Unfortunately, Street Fighter 2V really dropped the ball in my opinion. I had already seen Street Fighter get two butchered adaptations, so I really wanted this version to actually stay true to the story of the games and the personality of the characters. It isn't like Street Fighter was a literary masterpiece, but if you want to change everything about the plot and characters, then why bother adapting Street Fighter? Why not just make your own series with your own characters? Ryu is always dead serious in the games and never smiles...not....once! In the anime they turned Ryu into a Goku clone who is absolutely giddy that he gets to fight the next strong opponent and beat him up. Bison was always portrayed as a military mastermind who was like a mix between Napoleon and a 3rd world dictator with super powers. Yet in the anime, he takes his orders from a magical statue! Bison don't take shit from anyone! They turned Street Fighter into the Jacky Chan cartoon! It only gets worse. Instead of Vega and Sagat being Bison's 2 henchmen, the anime copied the American movie and made Zangief Bison's main minion. Why is this a problem? EVERY LINE Gief says is Russia this and Russia that. He is a diehard patriot that even invites Gorbachev to his victory if you beat the game as him. Why would he work for Shadowloo, who is at war with Russia? Zangief is stupid as shit, but he is NOT supposed to be evil, let alone a traitor to his country! They completely murdered his character! They try to pass Guile off as a legit badass with no tongue in cheek or comments about "taking care of your family". What is worse, he doesn't do the sonic boom. Not once. That's like the ONLY move he has! Yet the anime wanted to create a bullshit rule in which only Ryu and Bison can use Ki attacks. What the fuck? At least they didn't make Balrog a computer hacker who types while wearing boxing gloves for no reason. I guess 2V is still slightly less silly than the American cartoon. However, in retrospect at least the US toon was so stupid it's funny. Street Fighter 2V is mostly just boring.
Animation: 3/10
So you think you know bad 90s anime art right? You've seen recycled animations, lazy use of still shots and key frames with a ridiculously low number of frames per second. You may not have seen animation quite as lazy as Street Fighter 2V. I mean this shit actually stands out as notably bad by even the low standards of 90s anime OVAs. At least the 2V movie looked awesome. It wasn't a good movie by any means, but the animation looked spectacular!
Overall: 5/10
If you grew up playing Street Fighter as a kid, or if you are younger and are simply curious about cheesy, old anime, you owe it to yourself to watch a few episodes of this show. At least you might get a few laughs. I'm still going to give it a fairly generous score because I REALLY liked the Street Fighter games and this was still amusing for me despite its...flaws. Street Fighter 2V gets a 5 out of 10.
