Street Fighter X Tekken is simply fun to play. It’s like Super Street Fighter IV and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 had a baby. Like every Street Fighter since II, you’ve got three punch buttons and three kick buttons, but this time around, hitting them in sequence (light-medium-heavy) will propel one attack into the next, moving the character forward and making it easier to combo people, just like in UMvC3. Add a second heavy attack to the end of a light-medium-heavy string will launch the opponent into the air and swap your character to your partner, allowing you to continue the combo as your second character rushes out and starts juggling the opponent.
Character switches are a huge focus in this game and ended up being what I spent most of my super bar on. While normal character swaps (performed by medium punch and medium kick at the same time) and aforementioned launcher (which can also be performed by pressing the heavy punch and kick buttons simultaneously) doesn’t use any meter, you can swap characters mid-combo by cancelling out of an attack with MP+MK at the expense of one segment of the super gauge. Once you get a handle on a few characters, this becomes incredibly fun to experiment with, and a bit more controlled than Marvel vs. Capcom’s crossovers. Knocking an enemy into the air with Ryu’s shoryuken and following it up by swapping in Ken and hurricane-kicking an enemy across the stage is much easier to wrap your brain around initially than UMvC3’s character-swapping aerial raves.
I’m not typically a fan of having a team battle end when one character loses all of their health, but Street Fighter X Tekken has a couple of tricks you can use to get around your dominant character being damaged. I’m personally partial to Cross Rush (performed with a quarter circle back and both medium attacks), which brings out both of your characters simultaneously, divides your remaining health equally between the two characters, and has the computer fight with the character you were just using as you fight with whatever character you had in reserve for a couple seconds. This takes three bars, but it can be incredibly helpful if your secondary character isn’t quite as good of a matchup against your opponents as your primary one.
On the off chance that both you and your opponent have low health, it might be worth it to activate Pandora mode. If you have less than 25% of your total health, you can sacrifice one character to give the other a timed power and health boost. Run out of time and you will lose immediately. I haven’t personally found this that helpful, to be frank. The little scene in which one character is sacrificed and the other is powered up takes about four precious seconds, so I’ve actually lost a match because the animation to activate this mode ran out the timer. I’ve used it to win a couple of rounds, but often, my opponent would just avoid me until my Pandora mode timer ran out. That said, I have a feeling that if I played at a higher level it would become distinctly more useful.
Outside of these new mechanics, the game shouldn’t feel too alien to you if you’ve played Street Fighter IV as most of Capcom’s side has had their movesets directly adapted from that game (ignoring some major balance changes). The Tekken characters, on the other hand haven’t been completely adapted to the Street Fighter formula. They still have a number of attacks that are lifted straight out of Tekken. Perhaps it’s because of my lack of knowledge about the series, but it was a little jarring doing special attacks that required inputs that weren’t commonly used in 2D fighting games.
For instance, Kazuya Mishima has an ability that will move him forward and dodge projectiles called “Mist Step,” which is inputted with by moving the joystick forward, returning to neutral, then down, and down-forward. That input will cause Kazuya to dash forward, and it can then be followed up with a few different attacks. I would never have figured this out were it not for the trial mode, which seems even more important for the Tekken characters than the relatively traditional Street Fighter ones.
On top of that, some Tekken characters require that you hit both light and medium punch or kick buttons to do certain special attacks, which feels weird after years of Street Fighter and Darkstalkers has made me expect that pressing two buttons while performing a special move is always a meter-consuming EX attack. Mind you, Tekken characters have EX attacks too, so getting a handle on these characters definitely has a steep learning curve if (like me) you’re not familiar with the series.
While the fighting is all really fun, Street Fighter X Tekken does have some frustrations. Arcade mode is great, with humorous character interaction (Rufus confusing Tekken’s Bob for Ken Masters in disguise is particularly humorous), win quotes that actually tell a barebones story (assuming you’re using one of the game’s preset teams), and nicely CG-animated endings. Every stage has about a billion things going on in the background, most of which contain cameos such as Tekken 2’s punching-gloved dinosaur Alex and all of which are even more amusing than the energetic fat kid from the Overpass in Street Fighter IV.
There’s even a billboard with Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono dressed as Blanka ready to face off against Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada that occasionally shows up in one of the stages. Some stages have multiple areas that the fighters move between as rounds change. Everything about Street Fighter X Tekken’s arcade mode is great, and if it was at my local arcade, it would be one of my favorites.
But it’s not in an arcade, and the lack of polish—at least in the home console versions—makes the game gets a tad frustrating. Earlier, I talked about trial mode being a must, particularly for Tekken characters. Well, once again, Capcom has refused to give players the option watch demonstrations of how combos are performed correctly in trial mode, meaning that they must turn to YouTube or work it out on their own to get a grasp on how certain combos are timed. While some purists may protest that this is the only way to teach players how to learn their combos, I’m personally of the belief that seeing how to do something right and practicing that is more conducive to learning than consistently trying to do it wrong and then giving up. Most other fighters do this, so it’s a frustrating that Capcom seems so unwilling to go that extra step.
Online play suffers, too, although for a different reason. In an average match for me, about half of the sound effects wouldn’t play. Now, that might sound like a silly complaint, this issue made me realize how important sound is to the way I play fighters. There’s a much bigger difference between a blocked crouching jab and a connected one sound-wise than animation-wise. Occasionally, I’d think I’d connected with a jab and try to follow it up only to get smacked in the face. While I eventually got used to it, there were a number of times that the on-and-off sound threw me and I got hit because of it.
There is a reason for this, however. It’s because of the way Street Fighter X Tekken handles online play. The game’s netcode incorporates something called “Rollback” technology, which is meant to overcome lag between players that are separated by a great distance or by vastly different Internet connection speeds. If there’s latency between the two connections, the game skips over a few frames to keep players on both ends synced. A side effect of these skipped frames is that, if the sound effect for a particular move is programmed to begin playing at a certain frame, and that frame is skipped, the sound effect will get skipped over, too.
Other than that, for the most part online play has been pretty solid in the ranked matches I’ve played on Xbox Live, and Capcom have promised they’re working on a solution to the sound issue. It’s just a pain that I’ve had to adapt to sub-optimal online play even with a strong connection.
It’s also worth mentioning the console disparities between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Street Fighter X Tekken. While I mostly played on 360, I had the chance to try out the five bonus characters on PS3. While they certainly make the character select screen quite a bit bigger, the only character who didn’t feel like a joke character was inFamous’ Cole McGrath. Toro and Kuro were adorable clones of Ryu and Kazuya Mishima, but had very little health and range. Mega Man (who I think is hilarious, but other Mega Man fans have taken offense to) is pretty dang weak, but has attacks that reference Mega Man 1 and his moveset from Marvel vs. Capcom. I didn’t play Pac-Man that much, but outside of an incredibly simple infinite combo (which will probably be patched out in early April) nothing about him blew me away.
Also worrisome is the inability to bring two players on one console online on 360, which (like the bonus characters) isn’t vital but is fun. It’s a small loss, but it’s disappointing that one version of the game has it and the other doesn’t.
Street Fighter X Tekken doesn’t look like it will see an arcade release, which is a shame because it feels like a great arcade game. However, compared to other fighters that are trying to make a home console fighting experience more enjoyable, Street Fighter X Tekken feels kind of halfhearted. I just wish they put as much love into that experience as they did the game’s combat.
Food for Thought:
1. I wish the timer for Street Fighter X Tekken was just a little longer. 99 seconds just feels a little short for two-on-two battles, since a lot of my fights online ended with timeouts. I wish there was an option for 120 seconds or something online.
2. Character customization is a bit of a letdown. I wasn’t quite expecting anything on the level of Virtua Fighter 5, but the color selection is limited to a few colors for each bit of a character’s outfit you can customize. It’s not nearly on the level of The King of Fighters XIII, or even Capcom’s PS1 release of Darkstalkers 3.
