Street Fighter X Tekken (PC) Review

 (Originally posted on April, 2016)

(2012, PC)

Dusting off Street Fighter X Tekken was in large part due to the release of Street Fighter V, which looks both pretty and fun, but had too many issues surrounding its launch to get my $60. I don’t tend to pay that much for a new game unless I’ve been completely pulled onto the hype train and going each day without has become sweetly torturous. Still, now that I’m really in the mood for some Street Fighter, in the meantime why not try a game that was already bought but barely touched? Hell, years ago I even paid the extra $5 for the snafu that was the (already in the game code) “downloadable” characters. That felt wrong to do, even during a big sale, but I couldn’t just leave Dudley and Elena un-selectable. Exactly what Capcom wanted! Not looking to learn all the techniques/commands and certainly not ready to get whooped online, this review is merely based on casual arcade mode play after quickly going through the in-game tutorial.

Street Fighter and Tekken are both one-on-one fighters, but sit on wildly different ends of the spectrum in how they play, so the announcement of this game was a huge surprise, far more so than the Capcom and SNK crossovers. On the Capcom side, pretty much all the characters were already present in Street Fighter IV, with the only (relative) newcomers being Hugo, Poison, Rolento and Elena. I really would have preferred fresher, stranger Street Fighters, but all that recycling likely facilitated the game’s impressive roster size. Unbefitting of Capcom and their old sprite copy-pasting ways, the character models at least appear to be unique (possibly heavily modified) from Street Fighter IV. I’ve always played the Tekken series very casually, yet from what I can tell the speedier, simpler to control cast seems well represented. Moving Heihachi and Paul with 6 buttons and 2D fighter-like input commands feels like being born somewhere else in the multi-verse, but Capcom handled their transition well enough to make the experience feel like a novel, alternative take on the property; not at all clunky and distracting.

Playing the game for only about 10 hours total, there’s several new gameplay systems I didn’t commit to learning, as they didn’t seem very crucial if your only purpose is to make it past the end boss. I did make sure to remember the universal Light>Medium>Strong combo which first launches your enemy, then follows with your team quickly tagging in time for a brief chance to do some further juggling. Easy to learn, this combo is quite fun to constantly experiment and play around with. Being used to Capcom fighter mainstays such as throws, EX moves, super moves, tagging and more, all those features came to me effortlessly. I didn’t even try the gem system, which from what the game explained seemed too out there from what I would want implemented in a fighter. Also going untouched, a challenge mode with dozens of various missions also awaits players. My shallow level of experience with the game the left me feeling that it’s decent, speedy fun with easy to perform combos. However, stacked up against (some of) the competition, it lacks the more tangible physics and mind games of the III series, the outrageousness and fun “stickiness” while comboing in Capcom’s Marvel games or even just the truly exemplary presentation and style of various other fighters, which are all far more likely to lure me back.

If not outwitting a player in the arcade (remember those?) or online, most of the fun I get from a fighting game comes from taking in all the rich artistry and (often questionable) cultural representation of the stages, and this game doesn’t disappoint at all. Only missing the cast of Jurassic Park and those cool yellow/green jeeps, fighting in front of the electrified fencing of a packed dinosaur preserve sounds wacky, but doesn’t seem so out of place when supernatural warriors like Dhalsim and Yoshimitsu are duking it out. The strangeness is just beginning, as later in the game, alien power-infused Wooly mammoths come in dangerously close pursuit of the huge, speeding snow-mobile that you’re fighting on. Hidden in the autumn mountains of Japan, the Mishima Estate is gorgeous, with fights taking place from multiple locations. The Final Fight stage, set in Sodom’s latest wa-fuu inspired housing project is full of hijinks and cameos from Metro City’s best and worst citizens. Accompanied by ridiculous but fun J-pop instrumentals, the garish Dekotora gathering turns the game’s neon aesthetic from the usual 10 all the way up to 20. After that level in particular, I felt like staring at my brown carpet floor for at least five minutes.

Just like the stage design, the music is well above average. About half is based on the energizing, drum & bass heavy style of the late-90s Tekken games. The rest is Capcom’s ‘good’ SF4ish sound, with occasionally flashes of true greatness. The main theme is fantastic, sounding like a long locked-away masterpiece that could have carried any of Capcom’s hits during their prolific 90s period. I don’t know when I’ll play the game again, but it will at least live on within my gym playlist. One area the presentation fails is in the repetitive, somewhat lazily put together endings, with seemingly farmed-out FMV models that often look so bizarre that they belong with Megaman and Strider (by that I mean the weirdoes from the NES and Genesis boxarts!). Getting a believable story out of Street Fighter, Tekken and a magical Pandora’s box crashing from space is just too much, so the general tone immediately surrenders itself to comedy and mischief, even from such evil incarnate as Bison and Juri.

With the individual Street Fighter and Tekken entries standing taller on their own, nothing in particular about the game makes me want to stick around for long. The fighting engine is rather system-packed for complete newbies, but if you’re a fan of both series, you’ll likely find that Street Fighter X Tekken is a fun experiment full of sights, sounds and fan service that makes it well worth picking up for cheap, short term amusement at the very least. If nothing else, this game made me want to get my hands on Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V more than ever before. Surely both Capcom and Namco could live with that result.