Love the Presentation of this game. The Indestructible song is super hype and no other Street Fighter Game has really had a catchy main theme like that. Even in the stage select and win screen you can hear the same melody which is nice.

Also Arcade Mode has anime cutscenes for each character. They never again cared to put this much effort into arcade mode in the future.

I haven't played enough the be able to have an opionion about Focus Attack Canceling but the idea of spending bar to make moves safe is cool I think.

My biggest complaint is that losing a fight in arcade mode means that you will have to sit through several loading screens instead of just having the option to retry this is just super annoying and I have no idea how playtesters were just fine with it.

Street Fighter 2 was the first video game I every played, and for that reason I loved it. The popular 1 on 1 fighting series basically revolutionised console fighting games and most modern fighting games in some way pay their respects to that absolute classic. The console realease of Street Fighter 4 also garnered a lot of praise and is apparently one of the best fighting games on the console, but for me, it's fairly boring. That's ok. We are all different and some games just won't gel with us, even though they are supposed to be excellent, but 7 year old me feels sad. SF4 has been praised for it's netplay and online modes, which isn't really relevant to me. Its graphics, which are beautiful. But most of all praise was heaped upon its deep gameplay. I think that is probably the issue for me. As far as a pick up as go fighter, SF4 isn't really it. It feels sluggish and slow to start off with, and combos and special moves are really hard to pull off. Another issue I have with the game is the lack of story and the poorly animated cutscenes. The characters and their backgrounds was one of the main draws of the SF series, yet it seems to have been slightly ignored here. I'm sure If i stuck a good 20 hours into this game I would love it, but so far in my 4 attempts I haven't got much out of it.

What to say. Nobody saw it coming, everyone was expecting the fighting game genre to be reduced down to a niche, and Street Fighter IV blew this all away. Fighting games were back into the mainstream, not to say in hindsight that SF4 was perfect in any way, but oh man it was so much fun. The new mechanics had their share of criticism, sometimes for good reasons, the new characters were really cool, and after spending hours and hours online I can say with no doubt that this was not only a very solid entry in the franchise but a game changer for the fighting game community.