Review #212: Street Fighter X Tekken(VITA)

 Oh boy, have I been waiting to write about this one....

 Street Fighter X Tekken was one of last generation's biggest fiascoes. Lemme paint the picture, the first teaser was released, Kazuya beating the hell out of poor Dan. That trailer alone was one of the reasons I wanted to get a then-current gen system. As time went by, the hype surrounding the game grew larger and Capcom spent a lot in their campaign, they even financed a reality-show that pitted two teams against each other. Fans from both Tekken and Street Fighter were hyped, Fighting Game pros would sing the game praises, the game was a sure sell. And then it released, and on the very same day, DLC characters and costumes were found on the disc. 'Wait, maybe it's just data for the characters'. Nope, the full models were found. 'Maybe they aren't finished' some hoped, heck, Ono himself talked about how he wanted Blanka to make it in but they couldn't port him properly... and the very next day, people found a way to make these DLC characters available, and they were completed in their entirety, they even had Prologues and Endings. And then Capcom came with their usual bullcrap 'It's to make it easier for people that don't but the DLC to play against people that do'. Whatever. Capcom wanted to make SF X T a DLC cow and milk it for all it was worth, and it backfired on their faces. What's worse, while the game was fun to play, assuming you forgave Capcom for screwing you over, it wasn't so much fun to watch. Professional matches would often end in time outs, and would end up as an stalling game. They patched it numerous times, but it was too late. Heck, one of the patches added a game-freezing bug that they didn't patch well until a week after the fact. Even worse, they would tell their investors that the lackluster sales were due to the saturation of the genre. Bullcrap. And this is where I'm coming from, someone who was unbelievably hyped for the crossover of two of his favorite fighting game franchises, and how Capcom screwed up in the name of money.

 Where do I begin? The game uses the Street Fighter's standard 6-button configuration for your normal moves, while inputting certain motions with the joystick and pressing a button will produce a Special or Super Move. Tekken characters get motion specials as well as some simple attack strings to try to reproduce Tekken's strings. I think it worked well, for what it was. As far as unique mechanics go, the game borrows Tekken Tag's ruleset: You pick two characters, and as soon as one of them loses all their life, you lose the round. Now then, being a Capcom game, of course you get a three-tiered energy gauge, EX moves consume one bar, while Super Moves consume two. Alternatively, each character can charge one of their Special moves in order to get a free Super, it's very impractical, usually. Using all three bars you can use a Cross Assault, to summon your ally for a while and pummel the enemy two-on-one, or use a Cross Art, a move in which both of your characters use a Super Move on the enemy. Since you do pick two characters, you can tag with them by using Switch Cancel, which consumes some energy gauge, or use a Cross Rush, by double tapping a Fierce Kick or a Strong Punch mid-combo, in order to tag out while leaving the enemy in a juggle state. Worth mentioning is that the combo system is much more lenient that Street Fighter 4's, probably to make it easier to juggle, and I quite liked it. Then there's the Pandora Mode, by sacrificing a character with little health left, you can strengthen your remaining character, for a few seconds, and if you fail to defeat your enemy before said few seconds are up, you lose the round. Pandora is a terrible mechanics, that they patched a couple of times, but never managed to make it any useful. Lastly, Gems. The least we say about them the better, the Fighting Game Community shunned them, and casuals didn't care for them, it was just Capcom trying to make money by selling you stat-enhancing KBs of data.

 Capcom was so invested in milking the most money out of the consumer that they made the features as awkward as possible. Take Customization, which should have been awesome, for example. By the time this version was released, a ton of colors had already been released on the Console, but out of the box you only get FOUR measly colors. Let me remind you that these colors are ALREADY ON THE DISC, but they were made free DLC for two purposes: A) Get you into the store, which is one of the Menu options by the way, to try to break you into buying DLC and B) Making you think that Capcom was giving you stuff for free. Customization should've been awesome, instead you first have to spent five minutes activating over 10 different individual Color Palette downloads through the slow as molasses interface. It's not a fun experience. The worst part about it is that the colors are fairly limited, and they aren't even organized, why not put all the yellows together? It's so stupid, a Color Wheel would've been a much better, smarter way to allow for customization. But if they did it that way, they wouldn't have made you think that you were getting extra stuff for free, or you wouldn't have the need to even get into the Store. Heck, you get a Trophy for entering the Store. Capcom was that DESPERATE into getting you in the Store.

 I'm not done yet. Each character gets two costumes, and most of these are downright stupid. They were sold $1 a pop(52 characters x 2 = $104. Plus $15 for the DLC characters. Plus $ for the base game. Then there's some the gems...), To be fair, the idea behind the 'Swap Costumes', having Street Fighters cosplaying as Tekken characters and vice versa, was genius, but they went for either Humor or Fanservice, making most of the quite ridiculous and unappealing. The PSP version only includes the 12 DLC characters, costumes must be bought... unless you got a new copy, which includes a code that nets you costumes for 38 characters. What?? Let me remind you that both the Console Discs and PSVita card have EVERYTHING already on it, so... why do we only get 38 costumes? Why? Money, that's why. Money so that you can download 100 KB unlock keys for stuff that's already on your disc/card. Way to go, Capcom, way to go. Low Sales were definitely due to saturation of the genre.... the DLC genre they must've meant. Why make such a big deal about the DLC? Because Capcom made a big deal out of it, they wanted their DLC cow so badly that they compromised the game's integrity, heck, their integrity as a company, in order to make more money.

 As far as ways to play, it's actually fairly decent. There's the Arcade Ladder, Kumite(Survival), Training, Challenge Mode which houses; Trial, each character gets their own set, Mission, which has you fight certain fights under certain rules and Tutorial; and the already mentioned Customization. As far as the VITA port goes, they also tacked on forced touch controls for customization and traversing the gallery. They aren't too bad, but the fact that you are forced to turn the VITA 90 degrees every time you want to set gems or colors is pretty annoying. There's also optional touchscreen 'buttons' to allow for shortcuts when battling, this I'm OK with, it's optional and can be pretty convenient. That said, I felt the PS Vita lent itself well Street Fighter X Tekken.

 I also want to talk about characters. Street Fighter characters get a very few new faces(Hugo, Poison, Elena and Rolento), and the rest of the cast got very few new animations. This I wouldn't mind had the DLC characters not been, well, DLC characters. Which on the PSVita they are not, so it's kind of a moot point, but I wanted to mention it. The Tekken characters were done relatively well, I loved seeing them in Capcom Style, and I felt the translated them well. However, for some reason the animations for the dashes look... off, on every character, both Street Fighter and Tekken, almost... unfinished? These look fairly weird for some reason, which is inexcusable. Furthermore, you might recognize some of the animations on the Tekken cast as... borrowed, from other Street Fighter 4's characters, heck, some people claim that some of the Tekken's models borrow from some of SF 4's cast.... Regardless, as good as their overall appearance is, I feel as if story-wise, Tekken characters got misrepresented immensely, particularly poor Xiaoyu and Elena, Tekken characters are like caricatures of their other selves.

 But the thing is, are the 12 new DLC characters worth it? That's the only reason you'd want this version over the Console ones, and... they are, kinda. As far as the SF side goes, you get Elena, which is alright, but almost every DLC Tekken character offers something unique to the table, which I really liked. Elena and Wulong were particularly fun to use. And, hey, as 'vanilla' as Bryan's moveset is, he looks so insanely badass. The game also has some gorgeous cutscenes, for the Opening and Endings, but for some reason they ran very poorly on my VITA. I only read about one other instance of this, but no one seems to be mentioning it? Plus, the game will drop some frames every now and then, this wasn't a total deal breaker since it was fairly rare, but more competitive players won't like it.

 As far as content goes, the VITA version nets you 55 characters. There's the 38 base characters, the 12 DLC characters and Sony's bonus five. Pacman I didn't care for, and Bad Boxart Megaman is living proof that Megaman fans can't take a joke. No, Capcom is not 'teasing' you that you are not getting a Megaman game, knowing Ono, he just thought it'd be funny. As characters, they are both terrible. Then there's Kuro and some other cat dressed up as Ryu, they are both terrible characters as well. Lastly there's Infamous' Cole which is actually pretty good. Still, Xbox players aren't missing out. There's also 11 stages, 10 without counting the Training Stage, and they are... meh. They are swarming with character cameos, but I would've preferred something that... referenced Tekken and Street Fighter locations instead of... of what we got. And yes, 10 stages is pretty lame, they obviously spent all their budget on the pretty cutscenes, amazing promotional story-videos(Which are not included in the Gallery, for some reason) and the reality show.

 Expecting a handheld port to look as good as the Console version is just silly, however, it looks pretty darn good, occasional FPS drop aside. As a matter of fact, it looks leaps and bounds above the 3DS port of SF IV, clothes actually have physics now! Stages have lost some animations and other minor details, but, once again, they are much better looking than the Street Fighter 3DS port's stages. Basically, it's not just a 'good looking port', it's a 'good looking game'. The music is fairly good as well, and so is the voice acting, both Japanese and English.

 Street Fighter X Tekken is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with Capcom, nay, gaming as of late. That said, would I recommend it? Yes and no. Competitive players stay away, the framerate isn't locked at 60 and what you really want is an Arcade Stick, but casual players like me? I gotta say, having all 55 characters is pretty darn tempting, but it also means losing out on playing against other people(Unless you coerce them into buying a VITA and SF X T). Basically, it's a lose-lose situation. The sad part about it? I liked Street Fighter X Tekken, I had fun with the pseudo-juggling system, I enjoyed the simplicity of the mechanics, I loved seeing the Tekken characters in Capcom style, I had fun customizing the colors of the character... but Capcom did it darnedest to let you know that they were trying to get into your wallet, and it's hard to shake it off.
 6.0 out of 10.