“The Ultimate Game of Martial Arts Action!” in 1994
Now I must admit that I have been letting you guys down for several months. You see, I thought for sure that I had shared this advertisement for Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game (find at Amazon.com*), but I was so wrong. I guess I just assumed I had posted the ad long ago because of how many times I ran across it back when the game was new in 1994.
This is one of those roleplaying games that I only knew of because of magazines; I have never owned a copy of the game or its expansions. I should fill that Street Fighter-sized hole in my library of roleplaying games.
A fantastic, underrated game that is also a real mess. The Storyteller system was not at all a great fit for this genre, but for the most part, it actually kind of works…? Combat is everything and for my tastes, way too fiddly with the cards and whatnot. Some of the styles in the expansion books are just silly powerful. I did, however, run one of the best improv games of my life with this game, and it will always hold a really special place in my heart. Totally needs a new version with a more streamlined set of rules to cover the whole fighting game genre.
I really loved the game. Combat and Storyteller could be a bit fiddly, and it suffered the same problem any high powered character in any early Storyteller game did, but it was a smart way to handle the fighting game genre in pen and paper format.