Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight (NES)

While it’s not looked back on too favorably these days, Capcom’s original Street Fighter fighting game was a big hit. Its sequel would end up codifying many of the fighting game systems we still see today, but that game needed time to develop and Capcom wanted to capitalize on the hype surrounding the first game. Taking an entirely unrelated sci-fi action platformer and slapping the Street Fighter brand on it, Capcom aimed to deceive players into buying their new NES title that had nothing to do with the original game at all, and to further exploit one of their popular franchises, the United States release of the game expanded the title to include a nod to the arcade beat ’em up Final Fight. It’s not likely a company could get away with such barefaced manipulation of its audience now, but while this certainly wasn’t the fighting game or brawler people were hoping to play, Capcom thankfully wasn’t trying to sneak a stinker into people’s gaming libraries.

 

In the Japanese release, the plot of Street Fighter 2010 really is completely disconnected from the original, but the English localization at least tried to make it take place in the same universe by taking its cybernetic hero Kevin and renaming him Ken to match the second player character from Street Fighter. Supposedly taking place 25 years after Ken gave up his street fighting ways, Ken now works as a scientist. With the help of a friend named Troy, he develops something called Cyboplasm, a substance that can enhance a person’s natural abilities if administered properly but can twist people into monstrous forms if overused. A mysterious enemy manages to steal the Cyboplasm and begins administering it to people on the different planets humanity has inhabited to spread chaos. Troy is caught up in the attack as well, so Ken takes off to avenge his partner and stop anyone who has been mutated by his misused creation.

 

Ken has a few attacks that look like they’re trying to be martial arts moves, but the actual punches and kicks deal no damage here, these only being the means by which he fires his energy shots. The rapid fire blasts here are more akin to Capcom’s Mega Man than the Hadoukens Ken threw in his source game, combat with enemies mostly about moving around to avoid whatever they’re using against you as you launch as many shots as you can at them during any opening. Some foes might be at different heights than you tough, your default attack only firing forward, but you have the ability to curve your shot a little with the kick and forward punch variations of your attack, these much slower than your regular shot but often safer than trying to do the even slower jump shots. Your shots can be upgraded all throughout the game by collecting little power-ups, the damage increasing and some of your special shot types even gaining a secondary effect, but any damage will reduce your power some. Thankfully, the default damage is manageable enough and your basic attack fast enough that you never feel completely underpowered, but there is definitely a quirk to your firing method when it comes to the all-too-necessary dodging. For some reason, there appears to be a bit of a delay between firing your shot and when you can jump, and in a game as difficult as this one, that can spell the difference between success and failure before you’ve gotten used to this limitation.

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight is definitely an incredibly hard game, mainly because the game designs many of its enemies and bosses to be hard to avoid. A full powered shot meter will definitely help you make quick work of some of them, but even at full power the enemies move in ways you must respect to succeed. Flying enemies will often move to areas where your rapid fire shot can’t hit them, bosses have some fairly quick attacks and can often quickly cover the battlefield, and the game will sometimes limit your available platforms to complicate a battle that could have been easy if you were given more room to safely maneuver. However, while you will definitely need to learn what enemies can do to overcome them, there are few moments where it feels like you lack any recourse. There are sadly some cases, like an area in an auto-scrolling level near the end where you need to hop between walls and enemy spawns can line up in a way that makes it impossible to move forward safely, but these are definitely an exception in a game that, while not well-balanced, is still surmountable, the bosses in particular satisfying to take down when you’ve finally got a feel for how to handle their patterns.

 

Still, the game’s difficulty does hold it back from being much better, especially since your response to many foes will have to be being overly cautious in a game where a level timer exists. You do pack a backflip that grants you temporarily invincibility when executed at least, this being a perfect way to even the odds against some of the bosses who rely mostly on seemingly undodgeable attacks. It requires jumping normally and then pressing back in the air so it’s not totally fluid to execute, but Street Fighter 2010 is a little awkward in a few areas, like how you need to jump towards a wall and then press A to latch onto it in a way that doesn’t feel 100% reliable. There is also a considerable amount of slow down in some stages, some fights coming to a crawl that may technically benefit your reaction times but still doesn’t feel nice to have to push through.

Mild control problems could certainly doom any hard game to be much worse than intended, but Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight manages to stay interesting primarily because of its level design. Taking place across a few different planets, Street Fighter 2010 doesn’t settle into any one type of stage concept for too long. Every stage technically requires you to open a portal that will take you to the next one, but the means through which you do so keeps changing. Some levels require you to kill multiple regular enemies, others only ask you to overcome a boss in a devoted level, and others will take on a shape more akin to a full platforming level or auto-scrolling platforming challenge, the end of that stage containing whatever means is necessary to open the way onward. Even within these formulas things will keep introducing new ideas. These include an almost battleship like underwater level where the automatically scrolling screen moves back and forth instead of just forward, another level involves you standing on a waterfall of sand that keeps dragging you down through danger, and plenty of stages take on an arena like shape where the boss or baddies you need to defeat have some environmental assistance. Rolling waves of sand, plants that wither when stood on, or even ground that large worms emerge from to drag you into a sub-level spice up the fights, and the bosses in particular come in many shapes to match like ones attached to the level or move about with the same freedom you have. While the game is difficult on the whole, there are easier fights to be found and the game paces out its toughest levels to prevent player burnout.

 

What’s odd about Street Fighter 2010’s stages though are the interstitial areas where Ken is dropped in a small space where the background is an odd mess of color and the goals are unclear. Sometimes all you need to do is wait and the game will let you continue, other times there might be power-ups waiting here for you as a treat, but every now and then enemies or even a boss must be fought in these stages. These could be meant to represent whatever warp tunnel Ken takes between stages, but the fact some are pointless makes them a strange addition but not one that really helps or hurts the title in any strong way. What does make the game more enjoyable is some surprisingly good music backing the action and the visual variety found in already varied levels. Progress in Street Fighter 2010 keeps throwing new things at you to keep you engaged, and while not every new idea is a hit and some do outright recycle enemies or stage concepts, things are spaced out well so that it’s not a constant fight against the familiar.

THE VERDICT: If you put aside the deliberate deception of Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight’s title, you have an action platformer game that was nearly good but decided to turn up its difficulty dials a little too high. The level goals keep the action diverse and the stage designs are a good fit for the fights and platforming challenges, but too many foes are deliberately designed to slip around your capabilities and the power-ups that even the playing field are easily lost. It probably won’t please the audience its title tried to rope in, but players who do know what they’re getting into can appreciate the variety on offer even though the game doesn’t execute every idea it has all that well.

 

And so, I give Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An OKAY rating. If not for the name, it’s likely this game would have left almost no impact on the gaming world because of the skewed balance between interesting designs and flawed execution. Its problems aren’t so overwhelming that you can’t enjoy the many different forms the level challenges take, but it certainly needed to polish up some of its movement options to truly let the player appreciate its more difficult moments. The game didn’t need to so readily reduce your power meter to stay tough either even though the game is still manageable at lower power levels. It often feels like the game is on the cusp of crafting an engaging challenge only to mess up some small aspect. The problems aren’t overwhelming though, allowing there to be plenty of decent moments between the occasions where some system or design doesn’t come together perfectly, but it is possible the devotion to constantly providing fresh new experiences in its levels lead to oversights on how some of those might play. The stream of new content keeps providing reasons to push forward and the different level goals help break up the moments where things can get too difficult or a little shoddy, so there’s still enough going right in the game to salvage the overall experience.

 

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight is one of the most blatant attempts to trick players into buying a game with no relation to its title, but this is thankfully not a case where garbage was being propped up by deceptive marketing. It’s definitely rough around the edges and perhaps a bit too hard for its own good, but maybe if it had to stand on its own merits instead, the development team would have taken the time to refine the parts of it that did work so it could instead be remembered for something more than marketing deception.