STREET FIGHTER
Nov. 16th, 2020 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheSo we're gonna start out this series playthrough with Street Fighter, naturally, the first game in the series. This game was pretty much the pioneer of what is now the fighting game genre. But it's largely unpopular and unknown, as it was completely overshadowed by Street Fighter II which improved heavily on the formula.
I was going to go into a whole spiel about arcade games and this and that, and how great this was for an 80s game, but I'm itching to get into the game and don't feel like writing a whole article about SF. Let's just PLAY.
Now, as I said before, this game you can only play as Ryu. Technically, you can play as Ken if you play as 2P, and if you beat 1P in a VS match, you can continue the story mode as Ken. But, uh, I'm not going to do that.
In the rest of the games, I'm going to focus on the gameplay and "story" of the player characters, but for this one, we're going to focus on the opponents.
A lot of the characters from the original Street Fighter fell into obscurity after the popularity of Street Fighter II, so a lot of them we don't see again at all, or only in like, one exclusive console port of a version of a later game or something. Which is sad, because Eagle.
There's very little story to this game -- the "Emperor of Muay Thai" Sagat wants to prove he is the BEST FIGHTER EVER!!! and so he holds the first World Warrior torunament. Our little buddy Ryu, some kid from Japan, competes in the tournament. We play as him, fighting various street fighters from around the world.
What I think is funny about this is that Ryu is always the one traveling. No one comes to Japan to fight Ryu. It's all Ryu going other places XD He has to travel the whole world while everyone else gets to stay at home. What a weird tournament!
When the game starts, we get to choose to go to Japan or USA. I moved my hand to take a screenshot and the game chose Japan automatically for me because you have like a 5 second window to choose or it auto-selects.
Anyway, once you choose a region you then have to face off against that country's two representatives in the tournament.
Our first fight is against Retsu, whose eyebrow game is STRONG. A baldie with big eyebrows? Consider me interested. Actually, Ryu has pretty solid eyebrows in this game, too, it seems. Apparently, Retsu is a Shorinji Kempo instructor who was excommunicated for using forbidden moves. That's his entire story! That's actually... more than some characters get in this game...
Retsu's fight takes place in front of a temple. A cool thing about this game is each character gets their own fighting location.
Retsu was an "easy" fight, I just kinda learned my way around the controls and he fell. He actually beat me a couple times, though, but I just kinda mashed my way through it. He just kinda hopped around, really, but if you let him, he'd beat you up. But just kinda keeping moving seemed to be enough to beat him.
After beating an opponent, you're treated to a little picture of them with a beat-up face. And they say, "WHAT STRENGTH!! BUT DON'T FORGET THERE ARE MANY GUYS LIKE YOU ALL OVER THE WORLD," whatever that is supposed to mean.
Also when you lose, their normal portrait comes up and it says, "YOU'VE GOT A LOT TO LEARN BEFORE YOU BEAT ME. TRY AGAIN, KIDDO."
It's also interested to note that these lines are voice acted, giving every character in the game the same voice because it's the same recording for every character lmao.
Geki is the second opponent from Japan. He has no story, just some ninja dude. He can throw shuriken which is REALLY ANNOYING. It's actually possible to punch the shuriken, which make them fall down. This is really hard to do, though, and I only ever did it on accident.
I managed to get off my first Hadouken in this match, which does TONS OF DAMAGE and makes the game go into slow-motion for a bit while the enemy flies through the air in pain. It's pretty cool. But it's really fucking hard to do the Hadouken. I can't get the timing down at all. Interesting to note is that they actually localized this game with English voice acting -- Ryu says like "Fireball" or something when doing the Hadouken, instead of shouting out "Hadouken." I can't actually understand what he's saying, but know that they went out of their way to make English voice clips.
Geki has a desperation attack, something I didn't notice in Retsu. When Geki's HP is low, he starts hopping around and throwing THREE SHURIKEN AT ONCE, which are nearly impossible to dodge, and deal damage even if you're blocking. This killed me MANY times. So I finally figured out the strat -- deal a little damage to him and then jump around a ton hoping for time to run out. All the while I practiced my Hadouken.
Geki's fight takes place with a view of Mt Fuji, though I didn't get the mountain in the picture really.
Geki's KO sprite doesn't look nearly as beat-up as Retsu's :P He just has a bloody lip while Retsu's face was smashed in lol.
After defeating the two Japanese opponents, we get a little world map and a little airplane flies from Japan to the United States. Pretty cute.
Also, we got to do some weird minigame that took like, all of three seconds. I didn't really understand what was going on but you get some points for smashing the blocks. I think you're supposed to hit based on the "Timing" meter on the left side of the screen, but I didn't even see it, thinking it was a button-mashing minigame, and just kinda smacked the blocks as soon as it started, breaking only a couple of them.
Then we get to go on to fight Joe, whose fight takes place in a trainyard with graffiti and stuff. Joe was a former underground martial art champ, but then "troubles" forced him to go "on the run."
Joe sucks. Like, a lot. He's dumb and generic looking, but more importantly, his fight was REALLY REALLY hard to win. He is super fast, hopping all around everywhere. He seems to be able to quickly move between high and low attacks to break your guard. Plus all his attacks are just FAST, despite doing tons of damage.
With Ryu, you have six attacks: three kicks, three punches, each at a weak, medium, and strong level. Actually a funny tidbit -- the original arcade version of this game actually had a pressure-sensitive pad, and the harder you slammed on it, the stronger your attack was. This lead to a lot of broken machines and injured players, so it was replaced with the six-button system we know and love today lol.
Anyway, Ryu's lighter attacks do minimal damage but execute very quickly, while the heavier the attack gets, the more damage it does, but the longer the animation, making it harder to land a hit and leaving Ryu more vulnerable.
Joe doesn't seem to have this mechanic, he just zips around everywhere and smacks you with fast attacks that deal like 30% of your HP in damage.
I tried all kinds of things, and he even blocked the few Hadoukens I managed to get off, or just jumped over them like a madman. I tried to get off a Tatsumakisenpukyaku but couldn't manage it. Shoryuken I can barely manage even in modern games with snappier controls, so I haven't even bothered with trying that one yet. Never managed to get the special kick off.
Eventually I was able to beat Joe by allowing him to jump at me while I blocked, which means he would always hit in the air, so I didn't have to worry about him sweeping my legs. Immediately after, it seemed quite likely I could get two light jabs in, and then quickly sweep with a medium kick when he started blocking. It wasn't 100% foolproof, but it seemed to work a lot of the time, and after a few attempts I was finally able to defeat him. Lost dozens of times figuring that out, though.
When I beat him, I wanted a KO pic of him with his teeth knocked out and eyeballs out of socket, but he just looks kinda sad. What a disappointment! This was my least favorite fight so far. Though I guess it's only been three fights.
This is our first Mike Tyson wannabe in the series, a big black boxer dude aptly named Mike. Apparently he learned boxing while in jail for some thievery or something, and then ended up getting out of boxing after accidentally killing an opponent in the ring. So that's kind of terrifying.
Strangely, they were completely fine with Mike being in the English version of the game, with our second wannabe Mike Bison having his name changed in Street Fighter II. Though I guess having the last name on there really makes it a little TOO similar to the real guy.
Mike's fight takes place amusingly in front of Mt Rushmore, because, you know, America.
Mike is really slow, and thus easy to manipulate. In fact, this ended up being the easiest fight in the game so far. If you jump at him, you can land a medium kick in the air and he'll never dodge it, granted that you're just far enough away from him to land it (if you're too close, he'll counter before you can get your kick off, and if you're too far, you'll miss and then get countered). What's nice about this is that the starting positions of the characters is the perfect distance, so you can just hold up+right at the beginning of the match and land your first kick.
Mike hits HARD though. Like half-your-health-in-damage-from-one-punch hard. So you really have to make sure you're not getting hit. I tried to be a bit aggressive with my jump kicks but once I got him down to less than 50% HP, I mostly spent my time hopping around and trying to avoid him. He's slow enough I could try to get some Hadoukens off when he was far enough away, though I only managed to get one to proc, and he blocked it.
After finishing up in USA, we head over to China. There was a minigame where you are supposed to break blocks that some characters are holding, but I couldn't manage to reach the top left one no matter what I tried. My guess is that you're supposed to Shoryuken it.
Anyway, Lee is a cutie with a mustache (who also has no story), so I'll give him a pass for being an even more annoying Joe. He is stupid fast, and if you try to block he will zip in and beat you up. It took me several attempts to realize that any kind of blocking or evading was just flat out not going to work.
I tried the jumping-into-attacks constantly strategy that worked with Mike, but that was also a no-go here. It kinda worked, and once I even barely lost on the Great Wall. But eventually I found if I just tried to spam Hadouken as much as possible, I would land some of my soft punches and the constant ducking and moving forward seemed to lure Lee into hopping around instead of his normal full-assault mode. After a few attempts of this button-mashing fun, I managed to win the fight.
After fighting the mustachioed Lee, we move on to sexy bearded Gen, a professional assassin who developed his own martial arts style. His fight takes place in some kind of Chinese shopping district.
Gen really likes to jump. Like, a lot. He just kind of constantly jumps, and will sometimes combo into a sweep or something, but basically just jump jump jump. I won the fight easily by just ducking and kicking and he'd jump keep jumping over me and every two or three jumps, jump right into the kick. So this was literally just me holding down and mashing medium kick lol. He'd get some attacks off sometimes, but in the end it was Ryu who arose the victor.
After defeating Gen, we got to play another little minigame, this time like the first one but 'harder' blocks. I thought you were supposed to hit it when it was fully yellow, and I did, which made Ryu hurt his hand and everyone get mad and boo. So I'm guessing you're supposed to hit when it's fully red lol. I can't tell what's going on!
Finally we get to fly to England! Here we match up against Birdie, a bouncer who was invited to the tournament, but was apparently sick during it (????)
This guy is HUGE. When Ryu is ducking he's like half of his height. Also the fight takes place in front of "BLOCK HEADS Pub" which has graffiti of Bill Cravens in the background.
This fight was nearly impossible, Birdie can hit you from all angles, kind of like a slower Joe, but he blocks everything too. I decided to try mashing the input for Hadouken to see if I could pull it off, if not, I'd at least be doing some punching. I accidentally pulled off a couple Shoryukens this way and somehow managed to win, but it was purely through "strategic" button mashing.
This is like 95% of the reason I wanted to play this game :) The final fight before we head to our final goal of Thailand, we fight sexy mustache daddy Eagle. His portrait in the game sports a more chevron-like mustache, while his official artwork (which, btw, was drawn by Keiji Inafune, the 'father of Mega Man,' who got his start at Capcom drawing the Street Fighter art) shows him with more of a horseshoe stache. Personally I prefer the chevron style, and thankfully that was the style that they went with in later artwork for the character.
A fun fact is that Eagle is, other than explicitly being stated, canonically gay. In later games he comments that he's not interested in women, that seductresses' charms can't work on him, and he hits on guys. The don't ever say the g-word, but it's pretty obvious. There's some speculation he might be bi, since his design is revamped to be based on Freddie Mercury (who is famously bisexual), but I think it's unlikely from the "I'm not interested in ladies" comment and that charms don't work on him.
Eagle fights using two baton thingies, being the only character in the game to use a hand-to-hand weapon (the other weapon user being Geki and his shuriken). His fight is basically just him spamming attacks that are nearly impossible to dodge (he has a cute jump sprite, too, with his mouth hanging open lol).
We fight him outside of some kind of castle, where he might work, since he's supposed to be the bodyguard to a wealthy family. He also has the tiny bit of backstory of being rivals with Sagat, hence his entry in the tournament. Though he doesn't turn out to be the victor, of course.
I pretty much used the Birdie strat here -- spam Hadoukens until it worked, occasionally accidentally hitting a Shoryuken in the process. At this point the game seems really unfair and boring, honestly. It doesn't seem like there's any strategy to winning other than spamming Hadouken, as the game was designed to eat quarters.
After ruffling up the poor mustache, we finally get to head to Thailand for our final battes.
But not before a fun minigame of course!
Our next opponent is the wonky-looking Adon, who at least has a nice big nose to ogle. But mostly he's just super awkward looking in his portrait.
Adon is Sagat's strongest disciple, and is in the tournament to prove that he's not just Mini Sagat. He even does a rude little thumbs-down gesture when he wins!
Doesn't work, though, because we spam Hadoukens on him until he falls. The game is really cheap at this point, basically not letting you do ANYTHING outside of Hadoukens to deal damage.
I'm sure there's people out there who have cleared the game without using special moves, but honestly the enemies don't even have discernable patterns anymore and can seriously defeat you in like 3 seconds before you can even get button presses off, no matter whether you're blocking or whatever.
The final fight is versus weird-chinned Sagat, who is normally pretty hot in other games. His fighting sprite looks fine, even after he beats you and laughs at you.
I should mention that the characters actually do have a few little voice clips, most of them so garbled you can't understand them. But Birdie would clearly say, "Another win!" when he beat you, and Sagat (I keep wanting to type "SaGat" LOL) has an evil laugh. I can't even remember anyone else's, though, because they were just kind of muffled grumbling that didn't sound like anything.
At some point you run out of continues (I don't know how many you get to start, but I ran out) so very fortunately, I had made a save state (you can do this in the Anniversary Collection, much like with the Mega Man Legacy Collection) between each fighter. Because I'm not replaying the entire game over and over to try to beat Sagat.
Sagat's attacks deal massive damage, and what's worse, is that he has a fireball fist attack that can hit you even if you're guarding. You can jump over it or crouch under it, but since it's not telegraphed or anything, you don't really have time to react, and you have to pretty much already be jumping or ducking as he does it to get past it.
When it does hit you, it does a slow-mo effect like when you hit the enemy with Hadouken. It's funny when you manage to both hit each other and it's just slow-mo of both of you floating in the air.
Just spamming Hadouken inputs didn't seem to work very well -- this time I had to go specifically for Shoryuken, and only when Sagat was close. If he was far away, I had to concentrate on keeping my guard up, staying crouched to avoid his fire fist, but ready to stand up and block and start going for Shoryuken if he got close. In the end, because it's nearly impossible to pull of the Shoryuken, this took me probably 30 tries or so. I think you get 9 continues, so I never would have completed this if I had to use the continue system. Thank goodness for save states...!
After defeating Sagat, we get a different message: "YOU OUTLASTED THE BEST. YOU ARE NOW THE STRONGEST STREET FIGHTER IN THE WORLD!"
The game then proceeds to show all of the fighters you beat throughout the game with their knockout faces. Here's Mike's since I forgot to screencap his before. Then the credits roll, everyone having weird nicknames (Yuukichan's Papa did the sound design in this as well! I know him from the Mega Man series credits :P)
After the credits roll, there's a screen with Ryu's face covered up with text that says, "YOU HAVE EARNED THE DISTINCTION OF 'KING OF THE HILL'. BUT REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NO TIME TO REST ON YOUR GLORY, FOR THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WAITING IN LINE TO KNOCK YOU OFF THE TOP. BE PREPARED TO BE CHALLENGED."
It's funny because the victory message is basically, "You win, but you never REALLY win."
Then we can put in our initials, which has really sloppy controls, and I just barely managed to get MTH in in time for the 30 second countdown. It shows the high score table for like 1 second then immediately swaps over to a GAME OVER screen. So I didn't get a chance to screencap the high score table with me at #1 lol.
Annnnnnnnnnnd that's Street Fighter. The last several fights were pretty stupid; if you got unlucky you could get KO'd instantly with no ability to recover. You basically had to learn which way to dodge (either jumping, standing, or ducking) at first and then spam special moves until one hit. Using regular moves seemed to result in getting countered to death, with again, no way to recover.
I've heard before that the first game is terrible, and I can see why people say that. But I've finally played through the whole thing at least, even if the second half of the game was largely mashing Hadoukens, but I'm pretty sure that's the intended winning method honestly, with how everything else fails so hard so easily.
Plus we got to see stache daddy Eagle, and that's what we were here for anyway. Now we can finally move on to the much-more-refined Street Fighter II.
I was going to go into a whole spiel about arcade games and this and that, and how great this was for an 80s game, but I'm itching to get into the game and don't feel like writing a whole article about SF. Let's just PLAY.
Now, as I said before, this game you can only play as Ryu. Technically, you can play as Ken if you play as 2P, and if you beat 1P in a VS match, you can continue the story mode as Ken. But, uh, I'm not going to do that.
In the rest of the games, I'm going to focus on the gameplay and "story" of the player characters, but for this one, we're going to focus on the opponents.
A lot of the characters from the original Street Fighter fell into obscurity after the popularity of Street Fighter II, so a lot of them we don't see again at all, or only in like, one exclusive console port of a version of a later game or something. Which is sad, because Eagle.
There's very little story to this game -- the "Emperor of Muay Thai" Sagat wants to prove he is the BEST FIGHTER EVER!!! and so he holds the first World Warrior torunament. Our little buddy Ryu, some kid from Japan, competes in the tournament. We play as him, fighting various street fighters from around the world.
What I think is funny about this is that Ryu is always the one traveling. No one comes to Japan to fight Ryu. It's all Ryu going other places XD He has to travel the whole world while everyone else gets to stay at home. What a weird tournament!
VS RETSU
When the game starts, we get to choose to go to Japan or USA. I moved my hand to take a screenshot and the game chose Japan automatically for me because you have like a 5 second window to choose or it auto-selects.
Anyway, once you choose a region you then have to face off against that country's two representatives in the tournament.
Our first fight is against Retsu, whose eyebrow game is STRONG. A baldie with big eyebrows? Consider me interested. Actually, Ryu has pretty solid eyebrows in this game, too, it seems. Apparently, Retsu is a Shorinji Kempo instructor who was excommunicated for using forbidden moves. That's his entire story! That's actually... more than some characters get in this game...
Retsu's fight takes place in front of a temple. A cool thing about this game is each character gets their own fighting location.
Retsu was an "easy" fight, I just kinda learned my way around the controls and he fell. He actually beat me a couple times, though, but I just kinda mashed my way through it. He just kinda hopped around, really, but if you let him, he'd beat you up. But just kinda keeping moving seemed to be enough to beat him.
After beating an opponent, you're treated to a little picture of them with a beat-up face. And they say, "WHAT STRENGTH!! BUT DON'T FORGET THERE ARE MANY GUYS LIKE YOU ALL OVER THE WORLD," whatever that is supposed to mean.
Also when you lose, their normal portrait comes up and it says, "YOU'VE GOT A LOT TO LEARN BEFORE YOU BEAT ME. TRY AGAIN, KIDDO."
It's also interested to note that these lines are voice acted, giving every character in the game the same voice because it's the same recording for every character lmao.
VS GEKI
Geki is the second opponent from Japan. He has no story, just some ninja dude. He can throw shuriken which is REALLY ANNOYING. It's actually possible to punch the shuriken, which make them fall down. This is really hard to do, though, and I only ever did it on accident.
I managed to get off my first Hadouken in this match, which does TONS OF DAMAGE and makes the game go into slow-motion for a bit while the enemy flies through the air in pain. It's pretty cool. But it's really fucking hard to do the Hadouken. I can't get the timing down at all. Interesting to note is that they actually localized this game with English voice acting -- Ryu says like "Fireball" or something when doing the Hadouken, instead of shouting out "Hadouken." I can't actually understand what he's saying, but know that they went out of their way to make English voice clips.
Geki has a desperation attack, something I didn't notice in Retsu. When Geki's HP is low, he starts hopping around and throwing THREE SHURIKEN AT ONCE, which are nearly impossible to dodge, and deal damage even if you're blocking. This killed me MANY times. So I finally figured out the strat -- deal a little damage to him and then jump around a ton hoping for time to run out. All the while I practiced my Hadouken.
Geki's fight takes place with a view of Mt Fuji, though I didn't get the mountain in the picture really.
Geki's KO sprite doesn't look nearly as beat-up as Retsu's :P He just has a bloody lip while Retsu's face was smashed in lol.
VS JOE
After defeating the two Japanese opponents, we get a little world map and a little airplane flies from Japan to the United States. Pretty cute.
Also, we got to do some weird minigame that took like, all of three seconds. I didn't really understand what was going on but you get some points for smashing the blocks. I think you're supposed to hit based on the "Timing" meter on the left side of the screen, but I didn't even see it, thinking it was a button-mashing minigame, and just kinda smacked the blocks as soon as it started, breaking only a couple of them.
Then we get to go on to fight Joe, whose fight takes place in a trainyard with graffiti and stuff. Joe was a former underground martial art champ, but then "troubles" forced him to go "on the run."
Joe sucks. Like, a lot. He's dumb and generic looking, but more importantly, his fight was REALLY REALLY hard to win. He is super fast, hopping all around everywhere. He seems to be able to quickly move between high and low attacks to break your guard. Plus all his attacks are just FAST, despite doing tons of damage.
With Ryu, you have six attacks: three kicks, three punches, each at a weak, medium, and strong level. Actually a funny tidbit -- the original arcade version of this game actually had a pressure-sensitive pad, and the harder you slammed on it, the stronger your attack was. This lead to a lot of broken machines and injured players, so it was replaced with the six-button system we know and love today lol.
Anyway, Ryu's lighter attacks do minimal damage but execute very quickly, while the heavier the attack gets, the more damage it does, but the longer the animation, making it harder to land a hit and leaving Ryu more vulnerable.
Joe doesn't seem to have this mechanic, he just zips around everywhere and smacks you with fast attacks that deal like 30% of your HP in damage.
I tried all kinds of things, and he even blocked the few Hadoukens I managed to get off, or just jumped over them like a madman. I tried to get off a Tatsumakisenpukyaku but couldn't manage it. Shoryuken I can barely manage even in modern games with snappier controls, so I haven't even bothered with trying that one yet. Never managed to get the special kick off.
Eventually I was able to beat Joe by allowing him to jump at me while I blocked, which means he would always hit in the air, so I didn't have to worry about him sweeping my legs. Immediately after, it seemed quite likely I could get two light jabs in, and then quickly sweep with a medium kick when he started blocking. It wasn't 100% foolproof, but it seemed to work a lot of the time, and after a few attempts I was finally able to defeat him. Lost dozens of times figuring that out, though.
When I beat him, I wanted a KO pic of him with his teeth knocked out and eyeballs out of socket, but he just looks kinda sad. What a disappointment! This was my least favorite fight so far. Though I guess it's only been three fights.
VS MIKE
This is our first Mike Tyson wannabe in the series, a big black boxer dude aptly named Mike. Apparently he learned boxing while in jail for some thievery or something, and then ended up getting out of boxing after accidentally killing an opponent in the ring. So that's kind of terrifying.
Strangely, they were completely fine with Mike being in the English version of the game, with our second wannabe Mike Bison having his name changed in Street Fighter II. Though I guess having the last name on there really makes it a little TOO similar to the real guy.
Mike's fight takes place amusingly in front of Mt Rushmore, because, you know, America.
Mike is really slow, and thus easy to manipulate. In fact, this ended up being the easiest fight in the game so far. If you jump at him, you can land a medium kick in the air and he'll never dodge it, granted that you're just far enough away from him to land it (if you're too close, he'll counter before you can get your kick off, and if you're too far, you'll miss and then get countered). What's nice about this is that the starting positions of the characters is the perfect distance, so you can just hold up+right at the beginning of the match and land your first kick.
Mike hits HARD though. Like half-your-health-in-damage-from-one-punch hard. So you really have to make sure you're not getting hit. I tried to be a bit aggressive with my jump kicks but once I got him down to less than 50% HP, I mostly spent my time hopping around and trying to avoid him. He's slow enough I could try to get some Hadoukens off when he was far enough away, though I only managed to get one to proc, and he blocked it.
VS LEE
After finishing up in USA, we head over to China. There was a minigame where you are supposed to break blocks that some characters are holding, but I couldn't manage to reach the top left one no matter what I tried. My guess is that you're supposed to Shoryuken it.
Anyway, Lee is a cutie with a mustache (who also has no story), so I'll give him a pass for being an even more annoying Joe. He is stupid fast, and if you try to block he will zip in and beat you up. It took me several attempts to realize that any kind of blocking or evading was just flat out not going to work.
I tried the jumping-into-attacks constantly strategy that worked with Mike, but that was also a no-go here. It kinda worked, and once I even barely lost on the Great Wall. But eventually I found if I just tried to spam Hadouken as much as possible, I would land some of my soft punches and the constant ducking and moving forward seemed to lure Lee into hopping around instead of his normal full-assault mode. After a few attempts of this button-mashing fun, I managed to win the fight.
VS GEN
After fighting the mustachioed Lee, we move on to sexy bearded Gen, a professional assassin who developed his own martial arts style. His fight takes place in some kind of Chinese shopping district.
Gen really likes to jump. Like, a lot. He just kind of constantly jumps, and will sometimes combo into a sweep or something, but basically just jump jump jump. I won the fight easily by just ducking and kicking and he'd jump keep jumping over me and every two or three jumps, jump right into the kick. So this was literally just me holding down and mashing medium kick lol. He'd get some attacks off sometimes, but in the end it was Ryu who arose the victor.
VS BIRDIE
After defeating Gen, we got to play another little minigame, this time like the first one but 'harder' blocks. I thought you were supposed to hit it when it was fully yellow, and I did, which made Ryu hurt his hand and everyone get mad and boo. So I'm guessing you're supposed to hit when it's fully red lol. I can't tell what's going on!
Finally we get to fly to England! Here we match up against Birdie, a bouncer who was invited to the tournament, but was apparently sick during it (????)
This guy is HUGE. When Ryu is ducking he's like half of his height. Also the fight takes place in front of "BLOCK HEADS Pub" which has graffiti of Bill Cravens in the background.
This fight was nearly impossible, Birdie can hit you from all angles, kind of like a slower Joe, but he blocks everything too. I decided to try mashing the input for Hadouken to see if I could pull it off, if not, I'd at least be doing some punching. I accidentally pulled off a couple Shoryukens this way and somehow managed to win, but it was purely through "strategic" button mashing.
VS EAGLE
This is like 95% of the reason I wanted to play this game :) The final fight before we head to our final goal of Thailand, we fight sexy mustache daddy Eagle. His portrait in the game sports a more chevron-like mustache, while his official artwork (which, btw, was drawn by Keiji Inafune, the 'father of Mega Man,' who got his start at Capcom drawing the Street Fighter art) shows him with more of a horseshoe stache. Personally I prefer the chevron style, and thankfully that was the style that they went with in later artwork for the character.
A fun fact is that Eagle is, other than explicitly being stated, canonically gay. In later games he comments that he's not interested in women, that seductresses' charms can't work on him, and he hits on guys. The don't ever say the g-word, but it's pretty obvious. There's some speculation he might be bi, since his design is revamped to be based on Freddie Mercury (who is famously bisexual), but I think it's unlikely from the "I'm not interested in ladies" comment and that charms don't work on him.
Eagle fights using two baton thingies, being the only character in the game to use a hand-to-hand weapon (the other weapon user being Geki and his shuriken). His fight is basically just him spamming attacks that are nearly impossible to dodge (he has a cute jump sprite, too, with his mouth hanging open lol).
We fight him outside of some kind of castle, where he might work, since he's supposed to be the bodyguard to a wealthy family. He also has the tiny bit of backstory of being rivals with Sagat, hence his entry in the tournament. Though he doesn't turn out to be the victor, of course.
I pretty much used the Birdie strat here -- spam Hadoukens until it worked, occasionally accidentally hitting a Shoryuken in the process. At this point the game seems really unfair and boring, honestly. It doesn't seem like there's any strategy to winning other than spamming Hadouken, as the game was designed to eat quarters.
After ruffling up the poor mustache, we finally get to head to Thailand for our final battes.
But not before a fun minigame of course!
VS ADON
Our next opponent is the wonky-looking Adon, who at least has a nice big nose to ogle. But mostly he's just super awkward looking in his portrait.
Adon is Sagat's strongest disciple, and is in the tournament to prove that he's not just Mini Sagat. He even does a rude little thumbs-down gesture when he wins!
Doesn't work, though, because we spam Hadoukens on him until he falls. The game is really cheap at this point, basically not letting you do ANYTHING outside of Hadoukens to deal damage.
I'm sure there's people out there who have cleared the game without using special moves, but honestly the enemies don't even have discernable patterns anymore and can seriously defeat you in like 3 seconds before you can even get button presses off, no matter whether you're blocking or whatever.
VS SAGAT
The final fight is versus weird-chinned Sagat, who is normally pretty hot in other games. His fighting sprite looks fine, even after he beats you and laughs at you.
I should mention that the characters actually do have a few little voice clips, most of them so garbled you can't understand them. But Birdie would clearly say, "Another win!" when he beat you, and Sagat (I keep wanting to type "SaGat" LOL) has an evil laugh. I can't even remember anyone else's, though, because they were just kind of muffled grumbling that didn't sound like anything.
At some point you run out of continues (I don't know how many you get to start, but I ran out) so very fortunately, I had made a save state (you can do this in the Anniversary Collection, much like with the Mega Man Legacy Collection) between each fighter. Because I'm not replaying the entire game over and over to try to beat Sagat.
Sagat's attacks deal massive damage, and what's worse, is that he has a fireball fist attack that can hit you even if you're guarding. You can jump over it or crouch under it, but since it's not telegraphed or anything, you don't really have time to react, and you have to pretty much already be jumping or ducking as he does it to get past it.
When it does hit you, it does a slow-mo effect like when you hit the enemy with Hadouken. It's funny when you manage to both hit each other and it's just slow-mo of both of you floating in the air.
Just spamming Hadouken inputs didn't seem to work very well -- this time I had to go specifically for Shoryuken, and only when Sagat was close. If he was far away, I had to concentrate on keeping my guard up, staying crouched to avoid his fire fist, but ready to stand up and block and start going for Shoryuken if he got close. In the end, because it's nearly impossible to pull of the Shoryuken, this took me probably 30 tries or so. I think you get 9 continues, so I never would have completed this if I had to use the continue system. Thank goodness for save states...!
After defeating Sagat, we get a different message: "YOU OUTLASTED THE BEST. YOU ARE NOW THE STRONGEST STREET FIGHTER IN THE WORLD!"
THE END
The game then proceeds to show all of the fighters you beat throughout the game with their knockout faces. Here's Mike's since I forgot to screencap his before. Then the credits roll, everyone having weird nicknames (Yuukichan's Papa did the sound design in this as well! I know him from the Mega Man series credits :P)
After the credits roll, there's a screen with Ryu's face covered up with text that says, "YOU HAVE EARNED THE DISTINCTION OF 'KING OF THE HILL'. BUT REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NO TIME TO REST ON YOUR GLORY, FOR THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WAITING IN LINE TO KNOCK YOU OFF THE TOP. BE PREPARED TO BE CHALLENGED."
It's funny because the victory message is basically, "You win, but you never REALLY win."
Then we can put in our initials, which has really sloppy controls, and I just barely managed to get MTH in in time for the 30 second countdown. It shows the high score table for like 1 second then immediately swaps over to a GAME OVER screen. So I didn't get a chance to screencap the high score table with me at #1 lol.
Annnnnnnnnnnd that's Street Fighter. The last several fights were pretty stupid; if you got unlucky you could get KO'd instantly with no ability to recover. You basically had to learn which way to dodge (either jumping, standing, or ducking) at first and then spam special moves until one hit. Using regular moves seemed to result in getting countered to death, with again, no way to recover.
I've heard before that the first game is terrible, and I can see why people say that. But I've finally played through the whole thing at least, even if the second half of the game was largely mashing Hadoukens, but I'm pretty sure that's the intended winning method honestly, with how everything else fails so hard so easily.
Plus we got to see stache daddy Eagle, and that's what we were here for anyway. Now we can finally move on to the much-more-refined Street Fighter II.
