Street Fighter IV is really fantastic! It seems to have innovated the Street Fighter formula on nearly every level, and remains a blast to play today.

First off, the upgrade to 3D graphics from Street Fighter III was pulled off masterfully, and the game looks gorgeous. There is definitely a little bit of age showing in it, but all of the characters really do look like the game’s hand drawn artwork came to life. Also, the stages this game offers might just be the best in the entire Street Fighter series. Each one is full of life and atmosphere (Something that is aided by this game's wonderful music), and beautifully textured with a bit of a watercolor look. Add in the many moves and actions with paintbrush stroke effects applied to them and you get a really perfect artstyle that has aged amazingly well.

Now the number of improvements to the actual street fighting gameplay is simply waaaay too high to count. Everything just feels very fluid and fun. There is an excellent character roster that quite possibly could meet the needs of every single different playstyle on the planet, and the newly introduced Focus attack (This game's version of drive impact) can be a pretty significant game changer once you know how to use it. On top of this there are now 2 super bars; one that charges primarily from you attacking, and one that charges solely by you getting hit. This really helps out players that might struggle a bit with defence, while also being great at rewarding those who want to push themselves to be more aggressive. It’s all a really superb evolution of the games that came before it.

As is essential to every Street Fighter game, Street Fighter IV comes with a pretty awful barebones story with the worst dialogue you've ever heard, and they've even thrown in some really low budget anime cutscenes this time! Despite their poorly told stories each character (aside from abel, I hate u abel) is bursting with personality and charm on top of their already diverse movesets. There are even a select few characters (Gouken) that are actually interesting story-wise. Like I said it's basically a street fighter requirement to have a terrible story so it really doesn't bother me in the slightest here. I should also mention that outside of the story there are a few pre-rendered traditional intro cutscenes, and they all look quite spectacular and have great music to go along with them, despite them being completely inconsequential to the main story.

I want to say that the main problem with this game is a lack of content, as when you enter the main menu, the gameplay options you have consist of Multiplayer, Arcade, and a very barebones challenge mode. But the more I think about it, the less I think it's that major of a problem. The game already has a huge character roster so there are a good few arcade routes to go through. Saying that however, I did blow through the entire arcade mode in about a day or two so I guess it really depends on the person. Like I said before, I don't mind bad stories in fighting games, but I just wish the game put in more effort in other areas if it insists on having such a bad story. Kind of like how Street Fighter 6 has world tour mode. All in all however it's a very small hiccup in a very great game.

So TLDR: Go play Street Fighter IV right now if you like fighting games, it's pretty Fun. With lots of personality, excellent gameplay, and all the classic quirks of the Street Fighter franchise, you’re missing out if you don’t play this one.