And, hopefully, the final stand-alone rerelease.
Street Fighter II is more than '
just' a game. It's a classic. It's a trendsetter. It's a flippin'
legend. It's
also incredibly dated. Ultra Street Fighter II is one last update of this timeless classic, with new characters and the fancy HD sprites from Street Fighter II HD Remix and little else new. This is Capcom at their
laziest, and trust me, they are lazy.
Booting up the game presents you with a few options: Arcade Mode, a 12-man ladder fight with an ending for each character at the end, Offline and Online VS, 'Buddy Battle', in which you and another Player or a CPU team up to take down a single opponent, which could've been neat, but you
can't even opt to be the single fighter against two opponents. Way of the Hado, a
horrible first-person mode in which you use motion control to perform Hadokens, Shoryukens and Tatsumaki-senpukyakuus against Bison's soldiers. Training Mode, which is self explanatory, and, finally, a Sprite edit mode, in which you can create custom colors for your fighters.
Admittedly, Sprite edit is a nice addition, but SF II sprites are pretty basic, so you can'd do much with them, and the game places some odd limits in an effort to prevent things like 'Nude Cammy'. I thought I'd enjoy this mode, I usually like tinkering with color palettes in fighting games when allowed, but this time it felt...
lacking. There's one final option in the menu, an art collection, which contains various artbooks. To be fair, these images are
VERY high quality, although most of the artists have a
strange fixation on Chun-Li and her nipples.
I remember when SFIIHDRemix was released that I
longed for a way to own the game physically, since the new sprites looked fantastic. This cart is exactly what I've always wanted... but you should be
careful with what you wish for. Firstly, you can change between the old and new graphics on the options menu, so if you are a purist you can simply toggle the new graphics off. Secondly, the more you look at these new graphics the more you'll notice how they are
not as good as they look in stills. The art direction is fantastic, muscles look big, faces look badass and what not, but as good as the game looks in screenshots, the animations are a bit choppy anyways since they have the same amount of frames as the old graphics. As a matter of fact, these new, better-defined sprites make the lack of frames even more
noticeable than before.
Another issue is that sometimes proportions look
off. Fei-Long's head is too big for his body, a problem share with Cammy when she crouches. Or Dhalsim's dancing victory animation, his legs alternate between being shadowed from one frame to the next, which looks very
jarring. The proportions issue is also present on a few backgrounds, like Chun-Li's stage. The art looks great in pictures, but looses a lot of its luster when animated. While you can swap between old and new graphics when playing, you only get the HD endings.
The two new characters are a
scam. New characters on this old game sounded too good to be true, and it was. Capcom was too cheap to hire new pixel-artists, so they just repurposed Ken, Ryu and Akuma's frames to create Violent Ken and Evil Ryu. Violent Ken and Evil Ryu's winposes are just reused frames from their attack animations, one of V.Ken's worst is the one in which he stands mid-Shoryuken, looking as
constipated as constipated can be. They don't have a single new animation, Violent Ken's teleport uses Akuma's teleport sprites and E.Ryu's Shin Goku Satsu uses Akuma's sprites too. As I said, this is Capcom at their laziest. Since Akuma has always been deemed too overpowered for competitive play, there's a new, nerfed version of Akuma... and a hidden Shin Akuma version that plays like his Boss incarnation. They share the same sprites,
naturally.
As for the game itself, it has been entirely rebalanced... but Violent Ken seems to dominate competitive play since he is just too good. I
couldn't begin to get into the nitty gritty of how each character has changed, but if you enjoy Street Fighter II you'll be right at home here. Sadly, the joycons are not an optimal way to play the game. I settled for using the four buttons as opposed to the analogue stick, but both options were
unreliable for performing special moves.
If I were to speak about Street Fighter II's qualities it'd be an easy 8. The game is very old, but darn it if it isn't still a
great game. Sadly, this port does it no justice. For today's standards this release is lacking meat. There's a reason Street Fighter II's most modern rereleases are either budget-priced or compiled with other games, because a re-re-re-release of an older game as it was just doesn't fly anymore. And they tried to mask how lazy the port was with the new characters, but they are the laziest additions the series has ever seen, even lazier than Decapre, at least she had different inputs from Cammy and wore a mask.
5.0 out of 10
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