Now, it is most definitely the SFxT announcement and videos that has got me more interested in the SF world again and just yesterday my curiosity got the better of me and I bought SF4. The store did not have SSF4 and SF4 was only £6 anyway. I figured that if I liked it that much I would just trade in for SSF4 or maybe even get the Arcade Edition.
I need not have worried. Upon start up I was getting excited, the art style of the game had always impressed me and the videos of the game I had watched did look pretty cool. The intro sequence started up. I was buzzing with anticipation. The all too familiar art style that I really do enjoy came flowing onto the screen, It was great and I watched it all the way through. But what was that music I was hearing? It smacked of 80's power ballad and I did not feel that it matched the visuals in any way at all.
My excitement is a little deflated at this point. Onto the menu screen, Practice mode is where I need to go to first of all as I do not know how to play SF4 at all. I select my favorite SF character Blanka and choose Guile as my punch bag. After jabbing at all of the buttons to find out what does what and trying to put together some semblance of a combo but failing, I head into the menu to look for a moves list. The moves list is vague and needs some deciphering but probably just because I am more used to the Tekken style. Something that I was not happy about at all was that it was so small on the screen. My failing eyesight could barely make out what it was showing. Further to that, what it did show consisted of about 10 moves. "is that all?" I remarked to nobody in particular.
Once I had performed all of those moves on the lifeless Guile (except the ultra of course) I switched the practice mode to CPU so that I could actually put the practice into action. It took a while to get Blanka's super and ultra moves down but after a while I decided to venture into Arcade mode. As I started up arcade mode (on medium difficulty. Easy is cheating in my opinion.) the game asked me if I wanted to activate some sort of option that allows online players to challenge you whilst playing through arcade mode. "that sound like a fun idea!" I thought. So I activated it.
The first arcade battle and it wa against Guile. It was easy, he barely touched me in the first round. In the second round a new challenger entered the ring. An online battle loomed. I had heard reports of SF veterans venturing online and getting destroyed battle after battle online due to the "deep and complex fighting system" that is "easy to learn but hard to master." I braced myself for a thrashing! I selected Blanka since he was the only fighter I knew how to use. My opponent chose Sagat. The fight was easy and I won in 2 rounds. My challenger must have been as much of a SF noob as I was.
Back to arcade mode, I finished off Guile and up next was C.Viper. This fight was just as easy but while I was playing through the match there were 5 online challenges. I took them all on, losing 3 and winning 2. Back to arcade mode again, I beat C.Viper and moved on to Rufus. This match went to 3 rounds but I emerged the victor. Abel was up next, he was dispatched after 3 rounds again and then came Sagat. It didn't take long to realise that he likes to spam his fireball a lot. I was struggling to get through and I was having a hard time activating Blanka's super and ultra. I got pasted time after time until the 10th continue I decided that I would need more practice asmy lack of SF skill was taking a lot of shine from the game for me.
I took a break, made some tea and watched some SF4 Blanka videos on youtube. I learned some new, useful tricks and headed back in. My new tricks did not help. I was getting destroyed by supers and ultras every time and I was still struggling to activate Blanka's supers or ultra. I had to try somebody else. So who did I choose? Ryu. His moves were easy to learn and his supers and ultra was easy to activate. I flew through the arcade mode on the back of specials, supers and focus attacks. Seth took about 5 continues but he fell to a well timed focus attack.
Once that was done and the trophy was in the bag I realised that it was getting on for 0130 and I had better get to sleep. My initial impressions of SF4 after 3 hours of gameplay? It is a vast improvement over the last SF game I had played on PS2 but a far cry from the Tekken system that I am so familiar with. When it is widely regarded that Tekken is technically inferior to SF and the SF system is considered to be far more deep and complex compared to Tekken's control system, I have to disagree. I found the SF move roster to be as shallow as the characters and difficulty difference between activating supers and ultras for the different characters is vast. I could not use Blanka's supers or ultras effectively at all but Ryu's came at will. It seems like if I wanted to be able to use Blanka in the way he was intended I would have to use an arcade stick.
As for the characters I find the comedic SF characters such as Blanka or Zangief preferable to the serious characters like Ryu or Sagat. In the Tekken series the comedy characters are an annoyance.
All in all I did enjoy the game so far. Just not as much as I had hoped I would. I will definitely play through with as many characters as I can and try to unlock as much in game content as possible but I'm glad I only sprang £6 for it. SFxT may not be the definite purchase on PSVITA that I thought it might be but we will see. Maybe further gameplay will change my mind.
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