Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition (3DS) review "The game’s third significant change is more difficult to pin down as either a flaw or an improvement. Since the 3DS only has so many standard buttons available, extra moves are now mapped to the touch screen (which is quartered). By default, the touch screen allows you to execute up to four special moves with a single tap of your stylus or finger. If you find such coddling insulting, you can instead set your configuration so that those touch screen functions allow you to use more standard moves and throws."

Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition is a beautiful game and a worthy purchase by any measure, but it’s an especially exciting treat if you have a shiny new 3DS but nothing to play. Packed full of content and designed to take full advantage of the hardware, Capcom’s handheld adaptation of the must-have console fighter is precisely the sort of title that nearly everyone hopes will arrive frequently on Nintendo’s handheld once the trickle of software releases currently arriving for the platform turns into the inevitable flood.

When Street Fighter IV was released on consoles a few years back, I was ecstatic. Aside from the lack of a handful of favorite characters from Super Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, the game was a supremely polished version of everything I’d wanted to see for years but had never dared to dream would again be available on a current platform. Then Super Street Fighter IV came along and fixed nearly every problem I had with its immediate predecessor. New fighters and old favorites all playable from the start meant that my only remaining issue was Seth, an end-game boss so incredibly cheap that now when I have to face him at the end of the Arcade mode, I just reset the system and do something else.

For better and for worse, Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition is a faithful handheld port of that generally fantastic game. The bad news is that Seth is still a total tool and the good news is that there’s still so much great content that it’s hard to care. The logical part of your brain is probably saying “But that sort of thing shouldn’t be possible on a Nintendo handheld,” and that’s true even with the additional horsepower that the 3DS possesses. There have been some cuts and you will definitely notice them. You’ll likely be quite surprised, though, by the limited number of compromises that the developers made.

There really are only three major differences between this new handheld version of the game and its console big brothers. The first change is that backgrounds now are almost completely static. You can still fight in familiar arenas as pieces of the background shift slightly to one side or another to produce the illusion of depth, but now there are no wildly cheering crowd members. You probably won’t miss them much.

A second and more positive change is that everything now features an added dimension. There actually are two available perspectives. You can either play with the traditional side view in effect, or you can switch to a special perspective that shifts things by around 45 degrees so that you’re practically looking over your fighter’s shoulder as you pound your opponents into a pulp. While that second option does more to produce a 3D effect along the lines of something you might expect from the 3DS hardware, it’s not a particularly great way to play the game; opponents tend to be more difficult to beat because it’s sometimes difficult to tell what moves they’re prepping.

The game’s third significant change is more difficult to pin down as either a flaw or an improvement. Since the 3DS only has so many standard buttons available, extra moves are now mapped to the touch screen (which is quartered). By default, the touch screen allows you to execute up to four special moves with a single tap of your stylus or finger. If you find such coddling insulting, you can instead set your configuration so that those touch screen functions allow you to use more standard moves and throws. It’s up to you.

Naturally, the new change will leave some people disgusted. It doesn’t have to ruin the experience, though. Nearly anything about the game can be modified through the in-game menus and when you head online to face other opponents, you don’t have to worry about someone repeatedly tapping the screen to throw a stream of fireballs at you or something because you can choose to fight only players who use the more traditional methods of control.

I found out the hard way that it’s worth tweaking and saving your preferred settings immediately after you load the game for the first time. I went online for a few matches and neglected to adjust my settings, so I immediately found myself going up against someone who believed that the path to victory is paved by a steady barrage of special moves. My opponent chose Dudley and promptly demolished my character with nothing but a stream of diving punches. I refused to resort to such antics and lost as a result, but it was a relatively painless lesson to learn and I approve of the simplified control scheme even though I’m not inclined to use it myself. I just felt a little bit stupid for actually inputting proper commands to activate my special moves when it was clear that my opponent was doing no such thing. Capcom was wise to give people like me the option to avoid competing against players who abuse the simplified control scheme.

A more pressing concern—and one that a trip to the options menu won’t fix—is the game’s tendency to fall out of 3D mode if you get too excited while playing. Swinging the handheld back and forth (as is natural for scrubs like me when we play fighters) results in a lot of flickering as the game shifts in and out of 3D. The good news is that the game is perfectly playable without any 3D effect applied at all. After hours of play, I still can’t get over how great everything looks.

If you’re searching for a launch-window title that has some lasting value and some technical pizzazz, look no further than Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition. The massive roster of characters and handy access to local or online matches with other players means that you can stay busy for hours upon hours if that’s what you want. The game really has no peers at this early stage in the 3DS life cycle. If you don’t already own a previous version, or even if you do and you just want a competent fighting game to take with you on the road, it’s difficult to imagine anything else coming out in the near future that might surpass Capcom’s surprisingly polished port. With that said, many potential fans have already played a previous version of the game at great length. The lack of added content may be understandable, but it’s still disappointing. You have been warned.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (April 10, 2011) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.