The Street Fighter series is full of interesting characters and history, which you’d think would open the door to cool spin-off ideas, but we can’t exactly say that’s going on now.
On top of trying to sell users a Sakura skin for $100, Street Fighter: Duel apparently thinks we’re battling it out in Middle-earth plus some other obvious mistakes that fans are noticing.
As pointed out by Kujikawaii, the map of the world in the mobile game includes a nebulous continent called Middle Earth that looks like they combined Australia and the Middle East or something.
Since Duel was initially made for the Chinese market, we were curious if this was just a mere translation issue that was supposed to mean the Middle East, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
If you look at the wider world map featured in the game’s Explore menu, it also appears they added a bunch of extra land / countries randomly throughout the Atlantic Ocean too for some reason.
Ok man the steet fighter duel devs really have no idea what franchise they’re working on pic.twitter.com/269hmSk22a
— 🍡 イーサン 🍡 Comms Open! (@kujikawaii) March 3, 2023
We don’t believe that Shadaloo ever created a full on shadow continent, and it’s probably not Gill’s secret utopia either.
This normally would be a pretty minor nitpick, but these smaller mistakes seem to be emblematic of a wider lack of understanding of Street Fighter and its characters.
There’s also some pretty laughable goofs like Cammy’s Super being called Spiral Arrow despite clearly being a Cannon Strike and using the correct voice line. They seem to have mixed up the 2 names.
And that’s not the only character this applies to either with some apparently using attacks from different characters entirely.
SF: Duel’s minimal dialogue doesn’t offer any deeper insights into the world warriors or the strange world they inhabit, so there’s ultimately not much here for fans to latch onto aside from watching their favorite fighters use the same Street Fighter 4 moves a whole bunch.
If you compare this to another Capcom-licensed mobile game like Teppen, you can see the clear difference in approach to how they handle the characters and properties while trying to put them in new and fun situations we don’t get to see otherwise.
There are at least some cool new designs for the SF4 cast that could be much better served in Street Fighter 6 someday because there’s not much else tying this mobile gacha game to the series.
Banner source: The Lord of the Rings.
