Street Fighter Zero The Animation

It's been almost four years since I talked about Street Fighter II, the anime film by Group TAC. It was a film I was pretty positive towards and with good reason. It had some solid action sequences, a compelling plot and was pretty close to everything that the game's fans wanted. This film comes from the same studio six years later in 2000. It's not connected to the first, but they surely must have had time to iron out those elements that didn't work and make something improved, right?

Like last time, I'll be using the Japanese character names.

Story:

We open with Ryu contemplating on his ... old master while also struggling with some strange energy. This is the dark hadou, a power force that corrupted Gouki and may very well do the same to Ryu if he lets it overtake him. Meanwhile, Chun-Li is trying to track down a Doctor Sadler who's reportedly working for Shadaloo, Sakura is trying to find the mysterious martial artist (Ryu) she saw beat up a bunch of thugs alongside Chun-Li & a boy, Shun, claims to be Ryu's brother and starts living alongside Ryu & Ken at the dojo.

There are a lot of issues with this film. The first is the whole struggle Ryu has with the dark hadou. The film portrays this as an inner struggle that could lead Ryu down a path where he cares about nothing but fighting but we see no real evidence that that's the outcome. We never see Ryu get into a fight for no real reason, he always fights to protect someone else or because he thinks he's in danger and has no trouble turning down fights. The same is rue with Gouki, the man who was “consumed” by the dark hadou. Ryu and Chun-Li go to his island to talk with him and he just lets them go after a short, vague chat. And the whole big thing about it kind of ends in an anti-climax. Then we have the stuff with Sadler. It's largely boring. Sakura spends the film trying to meet with Ryu but she never speaks with him. Instead, the pay off to her whole arc is a short lecture from Ken. And the whole thing is completely irrelevant to the main narrative. Then there's the stuff with Shun. Which is probably the worst part of the film. Not only is this kid an annoyance but the latter part of the film has a lot of tension that relies on us caring about this kid and what befalls him. All while not giving us any compelling reason to care.

I guess you can give the film some credit for tying most of its narrative threads together but it kind of doesn't work when you have no reason to care about any of them.

Characters:

While the other film gave us a good sense of character for the major characters, at least, this one gives us kind of dull, generic focus characters. And if you thought this being based off of Street Fighter Alpha specifically was going to affect which characters get major roles, you'd be mistaken. The two Alpha characters we see the most of are Rose & Sakura. Neither of whom really gets to fight. Sakura spends her time in the pointless side story of trying to find Ryu. Rose spends her time appearing to Ryu as a sort of mystical guide. We see some other Alpha characters like Birdie, Dan, Guy, Adon, & Sodom, for very brief parts that give them virtually no sense of personality. Our main antagonist isn't even an actual Street Fighter character. He's a completely original non-character. Shun is the worst, though. He's obnoxious and the attempts to make him sympathetic are completely cliché.

Art:

If there's one thing you'd expect from a film based off of Street Fighter, it's probably strong action. Which is not something this film possesses. You know how those long running mindless action anime frequently involve lazy action sequences that feature characters stopping to charge their special attacks while their opponent sits back and lets them, side characters getting taken out easily and then the protagonist jumping in and ending the whole skirmish disgustingly easily? That's the major action sequences in this film in a nutshell. The more minor ones just show our major characters fighting nameless henchmen or they're ten second snippets of the Street Fighter cast fighting on an island. I guess you can give the film some credit in that its character designs do mimic the Alpha art style pretty faithfully but this is the type of franchise that's known for its action and those sequences are pretty lousy.

Sound:

They did get some capable actors for this. Including Orikasa Ai, Touma Yumi & Nishimura Tomomichi. Their performances in this, however, aren't very good. They're okay, especially considering what they had to work with. The music by Matsuo Hayato is really forgettable.

Ho-yay:

This film doesn't develop its characters or their relationships enough for any of them to seem romantic.

Final Thoughts:

Alpha is a lousy film. The disparate narrative threads are pretty bad and they don't form a stronger whole. The characters range from obnoxious brat Shun to bland major character. The action sequences are weak. All in all, it's barely better than what Hollywood did with the franchise. My final rating is going to be a 3/10. Next week I'll take a look at Phantasy Star Online 2: The Animation.

Street Fighter Alpha is based on the 1995 video game of the same name. The film features most of the cast from the game, and even squeezes in at least four characters from the video game sequel. The film is rumored to be the sequel to the Street Fighter V series. In all honesty, I do not see the connection any where. There is just no possible way this could be the sequel or prequel to anything. If for some strange reason it is, then it creates nothing but continuity issues. I simply look at this movie as a stand alone and nothing more. Casual ... fans can come into this and quickly understand what's going on. However, this movie was clearly meant for the fans of the video game, and even a majority of them has trashed this one over the years.

The Street Fighter franchise has went down hill since the original animated movie. Now make no mistake, the original was no work of art, and I would never consider it to be very good anime or god forbid great anime; but at least there was one area where it shined, and it happened to be in the fights. That film contained the best action scenes in the Street Fighter animated franchise. Unfortunately, the action scenes are only one of the many issues with this film, as they don't even begin to compare with the weakest scenes from the original film.

The action scenes can be halfway decent when they want to, but too many fights consist of either unseen action or two seconds of displaying a move. The fight scenes never exercise the animation to its full ability, which results in nothing more than just mediocre action meant to kill time. I wasn't the least bit impressed or entertained at all during this movie. There are small occasions when the animation is pretty fluid delivering decent choreography. However, these scenes are few and far between. The artwork is very passable, and the characters perfectly resemble their video game counter parts.

The plot has a few decent moments that will mainly mean something only to fans who have followed the game. It revolves around the mystery of the "Dark Hado", and pushes a possible confrontation between Ryu and Akuma. The movie contains the usual, and most obvious martial art theme, which is one seeking to become stronger, but I found the drama to be completely non engaging because I found the characters to be boring.

Now speaking of the characters, most of the beginning spends time building the relationship between Ryu and Shun. This happens to be the hardest part of the movie to get through. Shun is a detestable character in everything that he does, and his repetitive dialogue grows annoying very quick. I really hated Shun, and not too many people were fond of him from what I remember.

The biggest problem that I've known fans to have with this anime happens to be the lead villain. The main characters: Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li battle against a man who does not appear in the game. Although I can forgive if a video game to anime ignores the source material. The villain should at least be interesting. The villain by the name of Dr. Sadler comes off as just another stock bad guy who wants to rule the world, and is unconvincing at trying to obtain his goal. Been there, done that.

Street Fighter Alpha isn't the worst video game to film that I've seen. It's not even close actually, but it's nowhere near a good anime, and I highly recommend skipping it if you're not a fan of the franchise. If you are a fan, then I recommend setting your expectations very low.

High: Decent artwork and animation

Lows: Boring plot, boring fights, insipid villain, just plain boring

Ugh. Have you even SEEN this thing? It's f'ing terrible. Ryu looks like The Hulk wearing a headband. It's embarrassing!

They hype up a battle that never happens (Akuma) and there aren't even some of the most well-liked characters from the game in the movie at all. It's like a shitty version of Dragon Ball Z.

The main focus is Chun Li's crotch. This should have been an OVA in the series, not a feature length film. Those 90 minutes totally overstayed their welcome (refer again to the Chun Li comment).

It's poor. The only thing that ... gives it any credit is the title and the art, for its time. Not saying it's mind-blowing for 1999, but it was the common style.

The script, if you even want to call it that, >.> is abysmal.
Maybe it was just a poor translation from Japanese to English, although it doesn't really change the storyline, make you suffer through lame jokes, awkward conversations, and terrible voice acting that sounds like it was recorded through a tin cup

That's all I have to say, I think I just gave that more space in my head than I'd ever like to.



They said the PS4 is going to be over $400. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I only know about Street Fighter in passing, fighting games really aren't my thing. I went into this thinking I would know at least a handful of the characters but I always remembered it being a grounded compared to other fighting games like Tekken with its random God-seed/Demon-seed thing it did. It got to the point where characters were constantly talking about dark chi and becoming Super Saiyans that I realised I was wrong.

If you aren't a fan of the game, I think you'll find this pretty impenetrable as a movie even ignoring everyone suddenly having magical powers. Characters are mentioned with such weight and ... become important figures in the story, but might only get a minute or two of screentime. If you know the character from the game, it will probably make sense but if you don't, you'll probably be confused why Chun-Li is so stunned about "Dr Sadler", especially at the end where his tiny amount of screentime is.

Ryuu as a character was just pretty bland, same for Chun-Li whose motivation is to find her dad which she mentions twice but when they get to their destination, she never even looks for him. Ken had a little more personality than the two of them but it wasn't anything major. Sakura had the most character and personality out of the cast but she plays such a tiny role in the movie because for some reason they decided we needed a young boy called Shun to show up to be the emotional core of the movie and kind of a character surrogate, but it was a strange choice when Sakura already seemed to be filling that role as a newbie fangirl in the world of street fighting. It doesn't help that Shun is just kind of an annoying character.

Other characters just pop up and disappear as just blatant cameos that have very little baring on the plot. Akuma is probably the most glaring one, appearing in a vision once or twice before Ryuu decides to visit him to have a talk about the dark powers but by this point we're already well aware of them so it seems pointless, especially since Akuma just kind of walks off after a minute on screen.

The fights are generally well animated though but some of them stretch on too long, the end fight being a pretty blatant example. I don't know how many times characters got their second wind against a basically immortal enemy. Character X will sacrifice themselves to Character Y can escape, but Character X will run back to save Y and tell them to run, who will then run back to save X and tell THEM to run. It's a bit much. The fights against the impossibly weak enemies are considerably more fun compared to the big, weighty fights the movie really throws its attention at.

The first 10 minutes move at a breakneck speed as they try to introduce all of the characters and their motivations. Then it really slows down as we get repeated discussions of the dark powers and Ryuu's fear of falling to them for a long stretch in the middle, then they rush to the final encounter, infiltrate the base within 2 minutes and then the final fight takes up the last 20 or so minutes of the movie.

The most glaringly strange thing was the "Rose" character. A magical lady who just kind of appears 2-3 times throughout the movie to give advice to Ryuu and then disappear again. There is no explanation of her whatsoever. She's introduced like a villainous character but apparently was a good guy. Her presence was so unimportant that I kept forgetting she existed but everytime she popped up I had to relive that moment again of "Oh, there's a weird looking magical woman talking to Ryuu in his dreams about the Tarot cards. Cool."

Overall, pretty disappointing but I'm sure if you're a fan of the franchise you'll get more out of it than me. If they'd removed the Shun character entirely and kept a more grounded story, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more but the repetitive "Will he fall to the dark power" storyline that dominated from about the 15 minute mark onwards really bored me to tears because you can guess the answer without even watching the movie.