Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers – Review

Street Fighter II literally defined the fighting game genre as we know it today. Mechanics that made their debut in 1991’s Street Fighter II continue to be used widely in fighters today. Street Fighter II was wildly popular in the mid-nineties as well with releases in arcades and most any home system that could handle it. It’s incredibly important, and so rightfully commands nostalgia and respect. The question we need to ask now though, is given the evolution of the genre it helped create, does Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers have a place in today’s games landscape?

For the uninitiated, Street Fighter II pits you and an opponent against each other in an arena duel to the knockout. Each of the 19 character roster has their own move set and fighting style to learn. Basic attacks can be pulled off with single buttons, but to master a character you’ll need to learn their special, unique and super attacks. There’s a huge amount of depth to each character, and learning how to adapt to a variety of situations is key to success here.

Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers is largely based on Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, a game which released on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008. The new character art, animation and remixed music are all lifted from this earlier release, aside from the newly introduced characters ‘Evil Ryu’ and ‘Violent Ken’. The main mode of play alone is the Arcade mode where you must fight your way through a series of fights of escalating difficulty until you are victorious and set a high score. It’s a mode of play that made sense given the game’s arcade origins but feels like little more than an obligation today. The meat of the game then is in its Versus mode where you can challenge other human players. As with any fighter, playing against an opponent of similar skill is exhilarating. Learning and improving your play is key and as enjoyable as it has ever been – but it does take time, and whether it’s worth the time to learn and compete in Street Fighter II today is questionable.

There are some dubiously valuable new features exclusive to the new Switch iteration. The aforementioned new characters aren’t particularly exciting. Even if their move sets differ from vanilla Ryu and Ken, their designs aren’t much more than variations on the original characters. They feel like an afterthought. There’s a new mode called Buddy Battle, where you and another player can play co-operatively against an opponent which is a fun novelty but I found it too messy to really enjoy. There’s an art gallery available, which admittedly is a nice addition for fans. The headlining new game mode is Way of the Hado – a first person perspective, motion controlled mini-game which has you mimic Ryu’s motions to unleash fireballs, dragon punches and spinning kicks to hold back a series of soldiers. It’s not much fun.

Way of the Hado harkens back to the heady days of the Wii, to experimental but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to incorporate motion control into traditional games. The motion sensing technology in the Switch Joy Cons might have advanced well beyond what the Wii Remote had to offer but, at least in Way of the Hado, successfully triggering attacks is every bit as unreliable and frustrating as those games we’d all like to forget playing on the Wii. No matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t translate my movements consistently into action in the game. There are tutorial demonstrations to show you the techniques, but they were of little help. Whether I was sitting or standing, constrained or energetic, the movements I made with the Joy Cons rarely seemed to match up with the actions that appeared on-screen. The visuals in Way of the Hadou appear to be using assets from Street Fighter IV, which is jarringly incongruous with the rest of the game. Way of the Hado feels like it was tacked on without much thought in an attempt to add value to this re-release.

None of this is to say that Ultra Street Fighter II is a terrible game. There’s a reason that even games today are still building on the foundation laid by Street Fighter II. The biggest issue here is that this particular release feels utterly unnecessary. There is so little about Ultra Street Fighter II that justifies a purchase unless you absolutely must play a version of Street Fighter II on Switch right now. The base game is barely changed from Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix from almost a decade ago, which itself was a visual overhaul of a game from the mid-nineties – and to add insult the game costs roughly three times as much as HD Remix did when it was new. The added features are a short-lived novelty at best, a frustrating mess at worst.

In a world where you have boundless choices of fighting games with active communities, I struggle to see the point in Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers.

Note: Vooks will not be providing a score for Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers until the online features are activated. This is to ensure a fair scored review based on all the game’s features.