Purchase your copy of Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers here!
Today, we’ll be taking a look at the latest Capcom offering in the Street Fighter franchise released on the Nintendo Switch! Fight!
Style
The style of Ultimate Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers looks very clean and similar to the HD Remix a few years ago on PSN. The artwork is a great remaster but the game also allows you to switch back to the classic graphics in the options menu. The only thing that was kind of weird was that if you wanted to switch the graphical style, you have to exit your game complete to the main menu then go to the options section to configure it. I would think that in this day and age, you can incorporate on-the-fly graphics configuration in the pause menu.
Gameplay
The gameplay for the fighting game portion of USF2 is pretty standard with most other SF games, but the standard controller set up on the Switch is a little cumbersome and awkward sometimes. It is serviceable, but the analog stick for some reason causes fireballs and hurricane kicks to be harder to pull off than normal. It gets even worse when the controllers are split from the system to go into tabletop or multiplayer mode, since now you have this tiny controller to play a fighting game on. It’s a great way to get cramps, though!
Features
Being that this is an anniversary version of the Street Fighter franchise, I was really disappointed that there weren’t a lot of extra features.
Dramatic Battle: In this mode, you and a friend or you and a CPU-controlled teammate will go through dramatic battles with the bosses. It’s basically a 2-v-1 battle but with all boss battles. Interesting thing here is you need to defeat the bosses in 2 rounds to win, but if they beat you in 1 round, it’s game over.
Way of the Hado: This is a fun little diversion, but it gets pretty frustrating. This takes you into a first person view mode with Ryu, and waves of enemies come at you from M. Bison’s army. You use both the controllers and do actual hadoken and shoryuken moves to attack them. There’s some slight delay, but it’s pretty fun for what it is. There’s not much replayability in this mode, even though you can up your stats based on the points you get from defeating each level.
Online: The online ranked battles and friendly battles are pretty standard. I feel like there’s a lot of lag, but I haven’t played long enough to know if this is due to my internet connection or the game itself.
Customize: The customization features in this game are kind of silly and limited. You can customize your characters…. kind of. All you can really do to my knowledge is change their color.
The Final Lap
All things considered, I would have to give this game a 7 out of 10.
I wish I could give it more considering I’m a big fighting game fan, but I just can’t do it. Portability earned it a lot of points, but there’s not enough in this game to keep longevity going. I’m hoping that there will be some kind of downloadable content to keep this game fresh over time, but for those just looking for a convenient on-the-go Street Fighter game, this is a solid choice.