Opinionator: My Opinion of Street Fighter IV: The Ties That Bind



The Ties That Bind is a animated film that was part of the Street Fighter IV Collector's Edition package. It's a story set in between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter IV. It focuses on building two sets of characters. On one side you have the people from previous SF games trying to figure out multiple incidents involving the kidnapping of martial artists. This includes Ryu, Ken, Guile, Chun-Li and Sakura. On the other you have the new characters to the series who are carrying out the kidnappings with C.Viper and Seth who explain their plans to each other a long the way, which is a good job or no-one watching would have a clue either.

The weapon that needs these kidnapped fighters uses the energies that martial artists develop to destroy body cells, Seth wants to sell its use for as much as he can get. Naturally this leads to many confrontations between those who are trying to help Seth and those who are trying to stop him. None more so than Ryu, who's Satsui no Hado would prove to be the most pure and powerful form of a fighter's energy. Should they be able to capture and control Ryu that is.

This becomes the main side story in the animation as Ryu continues to struggles to hold on to his humanity, thus preventing him from becoming just like Gouki/Akuma.



Unfortunately all of this only happens after Ken wastes 25 minutes complaining to himself about losing his fighter's spirit because he's always doing business. It's really tedious and cliche, it just isn't needed at all. Meanwhile Ryu walks around doing nothing, at least in the Street Fighter 2 animated movie the build up to the main story events had Ryu fighting Fei Long and Ken taking on T-Hawk and Bison very early into the beginning.

Guile doesn't fight anyone, he just follows Chun-Li around solving the so-called mystery. The closest he comes is when he fires a sonic boom at random scientists. One thing I will say about TTTB is that it didn't do any time fillers with pointless cameo matches involving Zangief etc. It's a pity Sagat didn't make an appearance as this would be the right time in the SF universe where he would've left Shadaloo behind. Sagat's redemption in a match with Ryu would've been a lot better to watch earlier on.

The music is standard anime stuff, nothing special. Big scary Seth gets his big scary bad guy theme and anything to do with Shadaloo features the same shock and awe from Chun-Li and Guile followed by mysterious undertone music. Voice acting comes in the form of both the English and Japanese SFIV cast.

They give their characters personality for the most part. Ken's English voice actor, Reuben Langdon seems held back and too happy-go-lucky compared to his work as Devil May Cry's Dante. But maybe that's true for the entire animation and the Street Fighter series itself. It needs to embrace the modern way of thinking, that there are no true good and evil people, just kick ass fighters who are never one but not completely the other.

For Seth's appearance and resources he seems to be just another bad guy as far as anime antagonists go, his philosophical preaching doesn't keep your attention. The only way to be successful in this field is to be either a cool anti-hero or an ultimate evil bad ass. The world of Street Fighter has two of these in Bison and Gouki/Akuma but they go unused. There's a completely new plot waiting now that Gouken has returned but neither this nor the game takes advantage of it.

Despite this only being released with the collector's edition of Street Fighter IV there should be plenty of copies of it up on youtube or available from your usual .zip/.rar downloading sites. It only just goes over the hour mark so for all its flaws it doesn't drag and once it gets into the swing of things it's not too bad. Worth your time on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Time will tell if any SFIV expansions are released in the SF3 fashion, if it does there may be fresh character endings and some more story details. If that's not the case then you're stuck with this, sorry.