Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge

Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge is the first of many art books centered around Street Fighter in Japan brought to the States by UDON. Published in 2005 to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Street Fighter, Eternal Challenge presents a very interesting and intricate look at all things Street Fighter.

It's broken down into four sections: Art Works, History, Editorial, and Extras. In Art Works, we're given six sections dedicated to the art centered around Street Fighter in all its incarnations. In Special Illustrations Gallery 01 we get to see a lot of varying artistic styles and representations of the Street Fighter characters. Everything from phone card art to book and website illustrations to secret art files all from designers like AKIMAN, Nishimura Kinu, Nishizawa Akiko, and a great deal of others. The illustrations themselves offer looks at the private lives of the Street Fighters, calm and serene moments (such as Sakura resting under an overpass), comedic representations (like Ryu in his underwear at a laundromat, probably washing his ever present gi), cover and test location art, novel pin-ups, and an all around mish mash of various illustrations.

In Main Illustration Gallery we get the arcade cabinet art and game box art from the various Street Fighter games released since 1987. The series begins with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike then continues on with Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Collection, Street Fighter, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival.

The Character Illustration Gallery is just that. It details the characters that have appeared in every Street Fighter game up to Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike in all their various incarnations and various designers. Not that the looks of the characters have changed all that much from 1987 to 1999, but you'd be surprised how each artists renderings of the characters varies from one another. Looking at a Bengus illustration from Super Street Fighter II and then an Ikeno illustration from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, the characters, while being the same, look vastly different from one another. This section takes up a good chunk of the book as most of the characters have two page spreads dedicated to themselves. From Ryu to M.Bison are all given the two page treatment. Beginning with the cast of characters introduced in Super Street Fighter II, the page count dwindles. Fei Long, Dee Jay, Cammy, T.Hawk and Akuma all have a single page dedicated to them, while the later characters from Alpha and Street Fighter II all have half pages. The last page in the gallery gives us some rather updated illustrations from Bengus for the characters from Street Fighter, the original game from 1987, five of which have never been seen in a Street Fighter game since.

The Special Illustration Gallery 02 gives us more random illustrations of the Street Fighter characters doing random things. There's an illustration of Sakura at a festival taking off an Akuma mask -- with a Megaman and Hsien-Ko mask behind her; there's an illustration of Chun-Li where she appears to be selling a drink of some sort, there's the Street Fighter Vacation, Street Fighter II Image Museum and Super School Fighter II X illustrations, a whole collection of drawings dedicated to the characters and their lives outside of fighting -- some of which tend to be rather hilarious -- and lots of character sketches.

The Setting Data & Rough Sketch Gallery shows us a lot of in-game art (win and loss screens, game endings and the like) in their rough sketch design process. There's also a lot of the stages in drawing form and more rough character designs than you can shake a stick at. In this section there is an interview with Shoei, Nishimura Kino and Ikeno from Capcom's Street Fighter design team.

The History section begins with All Work Introduction, a section entirely dedicated to the development process of each Street Fighter game, beginning with the first one in 1987, and ending with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike from 1999. It continues with All Character Profile Introduction which details all of the characters involved in the fifteen year span of throwing fists and kicks at one another. Each character is spotlighted with a description, a brief detailing of their story, and their in-game history development (how they went from a to b). All Ending Introduction is dedicated to each of the characters game endings from all of the games in the series, offering more details to the characters personalities and histories; but staying away from the in-game canon of the Street Fighter plot. They don't tell you who actually won the second or third tournament, or anything of that nature.

The last few sections of the book are filled with interviews, pictures of statues and action figures based on the Street Fighter characters, controllers, t-shirts, posters, costumes, comic book covers, video game magazine covers, logos, gamebox art for the console versions of each games (some of which were rather ugly back in the day), and ending the book with an interview with the folks at UDON who bring us the Street Fighter comics.

All in all this is a really good book, and it was my go to book for everything related to Street Fighter art until very recently. The quality is pretty decent, and the art is very clear and vivid, though some of the illustrations were reduced in size to make room for all of them. The book is actually quite small and the interviews and history sections take up a lot of space. Both are quite interesting reads, but it's space that could be easily used for more art, of which there is plenty available. The book is out of print as far as I can tell, so I would probably avoid buying it unless you had to have it for your collection. As both on Amazon.com and Barns & Noble.com are fetching pretty high prices on it.

If I were you, I would spend my money on the next book to get a write up from me. SF20: The Art of Street Fighter.