GAME CLEAR No. 210 -- Street Fighter: The Movie

Street Fighter: The Movie (1995, PS1/Saturn)

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom (JP), Acclaim Entertainment (NA/EU)
Clear Version: Saturn
Clear Platform: Saturn
Clear Date: 2/2/25

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Why should I care?
You probably shouldn’t. This is a pretty unpleasant fighting game on a platform and in an era full of greatness in that very genre.

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Quick! Change the channel!

Video game movies have always been good. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Video games are the juvenile playthings of simpletons, but when adapted to screen, they become something altogether better: art. The kind the erudite likes of Frasier and Niles might discuss over sherry. It’s no surprise, then, that the 1994 film adaptation of Street Fighter was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike and helped cement the legacy of Jean-Claude Van Damme as a world-class actor. Hoping to seize this moment, Capcom re-adapted the motion picture back to the video game format in 1995. You’ll not be surprised to know the result pales in comparison to the cinematic masterpiece it was based on.

Having said that, I’ll show some grace to Capcom’s efforts and start with a bit of praise. They wisely replaced all of the brutish, ugly character sprites from the original Street Fighter games with digitized sprites of the actors from the film. Who needs hand-drawn sprites when you can slap some literal photographs in there? It doesn’t get any more photorealistic than that!

Okay, I don’t think I can keep this tongue-in-cheek shtick up too much longer. Time to get serious.

Street Fighter the movie — that is, the actual movie, not this game called Street Fighter: The Movie — is a seriously flawed film that nevertheless has some amount of watchable charm. Raúl Julia’s performance is widely praised (and rightly so), and the fight choreography is often downright decent. Going into this game, I had hoped that it might possess some similar redeeming qualities. Sadly, that is not really the case. Despite my sarcastic tone above, I was being totally sincere when I said this game is worse than the movie.

On its face, it seems like it could’ve succeeded. The game was made in-house by Capcom, so the know-how was certainly present to make a competent version of the game. Unfortunately, for one reason or another (deadlines, I’d guess), that didn’t really bear out.

The game consists of three modes that are pretty standard to the genre. The first is “Movie Fight”, which functions as the game’s story mode. You play as Col. Guile (Van Damme) and fight your way through a rough approximation of the events of the movie, with stills and FMV from the film interspersed throughout. The forced protagonist is just fine with me because of my fondness for JCVD and the fact that I mained Guile when I dabbled a bit with Street Fighter V, but folks who don’t care for his moveset might be a bit annoyed. Needless to say, every story beat results in a fight against some member of the Street Fighter cast. After each fight, there’s a bit of dialog, then you’re presented with two options for where to go next, which determines your next opponent. The series of bouts ultimately culminates in a showdown with M. Bison, just like the movie. Win, and you and the Allied Nations succeed and the game is over. Congrats!

It’s a functional enough retelling of the plot of the film in theory, but the difficulty is absurd and saps absolutely any fun out of the game. After the first couple opponents, your enemies become the most cheating-ass, input-reading motherfuckers you’ve ever fought. Thus, the gameplay devolves into messing around to try to find some goofy shit you can exploit that will trip up the AI just enough to beat them. It’s not fun, and I only persisted in finishing it because I am who I am. It’s a shame because this all could’ve been alleviated if the difficulty slider in the options menu affected story mode, but it seems it simply doesn’t! Bizarre!

The game also has “Street Fight” and “Trial Fight” modes, which are a more traditional arcade mode and a high score/endurance mode respectively. These do seem to actually respect the difficulty choice of the player and thus are probably more fun. It’s too bad they didn’t think to do that for the single-player mode that receives top billing.

Of course, much of the point of fighting games is to play against your friends. Unfortunately, I think the appeal of that is limited here too. Under the hood, this game was evidently based pretty directly on Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but I don’t remembering it having the kind of awful slowdown that this game sometimes does. Plus, the digitized sprites of the characters make for some pretty inscrutable hitboxes and hurtboxes at times. I’ll probably enjoy a few rounds of this with friends as a silly novelty, but I don’t think it’s likely to offer much more than that.

Alas! This could’ve been a weird, fun little Street Fighter entry, but it falls short of being really worth playing except as a brief curiosity. At least the Saturn has no shortage of other great fighting games, including in the Street Fighter series itself.

To throw it a bone, I will say that some of the music in the game is pretty great. And on a related note, if you manage to beat this game’s awful story mode, instead of credits, you are rewarded with this music video in full for your efforts. Sure, why not?