Fight to Improve Yourself
Recruit your favorite fighters, and unleash their powerful abilities to defeat the nefarious Shadaloo organization in Street Fighter: Duel. Developed by A Plus Japan, Duel abandons the franchise’s traditional fighting roots in favor of a gacha-style, RPG-fighting hybrid. This unique change of pace offers players hours of entertainment, but at what cost?
Duel opens with city streets under siege by mechanized Seth clones sent by the Shadaloo organization. Ken, Ryu and the World Warriors manage to defeat the robots, but M. Bison appears and quickly overpowers the heroes. In a last-ditch effort to take down the baddie, Ryu strikes but vanishes before he can land the final blow. Crestfallen, Ken retrieves his friend’s headband and sets off to recruit fighters and bring an end to Shadaloo’s machinations.
Press Any Button
Duel’s gameplay centers around 3v3 team battles. Players form parties of three fighters and face off against opposing forces by tapping charged skills as they become available. Eventually, players unlock a fourth fighter slot, which serves as a backup, in case one of their main three fighters faints. Several supplementary positions, known as assist fighters, open up as players progress. These assist fighter positions buff a fighter’s stats by 20% using the stats of the assisting fighter. Assist fighters will only provide a boost to the slot linked to the fighter.
In standard RPG fashion, players assemble teams to KO opponents by creating combos utilizing each fighter’s skills and typing. Typings in Duel are referred to as factions. These factions include wind, thunder, flame, infernal, master and legendary. You can check a fighter’s faction at a glance by examining the fighter’s icon. Unfortunately, Street Fighter: Duel’s team builder lacks an auto-assemble feature to automatically construct an optimal build. This means that players must rely on their skill and knowledge of faction interactions, if they want to be victorious. In addition to faction interactions, players can buff their teams by including multiple fighters of the same faction or members of the master and infernal factions.
Eventually, you’ll unlock EX-Moves to aid you in battle. EX-Moves are powerful attacks that provide extra damage, combos and stat buffs, including healing. Most EX-Moves require rarer resources to unlock, with the exceptions of Chains of Guilt and Nature’s Advent. These EX-Moves require players to complete a series of four objectives each to unlock.
All the World’s a Stage
Street Fighter: Duel offers players tons of ways to play. Challenge Mode serves as the main single-player mode and advances Duel’s story. Players assemble teams and battle along a linear track, unlocking story updates in the form of conversations between characters. Each stage presents a single wave of enemies to defeat, increasing in difficulty the further players progress. These battles culminate in a final boss fight at the end of each challenge level. After successfully beating the level’s big bad, players unlock rewards and the next set of stages. Along the way, players will unlock other modes, upgrades and tasks by completing specific mission guideposts.
Tasks provide extra challenges that reward players with various resources used to unlock and upgrade fighters. These occur randomly, and feature either boss battles, ‘who’s-that-fighter’-type quizzes or fixed-team challenges. These tasks offer a welcome change, especially from the grind of later levels, and yield a decent amount of resources as rewards. Players also accrue resources passively through Idle Gains, represented by the golden chest featured at the bottom of the Challenge map. As you complete challenge levels, the chest is upgraded, providing stronger equipment and more generous amounts of cash, scrolls and other resources.
The Next Battle
Duel’s other single-player modes offer slight changes to the game’s main play style. These modes include Global Operation, Shadaloo City, Supreme Fist and Bounties.
The Global Operation mode consists of dungeon levels containing environmental puzzles, waves of enemies and boss fights. Along the way, players can unlock treasure chests teeming with rare rewards. Upon completion of the dungeon, players receive equipment including Fighting Souls, which are powerful seals that buff fighters.
In Shadaloo City, players embark on a quest to complete three levels of grid-like maps. Face a wave of enemies made up of other players’ VS Arena defense teams by selecting a fighter tile. Each time you advance a tile space on the grid, all other tiles on the same row are destroyed. Complete all three levels of maps within 48 hours, or forfeit your progress. At the end of each level, increasingly difficult boss battles await. These battles yield rare resources including City Tips, a currency exchangeable for items within the City Shop.
The final two single-player modes offer more leisurely ways to earn resources. The Supreme Fist mode provides players with an unending supply of increasingly-difficult single-wave matches. These levels reward players with resources increasing in rarity the harder the battle completed. Bounties ask players to temporarily provide specific classes of fighters for passive missions that reward players with resources. Bounty missions are available daily, and provide one of the easiest ways to farm resources.
For those craving multiplayer action, Duel offers players a chance to test their fighting prowess in the VS Arena. Increase your rank as you challenge other players’ preset defense teams, or fight against players in real-time with Battle Royale mode.
Why Do You Hold Back?
Street Fighter: Duel is a perfectly fine free-to-play gacha-style RPG. However, even with a wealth of content, the game still feels like it’s missing something. While Duel is a major departure from the franchise’s signature button-mashing, beat-‘em-up gameplay, perhaps its not departure enough. Part of what makes the Street Fighter franchise so successful is its iconic character designs and interactive, combo-heavy gameplay. Most of Duel’s activities require little input from the player. Beyond setting up an advantageous team of fighters, and occasionally tapping fully charged combos and Ex-Moves, players aren’t challenged. After the first few story levels, I abandoned the manual mode entirely and allowed the game to fight my battles for me with the Auto-battle feature. Duel’s mechanics seem uninspired, given the franchise’s history. Perhaps with an added gameplay element, such as a match-3 style puzzle, Duel could deliver the perfect KO fans expect.
While Duel’s uninventive gameplay left me wanting, its colorfully campy cast of fighters, stunning visual design and raucous battle cries had me hooked. Franchise devotees will probably walk away from Street Fighter: Duel disappointed, but fans of gacha-style iOS RPGs would be hard-pressed to find a more accessible free-to-play game.
