Now we have Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, a rather middling OVA that tended to be overrated by anime nerds at the time. I remember being crazy hyped up for this movie back in the day, because SFII: The Animated Movie had been absolutely excellent and the Street Fighter Alpha games had gotten me even more into the series than SF2 had. The Alpha art style leaned more into manga and anime aesthetics and every sprite and background just looked flat-out amazing. Plus I thought that Guy (brought into SFA from Final Fight) was just the coolest character ever.

Ryu talks to Shun about importance of recycling.

Unfortunately the Street Fighter Alpha movie did not live up to the hype. I remember being pretty disappointed with it at the time of release, even regretting buying the DVD. I saw the game praised in video game magazines and websites at the time, and it was genuinely baffling to me. Because while it had a decent art style and seemingly good animation, the anime didn’t seem to have much else going for it. The story was boring, the action was lacking, and by focusing too much on Ryu, it didn’t really make good use of the game’s roster of characters. For example, there was hardly any Guy in it!

Upon rewatching SFA:The Animation, I found that my opinion of the film has actually gone down even further. The story isn’t just boring, it’s nonsensical. The action isn’t just lacking, it’s honestly pretty terrible. And the anime completely fails to make good use of the SFA alpha characters, so much so that a couple lame original characters get more screentime than any Street Fighter who isn’t Ryu, Ken, or Chun-Li. This might sound weird, but I found this film to be surprisingly shallow, an example of favoring style over substance.

First of all, I need to complain about the action. The fighting in this movie is almost entirely pure anime bull$#!%. Unlike SFII:The Animated Movie, which had a decent amount of fight choreography that felt grounded in real martial arts, SFA:The Animation is wall-to-wall high-flying nonsense, with characters constantly leaping into the air. It almost feels like they were aiming for something akin to Dragon Ball Z combat—just with the Kamehameha swapped out for the Hadouken—but the result feels incredibly dull and uninteresting. You will see a few identifiable Street Fighter special moves here and there, but it’s mostly limited to each character's projectile attack.

Akuma got really into woodworking, apparently.

The movie focuses almost entirely on Ryu this time, with Ken and Chun-Li having the biggest supporting roles. Sakura and Rose also each get a bit of screen time, but they are largely relegated to the sidelines and are completely inconsequential to the plot. Technically most of the SFA2 cast appears here, but their inclusions are little more than brief cameos. Some of characters you would expect to see do not appear at all, such Charlie Nash, Gen, Sagat, or M. Bison. But then Vega—who was at least playable in SFA3—shows up briefly to slash a hapless Dan.

Even Akuma, who was a main focal point of the anime’s marketing, does not fight in the film at all. In fact, despite being talked about plenty, he is barely even shown on screen. It seems to me that Akuma was used as a bait-and-switch here; a representation of the SF Alpha movie we all wanted, but not the one we actually got.

This is about all you get of the extended cast.

The story heavily features original characters who end up getting more screentime than any of the other Street Fighters. First there’s Shun, a mysterious boy from Brazil who claims to be Ryu’s long-lost brother. Next there’s Professor Sadler, a mad scientist who seeks to achieve world domination through acquiring the skills of the world’s best fighters…somehow… In order to do that, he needs to hook the fighters up to a machine that sucks the “data” (or is it “ki”?) out of them. Sadler serves as the film’s ultimate villain; what with Bison absent and Akuma not really involved in this movie.

And for our last new addition we have this big ugly cyborg character who is apparently named “Rosanov”. (I don’t remember ever hearing his name mentioned in the movie.) Seemingly inspired by SFII:The Animated Movie having monitor cyborgs that are dispatched to clandestinely surveille and report on martial artists around the globe, this movie also has its own cyborg employed by the bad guys for similar purposes. In this case though, the cyborg does not merely observe fights in the wild, instead he jumps in and collects data directly…by taking numerous kicks to the head. Physically Rosanov kind of looks like a cross between the SF2 Movie’s M. Bison and SF3’s Hugo, and yet he’s somehow painfully generic. This character has strong budget-brand knockoff vibes, which would be fine if he showed up for a quick one-and-done fight against a main character. But it’s genuinely annoying that this forgettable nobody plays such a huge role in the film’s story.

The plot of the film goes like this… [SPOILERS, I guess]

Ryu is training as per usual, but he feels this evil energy—the “Dark Hadou”—slowly taking control of him. A mysterious boy named Shun appears who claims to be Ryu’s little brother. Like Ryu, Shun also appears able to channel the Dark Hadou. Ryu, Ken, and Shun go to a street fighting tournament where—despite not being there as a competitor—Ryu ends up fighting big ugly Rosanov and vaporizing the cyborg with a Dark Hadou-powered fireball. Shun is abducted by Sadler, presumably for his Dark Hadou abilities or merely as a way to lure Ryu into a trap. Sadler hosts another street fighting competition at his laboratory and a bunch of Alpha 2 characters go to compete, including Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li. The lab is using fighters as test subjects, draining them of their “ki” or “data” or whatever and leaving them in a zombified state. Our heroes work to free the Alpha 2 cast from Sadler’s lab, but the cyborg Rosanov appears again, somehow resurrected and stronger than before. Ken, Chun-Li, and Ryu all fight Rosanov before Ryu goes all Super Sayajin Dark Hadou and blasts a Metsu Hadouken through the cyborg’s torso. With Rosanov destroyed by the Dark Hadou, Sadler was able to collect enough “data” and power-up his body. So Sadler jumps out of his lab to fight Ryu in a final confrontation. Ryu’s fireball—now seemingly free of the Dark Hadou for some reason?—kills Sadler as well, and the mad scientist’s body crumbles to dust. Oh yeah! And Shun also dies at the end, but not before revealing that he was not actually related to Ryu after all.

Look, I don’t know how else to put it, but this movie’s story is terrible. It’s especially disappointing when you consider the source material. The Street Fighter Alpha series actually had more story and character connections featured in it than previous fighting games. Originally the games had different end bosses for each character, depending on their in-game story and rivalries (not SF3 though). So there was a lot you could do with a SFA anime…but they didn’t do any of that. In fact, they didn’t even give us the most obvious SFA anime you could think of: a movie with Akuma as the main antagonist. Somehow they came up with something far more boring.

It seems like the only reason to include original characters in this type of movie is so you can kill them off. And they certainly do that; in fact, they kill off the cyborg guy twice! But it’s just such an odd choice when you have a roster as eclectic and varied as the SFA games, with its characters pulled in from SF1, SF2, and Final Fight. As I’ve mentioned before, I am probably Guy’s biggest fan on the internet, so you know seeing my badass Bushinryu boy reduced to a “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo really stung. Then again, when the overall product is this underwhelming, the fact that they overlooked your favorite character is really the least of it.

Even the pseudo-philosophical musings in this film are pretty weak. SFII:The Animated Movie had the incredible line, “Through strength, learn gentleness. Through gentleness, strength will prevail.” SFA:The Animation has nothing even remotely comparable. It’s really just Shun and Sakura asking why does Ryu fight. And Ryu straight-up tells Shun why he fights in the fifth chapter too! He says, “I’m not strong. That’s why I fight. I fight myself…against myself.” Ok, so yeah…question answered, I guess.

The central plot line with Shun makes no sense at all. Shun is able to channel the Dark Hadou and he explains that he learned this from his father. The only other characters with this energy are Ryu (who's resisting it) and Akuma (who has fully embraced it). The implication made is that all three are related and thus Akuma is secretly Ryu’s father. This would be a fairly huge plot twist—and a lame one, in my opinion. Plus, Akuma as Ryu’s daddy would draw further comparisons with Star Wars; seeing as how the Dark Hadou functions similarly to the Dark Side of the Force. Ryu even goes to confront Akuma at one point and ask if he has a son. Of course, the two don’t actually fight or anything, they just have a lively chat amongst a crowd of wooden dummies. In the end though, it’s revealed that Shun was hired to lure Ryu to Sadler’s lair and that he is not, in fact, Ryu’s blood relative. Alright…wait, so how is it that Shun is connected to the Dark Hadou again?

And why didn’t Sadler just use Shun for this Dark Hadou project instead of Ryu? Or Akuma? Presumably, couldn’t Sadler just send his cyborg dude over to that wooden dummy island and let Akuma utterly destroy him in order to collect the same data he ends up getting from Ryu, right? Why go through the trouble of deceiving, antagonizing, and manipulating Ryu when you have other easier options at hand? It just seems like an unusually dumb plan.

The whole concept of the Dark Hadou seems rather ill-defined in this movie. The Dark Hadou is said to be an especially powerful type of “ki” or energy. The Street Fighter fandom wiki describes ki thusly:

Ki is a preternatural and esoteric form of energy that is said to be found in all things. Within living beings, ki can be wielded and harnessed via martial arts and other forms of physical activity, as well as specific exercises. Ki can also be quantified as the strength and build of one's body, along with health, finesse, and muscle.

So ki is essentially Street Fighter’s version of the Force in Star Wars. And the Dark Hadou is (one version of) the Dark Side. But Ryu never appears to be tempted by the Dark Hadou—with its overwhelming power granting near-certain victory in combat—as much as it just hits him out of nowhere like a panic attack. For Ryu, the Dark Hadou appears to be more like a demonic curse.

And then there’s the insanely dumb method by which Sadler aims to rule the world. The nutty professor is sapping fighters of their ki in order to make himself more powerful. Except he doesn’t call it “ki” he calls it “data”. So his machines suck the “data” out of people, leaving them in a lobotomized stupor, mere husks of their former selves. While all this sounds nonsensical and internally confused, it is funny to me how prescient the movie ended up being about tech geniuses sucking up our data and leaving the masses behind as broken, mindless zombies. It's a totally random coincidence, and not exactly a premonition of course. But if we’re going to credit Kojima for predicting the AI dystopia in 2001 with MGS2, we have to hand it to these film makers for predicting our Social Media hellscape with this movie in 2000.

The data extraction scheme does at least lead to the movie’s funniest piece of dialogue. Chun-Li says to the captive Street Fighters, “They’re gonna sample your data and suck you dry!” They must have all clicked ‘Yes’ to accept the Terms of Service.

While I don’t want to come off too negative here, I have to admit that Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation is a bad movie. It’s just so underwhelming, especially when you consider the rich source material in SFA2 alone, and the fact that it was following up on the all-time classic that was SFII: The Animated Movie. It’s really baffling to me that they would go with such an uninspired script and—not only ignore the incredible cast of characters they might potentially play with—but actually throw in some derivative “original characters” to boot. The quality of the animation might look pretty good, but the actual film is a lackluster at best.