Ultra Street Fighter II Trailer, My Thoughts

30 years. The Street Fighter franchise is celebrating it's 30th anniversary this year. In 1987, Capcom released the original Street Fighter in arcades. It did pretty well, and even made it to some home computers and got ported to the TurboGrafx-CD.

But it was the sequel, Street Fighter II, that allowed the franchise to rocket to the massive level of popularity it enjoys today. The SNES port was one of the most popular games for the console, and it would introduce new versions that tweaked the combat balance and introduced new characters. Street Fighter II is regarded as the granddaddy of fighting games. And now, 25 years later...well, technically 26, Street Fighter II is coming to the Nintendo Switch! Say hello to Ultra Street Fighter II!

The trailer begins with a logo celebrating 30 years of Street Fighter. Nice logo. We then see footage of people in Japan lining up to play SFII in an arcade. This must be when it first came out. With this, I have a bit of a confession to make. I never played the game in the arcade. Never had a chance to as a kid. Did play the Genesis port on my Wii, though. I'll have to download it for my Wii U.

The game has HD graphics that look pretty good. I do like the option of being able to play with the original graphics as well. I'm sure that's something that many retrogamers would appreciate.

I have read this version will have more tweaks to the game's fighting balance. I think it would be nice to be able to pick different versions of the characters to play as, like in Hyper Street Fighter II.

The game allows two people to fight each other (One player gets a Joy-Con each), and there's a cooperative mode that allows both player to team-up against one CPU foe. I think this Cooperative Mode is a bit odd. Two against one? Why not have a "Tag Team" match up? Two players versus two CPUs. That would be fun.

I like that two people with Switches can battle each other. I'm guessing it's over local wireless. I wonder if online play is available?

Oh, and we get a brief glimpse of what looks like M. Bison getting Hadouken'd by Ryu, from a first-person perspective in the style of Street Fighter IV or V, I think. A mini-game of kind, maybe?

The trailer ends with giving us a brief glimpse of a pair of silhouettes. Based on the shapes, and he glowing fist, one is obviously Evil Ryu, a dark version of Ryu that first appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 2, and the other is Violent Ken, a dark version of Ken that first appeared in SNK vs. Capcom: SNK Chaos. He is described as a brainwashed version of Ken that uses M. Bison's Psycho Power. Neat.

Once I get a Switch, this will be on my list of games for it. This sounds like a lot of fun!