The new characters are very interesting. The four from the arcade version are Abel, Crimson Viper, Rufus, and El Fuerte. Abel is a mixed martial arts fighter, behaving like a compromise between grapplers like Zangief and more conventional characters. He has great ground attacks and lots of options for getting past defenses to land a powerful throw, but his aerial game is lacking. Crimson Viper relies a lot on faking opponents out and changing her momentum mid-move to land overhead attacks (among other options, but describing them all would take too long), while Rufus is... strange; he seems like a fat, multi-hit oriented close combat fighter, though it remains to be seen if that holds true. Finally, El Fuerte is all about speed, misdirection, and capitalizing on almost anything your opponent does; he’s hard to control, but lots of fun. Akuma, Gouken, and Seth (the game’s final boss) are also unlockable, and Gouken in particular does some interesting things to the typical ’Shoto’ design employed by Ryu, Ken, and Akuma.

Interestingly, this game has several notable improvements over its arcade release. In addition to the things I talked about above, you also get to unlock Dan, Feilong, Sakura, Cammy, Gen, and Rose and they play mostly like they used to; they’re all great additions to the roster. The single player mode also has several anime videos that relate to the game’s plot, with a few short clips for each character. It’s a great touch.

Expert players may be interested to know about a few engine tweaks in SF4. Safe falls from SF3 are still here, but Parrying has been replaced by Focus Attacks. It requires a little more forethought to use, since your character stands in place to charge up an unblockable, ’autoguard’ style attack that can lead to a big combo, but is vulnerable to several things. One of the more interesting uses for it is to Focus through a fireball, then cancel the Focus with a dash to safely move toward the enemy; you lose a little health, but it will regrow over time. Beyond this, it mostly plays like a mix of Third Strike and Super Turbo, so you’ll like how matches flow in this game.