FAKE RONJAN!!Stupid, Stupid Idea: A Street Fighter Sequel
I had been planning for weeks for our next gaming-related post to be a review of That Dragon, Cancer, a game made by a grieving father as a tribute to his 4-year old son's battle with cancer. After playing a couple of hours, however, I just don't think I'm going to be able to make it through the game. I'm still a relatively new father, and as much as I want to experience truly impactful games, I'm just not ready to go there.
Luckily, I've also been working on a follow-up to the most useless exercise in our site's history, because Street Fighter V releases tomorrow. Three weeks ago, we watched the computer play itself in demo mode in Street Fighter II to see who the game thought was the best character. What if we blew this approach out in Street Fighter IV as a fun swan song for that game?
What we did, and how it's different vs. last time
- We are watching a different game this time around. Specifically, we're watching Ultra Street Fighter IV for the Playstation 4. The game, unbelievably, has 44 characters, including every character from Street Fighter II. To keep this exercise simple and relevant, we are only going to look at battles between the twelve characters who appear in Street Fighter II.
- Ultra Street Fighter IV has a CPU vs. CPU mode, meaning that instead of waiting for the right random matchup to appear, we can actually tell the game which fighters need to match up against each other. We told the game to set the CPU ability to the hardest difficulty level in order for the characters to use their optimal strategies (in theory).
- Instead of watching 60 random fights, we can set up a full round-robin tournament where every character fights every other character. In fact, we did it four times! Ultimately, this means that we watched 264 carefully set up matches in order to produce the ultimate ranking of these twelve characters. And yes, this took several hours.
- Because every fighter faces off against every other fighter exactly four times, we have no need for optimization ranking algorithms; we have perfect information. As a result, we just ranked fighters based on their win-loss records.
Here are the results of this exercise:
#12: Dhalsim (8-36)
While Dhalsim at least put up some wins this time around, he is still the overall Street Fighter loser. Half of his eight wins came against Balrog, likely due to his ability to land blows from a distance.
#11: Guile (10-34)
Here's the stone-cold stunner. Guile won the last simulation, and I always assumed he'd be near the top in Street Fighter IV. Nope! In fact, without his 4-0 record against Dhalsim, he'd be in last place.
#10: Vega (15-29)
Vega's clearly a tier higher, in that he was at least generally competitive. He won at least one fight against all but three characters.
T8: Balrog and Blanka (19-25)
Balrog perhaps gets the upper hand by virtue of a 3-1 record against Blanka and winning records against some higher ranked fighters, but he's hurt by inconsistent results against poor fighters. Balrog was just 5-7 against the three fighters ranked below him, while Blanka finished 10-2 against them.
#7: Sagat (20-24)
Sagat notched at least one win against everyone except for Balrog, so he's a borderline contender. That said, as the #2 ranked fighter in the last analysis, it's stunning to see him put up a losing record this time around.
#6: Chun-Li (22-22)
Chun-Li actually had the best record against the #1 fighter in this list, as she finished 3-1 against him. On the whole, though, her performance was thoroughly average.
#5: Ryu (27-17)
And now we have the big jump up to the true contenders. Ryu rebounded from his sub-par performance in the last tournament and notched at least one win against every other character.
#4: M. Bison (28-16)
M. Bison oddly performed weakly against his fellow bosses (5-7 against lower-ranked Balrog, Vega, and Sagat) and had a 4-8 record against the three fighters ranked ahead of him, but he dominated everyone else.
#3: Zangief (31-13)
Wow. Zangief is just a beast in Street Fighter IV. Every time he did a spinning pile driver, I cringed. He was actually in 1st place through the first three cycles of this analysis, but finished a paltry 5-6 in the final round-robin and choked down to 3rd place. It's a shame - we could have seen a real celebration:
#2: Ken (32-12)
Ken was the best fighter when facing off against anyone ranked #4 and below, putting up a 30-6 record against them. However, he finished 1-3 against both Zangief and our top-ranked fighter, and that was enough to keep him in 2nd.
#1: E. Honda (33-11)
Yep, believe it or not, E. Honda finished on top of our rankings! His 6-2 record against Ken and Zangief created enough differentiation to cover for his 5-7 record against M. Bison, Ryu, and Chun-Li. Perhaps this domination explains why E. Honda was able to keep his last name while his countryman boxer Piston Honda had to change his name to Piston Hondo!
Here are the full data tables to document this analysis:
- Start Position indicates each fighter's record when they start on the left side (P1) or right side (P2) of the screen.
- Cycle indicates each fighter's record in each of the four series of round-robin matches.
I hope you enjoyed this follow-up analysis. Now, it's time to do it all over again in Street Fighter V! (Someday ....)
-rj