E3 2011: Next up, we take a look at the 'versus' fighter everyone's been waiting for

I’ve got a lot of bloody hours logged on Super Street Fighter IV. Too many, in fact – and so it’s no surprise that on my Capcom booth tour at E3 2011 I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Street Fighter X Tekken.
 

Tekkan has always been about the physical (ED)

The big news out of E3 came in the form of character confirmations and some platform details – so let’s get that out of the way. Street Fighter X Tekken will also release for Playstation Vita, where Capcom claim the game will be “almost identical”, and the Sony platform versions will get Cole from Sony franchise Infamous as an exclusive character.

Fourteen fighters have been revealed in total now – from Street Fighter there’s Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Cammy, Guile, Abel and Sagat while the Tekken side brings in Kazuya, Nina, Julia, Bob, King, Marduk and Hwoarang – it’s widely believed that this will end up around half of the final roster, though Capcom aren’t commenting on exactly how many characters the final version will hit.

But enough of that – how does it play? For a Street Fighter fan, all the signature moves of my favourite characters are there almost exactly as they were in previous games to perform. The properties work differently and almost every move handles slightly differently, but if you’re familiar with Street Fighter, everything will just work with those characters.



The Tekken characters have a similar quality. Yoshinori Ono’s team at Capcom have clearly gone out of their way to provide fans of Tekken with a familiar feel to those characters in this game, welcoming them into the 2D universe of Street Fighter. Core moves of the Tekken fighters will look very familiar, and basic combos that those characters are famous for should work in some manner in this title, too.

Speaking of combos, the big change here from Street Fighter IV comes in the form of how differently they string together. In a move that is a little similar to Marvel vs. Capcom, players are encouraged to bash through a combo string that leads them up to the Hard Punch or Hard Kick button. Hitting that button twice at the end of a combo will launch the opponent into the air and automatically tag in your partner so they can continue the juggle.
 

Whereas SF has laser beams (ED)

This is a recipe for nasty infinite combos, so Capcom have implemented it so that you can only do this twice consecutively. What’s very cool is that standard moves also count here – so for example with Ken you can trigger a tag with a Fierce-button Shoryuken and then have Chun-Li come in to do some extra damage, juggling the opponent in the air in ways which just weren’t possible in Street Fighter IV.

To be clear, though, this game has little in common with Marvel vs. Capcom or any of the other Versus series titles. The pace here is straight out of Street Fighter IV – sometimes slow and methodical, sometimes combo-filled, never one or the other, and I can see playing this game defensively as a totally viable strategy.

One reason for this is that if one character is knocked out it’s game over. Despite having two characters selected with individual health bars, one knock-out to either character counts as a loss. Unlike Marvel you can’t throw two characters away and win on the last one – you have to be careful here.

Other Street Fighter IV elements have been thrown out here, too. The comeback ‘Ultra’ meter is gone now, replaced by one, three-level super meter. This serves a few different purposes – one of the three blocks of meter can be used to pull out more powerful, fast and usually invulnerable versions of moves, just like Street Fighter IV, but the meter can also be used to tag out to another character while you’re knocked down to the floor to avoid being caught in another combo upon standing.

While the Ultra meter is gone, Ultra moves still exist – only appearing when your meter is a full three bars full. This’ll use the whole meter, but dishes out an incredibly damaging and cinematic attack on the enemy. While I wasn’t able to pull anything like this off, I was led to believe by another person – who, I’m told, had been on the demo station for hours – that you can cancel out of ultras in some circumstances in this game.

The Tekken characters have had new Ultra moves designed for them based on their actions throughout the story of those games, while Street Fighter characters are pulling their moves from their entire history, not just Street Fighter IV. Even Ryu has some basic kicks and moves that weren’t present in the Street Fighter IV series.
 

I wonder who will be victorious

As a huge Street Fighter fan, I left Street Fighter X Tekken more excited than I was about any other game at E3. It seems to take the very best of Street Fighter IV – which to me is most of it – and mixes it with the very coolest concepts from Tekken and from the Versus series of games like Marvel vs. Capcom. I literally cannot wait to get my hands on this again.