It’s essentially a way to spend two chunks of your super meter to absorb as many attacks as you want and then return fire. Red focus is an attempt to bulk up this mechanic. The mechanic has always been “ok”, but has never offered the real “predict and punish” oomph of, say, Street Fighter III’s parry. The focus attack in older versions of Street Fighter IV would let you soak up one attack and then launch a counter blow to try and surprise a predictable opponent, as long as they didn’t use an attack with armour-breaking properties. The key new elements in Ultra Street Fighter IV, aside from the grand character balance (which many spreadsheets around the net will explain for you), are Red Focus, Delayed Wake-up, and Ultra Combo Double.įirst up: Red Focus.
It’s a logical re-shaping of the Street Fighter IV design, and if you enjoy Street fighter IV quite a bit then you can take confidence in knowing that Ultra Street Fighter IV is more of what you love, with interesting new mechanics to consider and master. And while they are all solid additions (and all more interesting additions than, say, Evil Ryu), they’re probably the least interesting “new” things when we’re talking about the grand vision of Ultra Street Fighter IV.īefore I go into this, because things are about to get jargon-filled, please know that Ultra Street Fighter IV is a superb fighting game. Evil Cammy (Or Decapre, as she’s actually called), is a unique, zippy, mix-up-centric addition to the cast, and one of the five new faces of the Street Fighter IV roster (the others being Street Fighter III’s Hugo and Elena, Street Fighter Alpha 2’s Rolento and Street Fighter X Tekken’s Poison), bringing the total up to 44, a ridiculous number for a one-on-one fighting game. Well, that changes with Ultra Street Fighter IV, because now they’ve added evil Cammy! I jest, of course. No matter how many evil Shoto characters Capcom added over the years. It meant that the game, balance tweaks aside, remained a familiar constant – which is excellent given the quality of the game, but this also led to fatigue setting in for a lot of people. The game stayed underpinned by Ultra Attacks and Focus Attacks, with only the fighters that used them changing. For every new face that would appear, the concrete upon which Street Fighter IV stood would remain still.
Over the years Street Fighter IV has grown, but has remained largely unshaken at a fundamental level. It’s the fighting game for everyone and while some would argue that Street Fighter III is the better, or perhaps “deeper”, game, Street Fighter IV forwent the nigh impossible mastery mountain that is the parry, for what, at launch, was largely an HD facelift of Street Fighter II. Its roster is tooled to appeal to solid archetypes rather than wacky concepts. Its systems are designed to be tight and compelling, easy to understand but hard to fit together. Street Fighter is the conduit around which fighting game popularity appears to wax and wane. It might not have the gore of Mortal Kombat but, let’s be honest, no Street Fighter IV would have meant no Mortal Kombat 9… Street Fighter IV’s combos may not be as long and flashy as Marvel/Persona/BlazBlue, but they’re refined tests of execution nonetheless. Now please, if you have a personal favourite then I totally get that and I’d love to hear about it in the comments, but it’s impossible to ignore Street Fighter IV’s quality and impact on the genre. The past five years have been incredible for the fighting genre as a whole, but Street Fighter IV is the king. Of jaws agape when Daigo played Yun instead of Ryu for that little bit. Has it really been five years? Five years of focus dash cancels.
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