Friday, June 6, 2014

Demand It!: Street Fighter Assassins Fist


The other day while trolling the internets I found this Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist on Youtube that came out the previous week that I had no idea about. It was done by the same guys that did this cool, like, two minute short a few years back. This time they broke it down into multiple parts or you can watch the whole thing on DVD/BluRay and you should because it's pretty damned amazing.


It is the story of Ken and Ryu being trained to become the fighters that they are as well as the story of their master and Akuma who if you don't know is the baddest son of a bitch on the planet. The story goes back and forth between the present and the arrival of Ken to the dojo where he meets a young Ryu. Ken hates everything and is a spoiled ass kid who gets humbled by Ryu immediately. Also shown is their master's training as well as his brother who thirsts for more power who eventually becomes Akuma.


What I liked is that they actually show how Akuma got his strange looking features. At first I was like “Okay, how is this small Japanese guy gonna turn into this beast?” but then they show after first getting a big taste of the evil power how it deformed his face.


I like that they incorporated the struggle that Ryu had with the evil power that wanted to use him as a vessel. At one point after being ax kicked in the head by Ken and knocked out, Ryu wakes up full of rage and the energy flowing from him. Ken has to pull out a fire Shoryuken to put his ass down while Ryu charged up a massive Hadoken. By the way, the Hadoken training was awesome. Ken tries to shortcut all the training after learning the evil power from their masters handbook and his master is like “The fuck you learn that?! Don't ever do that again, and for the love of god, don't tell Ryu about it!”


This was a really cool series. Way better than that Mortal Kombat: Legacy which had more throwaway episodes than not and lost track of itself as it went on. Every single one of these mattered. Oh, and the nods to the video game were awesome. The old man making a song for Ryu which was his theme in Street Fighter 2 and Ken working out to the music that plays on his stage. They didn't even have to touch the other two dozen characters from the game to make this good.

Click here for previous Demand It

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