Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers

Capcom and Nintendo were partners in crime during the SNES era, where many fans can remember playing Street Fighter in its prime, but nowadays the partnership isn't as strong, with Street Fighter games being relatively absent from Nintendo's consoles in recent years. When we heard that Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers was coming to Switch, then, it sounded like it could only be good news.

Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers wants to be the ultimate version of the classic, and it's basically a revamped and expanded version of SFII that's somewhere in between Super Turbo from 1994 and the HD Remix from 2008. This means it includes the roster of 17 fighters, both with retro and HD visual finishes, as well as an online mode with ranked and casual matches.

Alongside all of this the Switch version adds the Buddy 2v1 co-op mode (inspired by the Dramatic Mode from the Alpha subseries), the inclusion of Evil Ryu and Violent Ken for a total of 19 characters and, finally, a series of juicy extras for fans, such as the Way of the Hado mode for them to pull off motion-controlled hadokens, a beautiful gallery containing more than a thousand hi-res pieces of artwork, and a colour editor to freely customise every single fighter.

With regards to this Switch version, there are a few features to tell you about. For starters, you can remove the HUD (including life and super bars, time, and character icons/names). This doesn't simply mean a cleaner screen, but also a tactical twist as you have fewer reference points to go on (but there's SFX when your super is ready and the music speeds up when there's not much health left, as usual).

There's a replay mode for you to save and replay your best moments via the stats menu. You can select your favourites and it works just like Mario Kart, in that only the script is recorded, and not the video, so there's no loss of quality.

You can play local offline multiplayer with two Switch consoles (both players need to have the game though), which is great for a pair of Street Fighter fans who both have the console. You can also recover life when in Buddy Battle by using the taunt.

The game adds HD rumble and vibrates with the impact of each character on each hand. It's more noticeable with the Joy-Cons separate from the Switch, but nothing as crazy as counting the balls in 1-2-Switch. There are up to eight difficulty modes included, from Super Easy to Master, and even Legend. Of course, other than their own special moves, Evil Ryu and Violent Ken include their own story ending.

Finally, besides being able to choose between classic sprites (4:3 ratio) and modern HD drawings, you can also listen to the old-school samples and the 16-bit sounds or alternatively go for the remastered music and VA.

Now, onto the controls. Just by looking at the console it's clear to see that Street Fighter II Switch controls were going to cause controversy. We've tried all the available methods and we've taken some notes, but the console's design is proving decisive. As you may have noticed, the Switch doesn't come with a traditional D-pad by default, and it's not the same to perform a shoryuken without one. Surprisingly enough, even if the analogue stick would always be our last resource in a fighting game (its multiple positions cause inaccuracy), at the end of the day we were playing more with the left stick just out of comfort. Besides, that's how you play when you split the Joy-Cons for two players.

However, the best option (especially if this game goes pro, like Super Turbo) would be having compatible arcade sticks, but it turns out that, perhaps due to its recent launch, there's still no officially supported fighting sticks for the Switch (Hori is making one, though). The second best option is always the D-pad, and with the lack of one on the Joy-Cons we immediately tried out the only one available for the system, the Switch Pro Controller. Alas, here we face a more serious issue. As good as the Pro Controller D-pad seems, it has significant flaws when recognising the proper directions. Nintendo is aware, but it's so far unclear whether new shipments will fix this, as it's a design flaw for the controller itself.

So it's somewhat frustrating that for now, we won't be able to play Street Fighter with immaculate controls on the Switch, even if we're getting used to it. At least newcomers can map special attacks to single buttons though, or even to the touch screen, which is a plus.

Regarding the Way of the Hado mode, it's pretty much the dream of many kids born in the eighties, as it allows you to put in practice the three classic Ryu techniques, but in first person and with motion controls, by performing gestures that, at least with the fist-based moves, are pretty similar. It actually works as long as controllers are well calibrated, and thankfully there are three sensitivity levels for you to find your range depending on your preference. Then you face a bunch of enemies in two modes with three difficulty levels, including character levelling, although this seems pretty repetitive at first glance. We know we've only had a little glimpse of this, but it doesn't feel as bad as one might have expected.

Finally, besides those controls and waiting to play some good online matches before our verdict, there's something else that we found weird and wanted to mention. If this is meant to be the definitive version of the classic, how is it that we see no sign of traditional things such as bonus stages (car and barrels), the option to tweak damage and speed, or the chance to arrange local tournaments? This leaves us perplexed, stunned, and a little disappointed.