If you can get passed the idea that this is a role-playing game based on a less-than-cerebral video game, you'll find that Street Fighter is not a bad piece of work.The setting is refreshingly simple: the characters are martial artists competing in a global circuit of underground fighting tournaments. A criminal empire called Shadoloo is up to no good, but since it's run by some of the best fighters in the world, the only way to take them down is to become a superior martial artist and bludgeon some justice into them. This allows players to choose all kinds of melodramatic motivations for their characters, from fighting as a means of self-perfection or good old fashioned revenge. It also allows adventures to focus on the tournaments, or on crime busting, exploration and discovery, or whatever suits your mood.
The publishers faced the difficult task of creating rules that mirror the mechanics of the video game, and have done an admirable job. Choose one of 11 fighting styles, each of which has different special manuevers, and start kicking butt. Character generation is quite easy, and while combat is a slow process, it can be quite fun.
The rules are extremely expandable, allowing for not just kung fu action but space aliens, supernatural monsters, lumbering robots, or whatever weirdness you see fit to add. Creating new styles and manuever is a snap.
There are downsides: the fighting styles need a little tinkering to balance them out. It will take a looooooong time before characters even approach the lethality of the villains. There is no simple way to scale adventure challenges. The rules are built around 10-sided dice, which aren't especially easy to come by. Finally, three of the key Street Fighter game-characters, and their fighting styles, are not included; you'll have to buy another book for them. That's a pretty crass attempt by the publishers to milk some more money out of the product.
Still, this is a quality game. It's a small matter to strip away the video game elements and just go to town with martial arts role playing. Pick this up if you can find a copy at a decent price. You won't be sorry.
