Street Fighter IV:  The Ties That Bind

Platform:  XBox 360 (play disc), Blu-ray

Release Date:  February 9, 2009

For those that ended up getting the collector’s edition of Street Fighter IV, you ended up getting a couple of extras.  The first is a figurine of either Crimson Viper or Ryu, depending on which version you choose (XBox 360 or PS3, respectively).  The other is a videodisc of a 65-minute anime called The Ties That Bind.  The 360 gets a 360-only disc, meaning this won’t run on a DVD player.  The PS3 version, however, gets a Blu-ray disc, and will run on any Blu-ray player out there.  Whichever way you view it, though, casual fans might be confused, and anime fans may get disappointed.

The Ties That Bind is supposed to be a filler story between Street Fighter II and IV, and also explains a little bit of Alpha as well.  The story mostly centers on five of the fighters from Super Street Fighter II (I say this because Cammy was never in the original), as well as Sakura from the Alpha series.  It also introduces Crimson Viper and Seth, the main boss of Street Fighter IV.  Basically fighters are disappearing from all over the world and there’s this whole conspiracy theory as to why it’s going on. There are cover-ups everywhere, and it’s up to these few fighters to figure it out.  In the meantime, Ryu is stuck trying to figure out how to deal with his Satsui no Hado problem, and Viper is trying to find Ryu and…oh hell, the plot’s not worth discussing, it’s just too confusing.

I was a little disappointed in this video.  The animation was the big thing that struck me as odd.  I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m seeing this on a Blu-ray disc, or that the TV I’m watching this on is just so large that I can see the frames, but the animation seems to stutter quite a bit, as if the frame animation wasn’t brought up to smoothness.  It almost looks like the same quality of animation in the prologue and epilogue sequences in the game, which you can get away with there, but not in a full blown OAV.  Bleach and Naruto seem to be better animated, even in TV show form.  I also wasn’t a big fan of the whole Dragon Ball Z scream-fest near the end, as it’s just way too cliché and easy to see through.  The plot was confusing as well.  It’s almost like a bad episode of Heroes – they jump from plot point to plot point, as well as from character set to character set, and it all culminates in the end.  It’s definitely one of those videos that you need to watch twice or more just to get half the plot, even though you’re going to ignore it anyway because it’s not really important in the actual game.  The fight scenes are ok, and at least Ryu gets the main fight in the end, but it’s all pretty par, if not sub-par, for the course.

Maybe I had higher expectations for this, but I ended up not liking The Ties That Bind as much as I wanted to.  It was too easy to see through everything, some of the details were unnecessary, and the animation was a bit too blocky for me.  The plot reminded me a lot of a bunch of SNK fighting game subplots – full of holes and hard to understand.  Thankfully this is just a bonus if you get the collector’s edition, so I’d say it’s worth about 10 bucks tops.  Just don’t use it as the main reason to get the collector’s edition.