What a flash it is, but the lack of substance still shows
Super Street Fighter IV has a training mode, but it isn't a tutorial, just an option to fight against an enemy that doesn't fight back. The challenges on the other hand are a bit different, because they give you moves you have to pull off against the opponent, and possibly multiple moves in combination. The game does not show you on the screen how to actually do those moves, though, so you have to go to the menu and choose show input to find out, which is a pretty horrible decision by the developers. It could possibly be over-looked if the explanations in "show input" made any sense. For instance if they had shown the actual buttons you use to attack rather than a fist icon. When I couldn't figure out how they wanted me to do a move, I checked the part where the input language is explained – and it only explained the parts I'd have to be an idiot not to figure out by myself.
Eventually, with little to no help from the game I managed to uncover that A, B and R was light, medium and heavy punch while X, Y and L were light, medium and heavy kicks and that I blocked attacks by walking backwards. Even so, I had a hard time with most of the challenges. It didn't seem like the developers had focused much on making them physically possible. Often I was supposed to pull off a combo where the first attack pushed the opponent too far back for me to hit him with the second attack. Another problem was that some attacks were too slow and the game wanted me to pull them off in very rapid succession. However worst of all was that the opponent often blocked the second attack, meaning I kept pulling off the combo flawlessly for several minutes before the opponent for no particular reason didn't block the second attack.
If you want to play it singleplayer, than there is very little to do. It is only the challenges, some mindless car smashing and the arcade mode, The arcade mode has five difficulties and you can set the number of rounds per battle and the number of battles. The arcade mode does not give you any reward for completeing it, so it exists solely for its own sake, which would have been nice if it was actually good. However the fighting is very shallow. It is in 2D and the fighters move really slowly sideways. You attack, but there is little strategy too it. You just mash buttons when you can and block otherwise. There are plenty of different moves, but solely for the purpose of looking cool, because they all feel very much the same. I don't feel like I've learned anything useful from several hours of gameplay.
The arcade also suffers from a ridiculous difficulty curve. Like I said, you don't improve much as you go along, so it is stupid how much they expect you to learn through the cause of a 20 minutes long game mode. The boss is so ridiculously overpowered that if you are to have any chance of beating him you must choose a difficulty that makes every other match except the second last one be so easy it is boring. When I fight the boss and it isn't easy anymore, it isn't challenging in the right way either, because it just feels like I'm doing the same thing over and over again until I'm lucky enough to succeed.
In short, the game seems to focus way more on looking awesome than having awesome gameplay, but at least it succeeds at that. The characters are all kinds of ridiculous badass martial arts stereotypes, mostly with muscles the size of melons and often without shirts on. You have military guys, boxers, mutants and a guy with "yoga" powers that let them spit fireballs and extend their arms to four times the length.
The graphics look great, from the character designs to the fighting destination. The 3D is flawless and the dynamic mode is amazing. I had assumed that it would look cool, but make the gameplay really hard, but it actually doesn't affect the gameplay negatively at all, it is just awesome and almost makes it worth playing despite the horrible gameplay.
Almost.
Also adding to the games flash are the anime cut-scenes at the start and end o the arcade game. There is one cut-scene for each of the characters, but frankly it adds way more to the production cost of the game than it does to the experience. They aren't long enough to qualify as a story, and even if they did, then they have very little to do with the arcade mode, so it is not storytelling through gameplay. While the cut-scenes look really good, and are different from the art styIe of any other videogame I have played, it still doesn't make me care about the characters at all and feel more like it is there to be a distraction from the horrible gameplay.
However, possibly the most badass part is the super moves that you can pull off by using the touch screen. When you have taken enough damage, you will be able to use an ultimate attack which doesn't just take a lot of damage, but looks incredibly badass.
At the end of the day I expect many fans of fighting games to like this one, but if you like me isn't that big a an o the genre, trust me when I say that this isn't the game that will change your mind. I would not go as far as to call this a bad game, because a good flash does make the game enjoyable, and when it comes to multiplayer most games are fun even when the gameplay is bad, but I definitely wouldn't call it a good game either.