Super Street Fighter IV

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Street Fighter IV arrived in April 2010 carrying a lower price tag than a standard retail release, which was itself a statement about what kind of product Capcom was selling. The update to Street Fighter IV had grown too large to ship as downloadable content, yet Capcom resisted charging full price for it. That tension between value and ambition would define the game's entire story.

  Producer Yoshinori Ono declared it the definitive end of the Street Fighter IV series. He named it. He priced it. He then spent months building a separate version for a handheld console he had only recently seen demonstrated. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a game become both a closing statement and a platform for three more years of updates? And what does it mean for a fighting game to reach a new audience without losing the old one?

• 2. The Roster Expands

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  Dee Jay and T. Hawk were supposed to be in Street Fighter IV from the start. Both characters from Super Street Fighter II had been planned for the original game before being dropped. Super Street Fighter IV brought them back, and with them came seven other fighters drawn from across the franchise's history.

  Adon from the original Street Fighter arrived alongside Cody and Guy from Final Fight, all three based on their versions from the Street Fighter Alpha series. Dudley, Ibuki, and Makoto returned from the Street Fighter III series. That brought the returning count to eight, built around the original game's 25 characters for a total roster of 35.

  Two fighters were entirely new. Juri, a South Korean Taekwondo practitioner, carried a device called the Feng Shui Engine implanted in her left eye, which granted her time-warping abilities. She worked for Seth's organization, the Shadaloo Intimidation Network. Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler, entered the game seeking to prove his fighting style the greatest on Earth. Both characters gave the roster a range of physical disciplines and motivations it had not held before.

  Every returning character from the original version received a third alternate costume, while the newly introduced fighters received two. Players who had purchased costume packs for the original Street Fighter IV could carry those purchases forward into the new game, along with two bonus colors unlocked by detecting a save file from that game.

• 3. Mechanics and Modes

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  The Ultra Combo gauge in Super Street Fighter IV functions as a Revenge Meter, charging when the player takes damage. Every character carries at least two Ultra Combos, though only one can be selected per match, in a system that echoes the Super Arts mechanic from the Street Fighter III series.

  Bonus stages familiar from Street Fighter II returned in single-player mode when toggled on. The first challenged players to break a car; the second tasked them with smashing as many barrels as possible before time ran out. These were optional diversions rather than required steps.

  Online play received substantial structural investment. The Replay Channel let players save and share match recordings from around the world. Endless Battle placed the winner against a rotating group of up to eight opponents. Tournament Mode replaced Street Fighter IV's Championship Mode with a single-elimination bracket format. Team Battle supported up to eight participants. A downloadable Tournament Mode was released on the 15th of June, 2010, extending the competitive infrastructure further.

  Draw conditions carried specific consequences in online play. If both players depleted their health meters simultaneously, or held equal health when the timer expired, the result registered as either a Double KO or a draw, with both players losing battle points and player points.

• 4. Ono and the 3DS

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  Before 3D Edition existed, Yoshinori Ono had considered porting Super Street Fighter IV to either the Nintendo DS or the PlayStation Portable. He rejected both. Neither handheld satisfied him.

  Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi changed that. Takeuchi showed Ono a version of Resident Evil 5 running on the Nintendo 3DS. Ono then built a quick version of Super Street Fighter IV for the 3DS in a couple of weeks. Nintendo saw it and wanted it shown at E3 2010. Ono refused, judging it not ready. He allowed Nintendo to use a few screenshots and discuss the game, nothing more.

  The Dynamic Mode, an over-the-shoulder camera angle that replaced the traditional 2D plane view, was included early in development partly to attract casual players. Ono observed that Ken and Ryu were the characters most commonly picked by lapsed players returning to the series, and the new angle suited them particularly well. In a conversation with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, Ono compared the touchscreen control system to the Super Guide function in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, framing both as tools for approachability.

  The pedometer feature of the 3DS, which rewarded coins based on steps taken, prompted Ono to connect coin spending to the figurine collection system. The StreetPass function allowed nearby players to swap character figurines, each carrying their own statistics, and assemble teams for figurine battles. Ono also designed a Fighter Request function so that any nearby player could accept a challenge from another player's game, with the explicit goal of building a local community around the title.

  One technical limitation shaped the final product quietly. Character facial expressions during Ultra move sequences were handled by a different method than in the console version. Ono acknowledged this as the one misgiving he had, but concluded no one would notice on a small screen.

• 5. Critical Reception

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  Edge magazine retroactively awarded Super Street Fighter IV a ten out of ten in its October 2013 issue. At the time of that award, only twenty-two other games in the magazine's twenty-year history had received the same score.

  At launch, IGN gave the game a 9.0 and an Editor's Choice award. GameSpot also scored it 9.0, describing it as standing on the broad shoulders of its predecessor. GameTrailers rated it 9.3. Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann gave it five out of five, arguing it added enough new material to justify skipping the intermediate upgrade steps the Street Fighter series typically demanded of fans.

  The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences named it Fighting Game of the Year at the 14th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. In 2011, Complex ranked it 40th on a list of the best fighting games of all time. By 2019, Game Informer had placed it 10th on the same type of ranking.

  The 3DS version drew its own wave of criticism and praise. Computer and Video Games gave it a 9.0, with reviewer Tamoor Hussain calling the console version the greatest fighter of its generation. Pocket Gamer's Damien McFerran described it as one of the finest portable fighting games he had encountered, despite some minor interface issues. The Telegraph's Tom Hoggins acknowledged it was yet another update of a two-year-old game, but wrote that it was built with enough skill and pride to win him over anyway.

  Not all assessments were unconditional. Eurogamer's Johnny Minkley noted it was not a serious alternative for high-level competitive play. The British publication games(TM) argued that its status as arguably the best portable Street Fighter owed more to the poor quality of previous portable entries than to exceptional achievement on its own terms. NGamer UK called it a staggering port of an exceptional game, but withheld the label of definitive version.

• 6. Arcade Edition and Beyond

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  On the 4th of April, 2010, Yoshinori Ono confirmed an arcade version of Super Street Fighter IV during the Japanese Street Fighter IV finals. Playtests followed at various arcades and at the Tougeki Super Battle Opera tournament.

  The arcade version added twin brothers Yun and Yang from the Street Fighter III series. It also introduced Evil Ryu and Oni as hidden bosses, teased in a launch trailer. When arcade units reached locations around the United States, players discovered the characters before Capcom was ready. Videos were flagged and accounts suspended at Capcom's request. Evil Ryu became officially playable on the 25th of March, 2011. Oni followed on the 8th of April, 2011.

  The home-platform version of Arcade Edition arrived in July 2012, bringing those arcade changes and the four new characters to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. It was sold both as downloadable content for existing owners and as a standalone retail game.

  Ultra Street Fighter IV was announced in July 2013 and released on the 4th of June, 2014. It added five characters: Rolento, Elena, Poison, and Hugo, all ported from their Street Fighter x Tekken versions, plus Decapre, one of M. Bison's Dolls who had appeared as a non-player character in Street Fighter Alpha 3. Six additional stages came with the update. The version Ono had described in 2010 as the definitive last packaged product had, by 2014, generated two further packaged products. His earlier statement naming Super Street Fighter IV as a closing point remains part of the record.

• 7. The Juri OVA

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  In Asia, the Collector's Edition of the Xbox 360 version of Super Street Fighter IV included a voucher for a downloadable animated film featuring Juri. The film runs forty minutes and serves as an origin story for the character, positioned as a canonical prologue to the game's events.

  The film was fully dubbed in English but was not made available outside of Asia at the time of release. It remained a regional exclusive until 2012, when it was included as part of the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Collector's Set. That set was the first time audiences outside Asia could access it through official channels. For a character introduced as brand new in Super Street Fighter IV, the existence of a dedicated standalone film signals the degree of investment Capcom placed in her.