Customer Reviews

Street Fighter, Vol. 6: Final Round

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't have a lot to say about this. Fantastic art as usual. The storyline seemed to fall flat though. There was a good build up in all the other volumes of this series but in this one everything seems rushed. Battles last a couple of pages and then it's on to something else. I really didn't like how Chun-Li and Guile had absolutely nothing to do with the take down of Bison. They both drop out of the tournament and don't do much after that. Ken has a short fight with Vega and then doesn't do anything other than getting kidnapped. This volume is a let down to end an otherwise great series. I think Udon is sick of Street Fighter. Their writing makes it seem like they have no interest anymore.

With the final volume coming out, it was time for the big finale. You already had a pretty good idea who was going to fight who, the question was how was it gonna play out and how exciting it would be. Unfortunaly, the main fights quickly end before you even get started with them. The boss fight at the end was a nice touch, but I guess I was looking for a little more bite to the final volume.

Overall, it's okay because it's Street Fighter, but this Final Round to me ended in a draw.

The Street Fighter comic saga is brought to a fitting end with "Final Round," which gives a strong impression of the writer waking up and discovering he has to wrap up a sprawling plot involving dozens of characters in about fifty pages. If you enjoyed the previous installments in the series, you'll get closure here, but don't expect it to blow your mind.

For fans of the gorgeous and kinetic fight scenes, this volume won't disappoint: nearly every page features a recognizable martial arts move from the series, and long-awaited grudge matches from Volumes 1 and 2 come to a satisfying fruition here. With an entire 13-man tournament to cover in six issues, plus qualifying rounds and spy action behind the scenes and a concluding segment, the action gets so difficult to track that a handy bracket is included, letting you know where you are in the blizzard of nonstop action and giving you a satisfying opportunity to imagine how the future fights will play out. A variety of inventive solutions are used to salve the dignity of two fan favorites forced to duke it out, so fans of underappreciated characters won't be particularly disappointed either.

Unfortunately, hitting all the high notes on the action front leaves precious little room for plot or character development. The final battle between Ryu, Bison and Akuma (which I won't spoil here) features Ryu in a weirdly supporting role, as writer Ken Siu-Chong is forced to stick to a video game canon which never made a lot of dramatic sense in the first place. A hurried denouement reminds me of nothing so much as the ending crawl from a historical fiction movie, with pithy one-liners about how everyone fulfilled their dreams and/or stayed in the exact same position they'd been in for 6 volumes. Peace has never sat easy in the Street Fighter universe, so readers can console themselves that this "Happily ever after" is sure to be interrupted sooner rather than later.

Even the ending stories on the video game were better. The art was much better on the first couple trade books of this series.