Street Fighter Zero The Animation

Now I’m not an avid Street Fighter fan, but I have played through about 60% of the games and know the characters and the compelling back stories. So before I watched this I had high hopes, just thinking about what a Hadōken would look like in an anime format was a fabulous thought. Unfortunately this isn't the awesome SF film i expected. It feels like it made was for fans so it misses the mark in terms of capitalizing on the game material they have to work with, but overall the film is a good watch if not a very interesting one.

The story is pretty ... straightforward and easy to understand, Ryu is trying to overcome the evil force inside of him that consumed Akuma (the brother of his sensei) and this force is known as the "Dark Hadou". While Ryu tries to deal with these problems that are affecting his life, another unexpected aspect comes into play in the shape of a boy called Shun who claims to be Ryu’s brother. Ken happens to catch up with Ryu joins him on his journey to help overcome is powers, Chun-Li happens to be sorting through a police investigation that happens to tie into a fighting competition and Sakura after chasing after Ryu after seeing him fight for the first time comes into play and all of them happened to become interlocked by the fighting tournament with their own reasons for entering.

It is a story that holds up well enough for it to be considered true Street Fighter canon material with most of the characters involved feeling right, Ryu is still a lone warrior with great fighting skill, Ken is Ryu’s friend and training partner who fights in numerous tournaments, Chun-Li is also fighter, working with the police with a smart and calm attitude and Sakura is an energetic young fighter with unpolished skills who idolizes Ryu. Enemies like Gouki (Akuma), Dan, Zangief and Vega do what they do with creditable performances, however the main antagonist really didn’t do it for me, he just seemed like a power-hungry fool who got his fifteen minutes of fame and then was dispatched with. I feel they should have gotten a more interesting villain as this guy didn’t have the proper personality to properly be an antagonist worthy of the SF series. Also the fact that Ryu had a brother is just nonsense to me and it breaks the image of Ryu as a lone wolf searching for answers to his powers which he may never know of.

When it come to the art and animation we see that the film is very stylized for better or for worse depending on your preferences, some characters and signature attacks look good while others look like they could have been better. The art style for the characters looks good works well, but a fair amount of the characters look too musclar and bulky and the art also makes certain people look beefier and heavier in movement then they are in the actual games. There is also the point of the energy-based attacks that didn’t look as impressive as they could have with most of them being ball-shaped with no defining features and being one main colour which really disappointed me. But then maybe that’s just me being picky.

Now I know that in an adaptation of anything nothing is going to fully be spot on, but with an anime film you have the chance to show off things that games can’t do, you have to wow the viewer. The film felt like it was almost there but could of had more style, there are some pretty good fight scenes and some painful blows dealt to characters that shows that there was care put into the film, but at other points the film forgets choreography and battle sequences, the game material and gives you something that could have looked a lot better. When it comes to audio it’s pretty good, the soundtrack is nice and the having watched it in subbed and dubbed formats I’d say they both work.

I conclusion this is a film that was created truly for Street Fighter fans, it’s based off of the games and for what it’s worth it does what it can fairly well, but unfortunately it comes up short in not delivering the full anime experience it deserves. Style and art design play a big part in carrying the film along and it is worth a watch whether you’re a fan of the Street Fighter series or if you are person who likes action, fighting and story that works and is rather enjoyable.

It was okay, I suppose. Some of the fight scenes were good. The kid was annoying. One complaint is that they have way too many characters from the games not doing anything. Sagot is in the background of, what, one scene?

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.