Review #811: Ultra Street Fighter IV

 Greatness born out of laziness.

 I loved Street Fighter X Tekken, despite its garbage DLC practices which played a huge part of why the game bombed so hard. But if Capcom knows one thing it's how to be lazy and sell you a recycled product, so they grabbed all the Street Fighter assets, Rolento, Poison, Hugo, Elena as well as its six stages, they also repurposed Cammy's model to make Decapre and then resold Super Street Fighter IV AE as Ultra Street Fighter IV. Love it or hate it, Street Fighter IV rekindled the mainstream interest in Fighting games, making it a legendary game alongside Street Fighter II. This game came out at a time I was falling out of love with the Fighting genre, no longer watching every Evo and every other Tournament that came out, so I ended up skipping Ultra.

 Truth be told, there are more novelties to the game other than the new characters and stages. Now you can pick a third option when picking your Ultra: W Ultra Combo Double, which nets your character access to both Ultras, albeit a bit weakened to make up for the added tools. There's a new focus attack, Red Focus, which can tank any amount of hits instead of only one. Lastly, there's delayed wake up, to play tricks with your opponent. Nothing to mindboggling, but they are good additions. There are no new offline modes, which kinda suck considering Street Fighter IV was already pretty lacking there, but now you can play Versus matches with Edition Select, letting you pick any SF 4 version of whichever character you like. If you download the free dlc, you also get wacky Omega versions to pick from.

 Included with this game was every piece of DLC released up to that day, this means veteran characters get 3 DLC costumes, Super and AE characters get 2 DLC costumes and the newbies get none. You still need a Street Fighter IV savefile if you want access to colors 11 and 12 for the pre-AE characters, something I found out since my PS3's HDD got murdered a few years ago and didn't have a SFIV save file. Oh, and the last nine new characters(AE plus Ultra's new comers) still don't have Trials, which is ridiculous since they shouldn't be hard to implement, nor do they get Rival cutscenes, making them stand out from the rest of the roster. Remember how every iteration of Street Fighter IV up to now came with very beefy instruction manuals? Nope, not this time, Capcom had to follow their time-honed tradition of cutting corners.

 As far as the new characters go.... I really didn't care about the SF X T newcomers. I guess Hugo is so huge he is fun to fight, but that's it. Surprisingly, I really, really liked Decapre, the lazy model repurpose. She's like a much cooler version of Cammy and isn't wearing a glorified bathing suit.

 While I've got nothing but criticisms about Ultra Street Fighter IV as a product, there's no denying that underneath it all you've got Super Street Fighter IV, a classic through and through. The game is an absolute blast to play, it's always been. That said, I understand why I skipped this game back in the day, I didn't really care about the new characters and the new gameplay mechanics were but a few small nuances to an already spectacular set of mechanics so I never saw any need to get the new update. That said, anyone who is this late in getting into Street Fighter IV should undoubtedly pick up this final version, and someone that never made the jump from Super to AE might find 9 new characters a much more enticing offer.
 9.0 out of 10