Here’s a bunch of stories about the Street Fighter cast that didn’t really have much to do with the main story. Not special, but they’re passable.
Creative staff:
Writer: Matt Moylan, Jim Zub, Ken Siu-Chong
Art: Omar Dogan, Takeshi Miyazawa
Colors: Espen Grundetjern
Latterer: Marshall Dillon
What They Say:
Featuring four short stories! Juri faces off against the deadly doll Decapre! Ibuki battles the mysterious Q! Sakura and Dan get down to some serious training, and Chun-li tangles with the Mad Gear Gang! It’s a truly legendary gathering of rare tales in Street Fighter’s first Annual 1-shot!
Content: (warning, this section may contain spoilers)
The Street Fighter Unlimited series is ending it’s run soon, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more stories to tell in the universe! With the incoming arrival of Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers, Udon has given us this annual 1-shot issue of four separate stories. The first one, “Miss Brutality“, shows us the international return of the Mad Gear Gang in Hong Kong at the “Hong Kong Princess” event. The Mad Gear members, lead by Won-Won here, who plugs a hashtag and says they’re taking the car and cash prize being offered to the event’s winner. Chun-Li shows up, since the whole internet thing gave away the Mad Gear plan, and she stops the theft. The second story, ” Case Closed” Follows Ibuki as she infiltrates a highly secured area in the hopes of retrieving sensitive material. She makes it into the place undetected, but things go awry when the mysterious Q shows up. Her plan to get in and out fails and Q manages to keep the material and escape.
The third story involves Street Fighter IV character Juri. In “Warehouse Find” Juri investigates the warehouse where Seth is keeping some unknown things. This leads to a confrontation with Decapre, one of Bison’s mind controlled dolls. It’s really not very long, and it seems to serve as just filler or character fluff. The last story, “Nerves of Steel“, focuses on the characters of Sakura and her friend Dan Hibiki. Dan explains that he’s been offered a big prize for fighting a mystery opponent, and that the money would enable him to reopen his dojo and resume teaching Saikyo-ryu. Dan starts his training immediately, but his injuries humorously impede him at first. Dan soon finds himself at the big night, where his opponent is revealed to be…a car. Dan rolls into action immediately, but the fight goes…just as one would expect with Dan.
In Summary:
This was a pretty good annual issue. The stories are all really short and mostly meant just to be humorous or show more of the character personalities. The succeed in this regard,but there is not much here beyond just that. all the stories are around 4-7 pages long,just telling small scale tales that flesh out characters. Chun-Li’s story is probably the worst in that regard, since we don’t really get any more sense of her character than we had going in. This makes it incredibly hard to see what the point of that story was, but overall, the annual did give a small glimpse into Street Fighter’s world, so I’d say mission accomplished. The art was pretty decent for most of it, and the writing was fine as well. This is really only an issue to pick up if you’re really into the franchise, otherwise this won’t hold much for you. Give it a look if you’re interested, since it certainly does well by the characters. The humor comes across well.
Grade: B
Released By: Udon Entertainment
Release Date: December 14, 2016
MSRP: $3.99
