There was a moment that occurred at T12: Toronto Fighting Game Championships that still makes me chuckle. This moment happened very early on in the Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition team tournament. On the big screen, two competitors both picked Yun, which made the entire crowd boo mercilessly.
If you haven’t been following the latest news when it comes to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, I don’t blame you for not seeing the humour in it. However, serious Street Fighter IV players have been crying foul about Arcade Edition’s character balance since the release of the game. Yun and Yang in particular stand out as being considerably stronger than the rest of the cast, though a number of characters received some weird and unnecessary balance changes that made a lot of people angry. Although Capcom has admitted to intentionally making the game unbalanced, this proved to be a bad decision. Ultimately, Yoshinori Ono, the main producer behind the Street Fighter IV series, apologized to the community at EVO 2011 and announced that he’d make things right with Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Version 2012, set for release on December 13.
Unlike the previous Street Fighter IV releases, this is coming out as a free patch to anyone who has bought Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. It does not contain any new characters or features. Odds are, if you stopped playing Street Fighter IV awhile ago, Version 2012 will not bring you back. However, if you’re like me, who is still playing the game regularly and frustrated with how the game was re-balanced, the character balance changes contained within Version 2012 could be a badly-needed cure for our Arcade Edition blues.
If you’re interested in seeing what’s changed, head over to Shoryuken for a fairly comprehensive list of known changes, which were translated from the Capcom developer blog. Interpreting these changes can be difficult if you’re not familiar with the terminology, frame data or advanced game mechanics, but they’re available if you wanted to know to what extent each character changed.
I was really happy with the character balance in Super Street Fighter IV, but disappointed that Capcom went in and basically wrecked a bunch of things I liked with Arcade Edition. I would be happy to just see everything revert back to the way things were in Super. However, this isn’t the route that Capcom took this time with Version 2012, so all I can do is hope that these changes are for the better. Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Version 2012 (damn that’s a long title) will be available for download on December 13th. Stay tuned for impressions on this and other games on In Third Person!
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