Street Fighter 4: State of the Game

This upcoming weekend is going to be interesting for SF4, as the National Tournament Finals are being held in San Fran. Top 16 Gamestop winners are going to duke it out, and MD/VA is being represented by Eric Kim. Eric's been a solid SF3 player for a long time, and his Sagat is no joke. More offense heavy than I think he should be, but extremely solid. Daigo of all people will also be there, collecting a free trip to California and a big paycheck, and hopefully Eric will smoke him too. :)

Take a look at the most popular arcade games in Japan right now;

Video Games
1. Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion - 365.4 (-)
2. Blazblue - 274.2 (-)
3. Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs Gundam - 260.3 (-)
4. Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2: Tenkousei Akane to Nazuna - 217.2 (UP)
5. Melty Blood: Actress Again - 184.7 (DOWN)
6. Virtua Fighter 5R - 115.6 (-)
7. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core - 111.5 (UP)
8. Street Fighter IV - 83.4 (DOWN)
9. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike - 76.1 (UP)
10. Death Smiles Mega Black Label - 52.4 (-)

(Courtesy Arcadia Magazine, May 2009)

Blazblue at #2? Guilty Gear moving UP? Street Fighter 4 at 8th? What's going on? Granted, this is the first installment of the SF4 franchise. Seems like it's possible, though, that Zangief / Sagat / Boxer is too much for the Japanese scene to handle. Zangief is an especially big problem. Matt Frank "The Tank", a common face in the fighting game scene from North Carolina, has this to say about SF4 Gief;

"He still loses hard to most of the top characters, but the characters he does beat stand little to no chance against him; he's kinda like ST Honda (who I also hate) in that respect. I don't like him cuz he's braindead stupid easy, and he's absolutely no fun to fight as or to fight against. I mean, you can't fucking sweep lariat most of the goddamned time. What the hell?

He's like AC Pot, but without all of the system options that GG has that let you get away from Pot. There are far too many characters that have zero options to escape once they're cornered by Gief. He's one of the things that make me question whether or not I actually think this game is long term good, and according to Arcadia, Japan agrees with me."

When you have a character in a game that does extremely well against most of the low to mid tiers but poor against some higher tiers, it becomes a headache for the community. It's even more problematic in some ways; since he's got his issues with some characters, and thus avoids the ban hammer. So either you're picking a character that gets smashed to bits by that problem character, or you pick that problem character and get scraped badly in an unfavorable matchup. This issue applies not just to SF4 Gief, but also ST Honda (Has problems vs projectile characters) and I believe Algol in Soul Calibur 4. Characters like these can discourage picking those low-mid tier characters in the first place, for fear of ever running into that guy in tournament.

That being said, SF4 is still alive and well, both in Japan and (especially) in America. It's certainly better than SF3, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.