn’t built for 2-D fighters, and you really need to migrate over to the Saturn to get the true Street Fighter: The Movie: Not A Gift Basket experience. And, oh yeah, if you can play it on the Saturn, there are real Capcom games that are a lot of fun on the system, so maybe just go ahead and ignore the whole thing. Darkstalkers is pretty fun…

So we’ve got two different versions of Street Fighter 2: both based on the original smash hit in one way or another, and both are totally skippable. Why? Well, that’s likely something someone at Capcom circa 1995 would like to know. Hell, maybe they still would like to know. Why is Street Fighter 2 successful? It’s not just the characters, because they’re all (mostly) here, and that didn’t do the trick. The lack of super violence? No. The special moves? Probably not. Whatever made Street Fighter 2 into the juggernaut it became could not be replicated for two different movie games, and two duds were dropped out into the world, never to be seen again (save by bored bloggers bossed around by bots).

Though there is a bright side here. Another movie, this time the animated Street Fighter feature, inspired its own tie-in title. Street Fighter Alpha/Zero started as little more than an excuse for a new, beefier Bison, but it quickly graduated through its own revisions into a worthy successor to the Street Fighter throne. This eventually led to not only the inevitable Street Fighter 3, but also the entire Versus franchise. What separated the Alpha series from its The Movie brethren? More issues than anyone could ever count. But could Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game(s) have been as good and memorable as the Alpha series? Sure! If only someone at Capcom had been able to figure out what made Street Fighter 2 so dang good.

The Street Fighter franchise: it has defined the genre to this very day, yet no one in charge of it had any damn idea why. Bunch of imposters…

FGC #557 Street Fighter: The Movie

• System: A wholly unique experience for the arcades, and then the more traditional version for Sega Saturn and Playstation (1).
• Number of players: The arcade version has a hidden tag team mode (once again aping Mortal Kombat’s endurance matches), but all versions are still just two players.
• Favorite Fighter: Blanka for the home versions (“Charlie” looks so ridiculous!), Ken for the arcade versions. Honestly, in aping Mortal Kombat, none of the fighters feel all that distinct in the arcade, so I might as well be playing as Blade anyway…
• The Specialest Moves: The home version also introduced “EX” versions of regular special moves for the first time in the franchise. If you want super armor, you have a lousy Playstation game to thank.
• What’s in a name: Like in the movies, the jumbled Vega/M. Bison/Balrog triangle is stuck in American mode, even for Japanese audiences. Though, oddly enough, Akuma retains his original Gouki name in his native land. Maybe that’s because he didn’t actually appear in the movie due to Jean-Claude’s inability to win without losing a round?
• Did you know? Street Fighter 5 included a data entry for Blade, aka Gunloc of Saturday Night Slam Masters. This means Street Fighter: The Movie: The Arcade Experience is somehow a canon game in some way.
• Would I play again: I’m not even going to watch the movie again, left alone play the tie-in titles. Making this game may have been the most important part of someone’s life, but for me, it was an unpleasant Tuesday.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Mappy Land for the Nintendo Entertainment System! Let’s visit the house of mouse for some trampoline times! Please look forward to it!