dee.reid
"Street Fighter II: V" is cool. It's been a while (since about 1994) from when I last played the video games but this animated series, done in true Japanese Anime' style, remains tasteful and respectful to the source material. But still, obviously it was meant to cash in on the "Street Fighter" craze of the early '90s. Ken and Ryu are two fighters who have trained together since childhood and embark on a worldwide odyssey to learn the secrets to fighting. They encounter many friends and enemies (including Chinese babe Chun-Li and American military hard-a** Guile) and run afoul of martial arts-trained nasties including ruthless dictator M. Bison. The "Street Fighter" movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme wasn't cool, but this piece of animation takes the cake. It's just too cool.
GibSandwich
Street Fighter 2 V is an animated tv series based on the characters from the Street Fighter video game.Ryu and Ken are the main characters, both aged 17 and highly skilled warriors, winning every tournament they enter. The series starts off with Ryu living with his family on an island as a tree lopper where one day he recieves a letter from his training partner and best friend, Ken Masters, the only son of extremely wealthy parents.The letter has some cash and a plane ticket and a short note reading "Ryu, come to America" and that's it.After thinking about it for a while, Ryu decides to take Ken up on his offer. After farewelling his family Ryu leaves for the airport and continues on his way to a different life. Upon his arrival in the USA, Ryu meets Ken and they reminisce, and later that night they go out to the local clubs and pubs. At one particular bar they run into brushhead pilot Guile and a fight ensues where Ryu has the tar beat out of him. The next day Ken tracks Guile down to the air force base and challenges him to a fight. After Guile beats up Ken with a few underhanded tactics, Ken and Ryu realise that even though they win every martial arts tournament they enter, the real challenge lies with the street fighters around the world, as they do what they need to do to win, including using many techniques not used or allowed in any official martial arts tournaments. So, armed with his father's money, Ken and Ryu set off on a journey around the world to hone their fighting skills, learn new things, meet new and interesting people and beat the hell out them.During the series, Ryu and Ken travel to many different locations, meeting many other familiar Street Fighter characters including Chun Li (who becomes a major character in the series), Fei Long, Vega, and BisonI feel it is important to note than I am a Street Fighter fan, loving the games and I was looking forward to this series, after the awesome Street Fighter 2 animated movie.The first 5 tapes in this series are excellent, and the pace moves along well. At some points in the series it is actually quite profound, especially the parts with Dhalsim. The animation isn't tops though and the fight scenes have a lot of the same animation used repeatedly, usually mirror-flipped to make it look different.I loved the series up until ***SPOILER*** Ken fights Vega. At this point I felt like the producers must have gone "ok guys, we've got to pad this out, and worse, our budget has been cut in half" as the storyline didn't progress much at all after that, and the pace of the episodes seemed to really drag in parts. The animation went down hill too with a lot less fighting than the earlier episodes. The dialogue seemed to lose a lot of charm too, as the jokes between Ken and Ryu became more infrequent, in the earlier episodes you would be laughing every episode, I can only remember laughing about 3 times in the last 5 tapes. For example the ***SPOILER*** Ken and Vega fight seems to go on for about 3 episodes with most of the fight being Ken and Vega staring menacingly at each other. When ***SPOILER*** Bison is strangling Chun Li, this scene seems to go on forever and throughout the next five tapes it is repeated CONSTANTLY, to the point where basically my brother and I were laughing at how many times we saw Chun Li's shoe fall off. Also when ***SPOILER*** Cammy is planning to kill Dorai, Chun Li's father, she watches over him whilst she plans his death. You see Cammy killing Dorai, you think "he's dead!" and then it goes "shimmery" like Scooby doo style and you realise she was just imagining it. Just that scene takes about 10 minutes! By the end I just yelled out "Kill him already!" I didn't care whether he lived or died I just wanted something to HAPPEN. More disappointing, you never find out if Dorai dies, he just chills out in a bed in a coma for the rest of the series! If this show was on once a week, he would probably actually be in a coma for the actual time it could take to recover from one! Arrgh! The last 5 tapes also don't leave Spain as that's where ***SPOILER*** Bison and his helper (who questions every command Bison gives, saying "But Sir..." after everything Bison says) are doing their "lets take over the world" thing.Bison, by the way is a crazy b**tard who was really terrifying at first and after a while became so annoying with his constant "evil laughing" that I really did want him to die.The actual only way this series conforms to the Street Fighter games is by Guile's pal Nash ***SPOILER*** getting offed by Bison.At the end of the series, Ryu doesn't even return home, and Chun Li does not have any sort of ending. The series is wrapped up in about 10 minutes, where most of the `fights' have 5 minutes of just staring each other down.After all this disappointment, when Bison is ***SPOILER*** telling them how his "friend" helps him with psycho power I was thinking "YES!! AKUMA!!" after seeing him all over the place in the series, but it was that lousy eagle's head. What was the point of that thing anyhow?This series could have been great, but unfortunately the soul just seemed to fall out of it.Watch the first few tapes until Ken and Vega fight and then make up your own ending
Marco Pantanella
That's basically the only flaw of this anime series, the plot is fairly slow to develop, I guess by choice, since it's a series made of several episodes, but aside from that, it's a great view. Very nice artwork, and cool fighting scenes.
