Street Fighter IV Review

By 2008 the fighting game was a museum piece. Street Fighter IV brought it back by being unembarrassed about what it was: the same footsies, the same links, the same characters most people already knew, rendered in a thick ink style that reads instantly on a stream and never looks like a muddy 3D approximation of a sprite. The focus attack is the design keystone, an absorb and counter that gives every character a way to break out of pressure and a way to convert, and the dash cancel gave the top end a combo language deep enough to sustain a decade of tournaments.

Newcomers got generous input windows without the ceiling dropping. The reservations are real. Seth is an unfair final boss with a teleport and a command grab, the vortex setups that dominated the metagame reward one knockdown with a coin flip loop, and Capcom's habit of shipping Super, Arcade Edition and Ultra as separate purchases wore the audience down.