Final Fight: Streetwise
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 This time, beating down the city’s most wanted won’t be enough… it will also require your sanity and patience.
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"[This game] doesn't look good, doesn't play well, and it can't even get its unlockable bonus--the original arcade game--right."
— Jeff Gerstmann, GameSpot
Final Fight: Streetwise is a beat 'em up game published by Capcom and developed by Capcom Studio 8 on the PlayStation 2 and Secret Level for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox respectively. A PlayStation Portable version planned but was cancelled. It is the sixth and final game in the Final Fight series, as well as the last game to be developed by Capcom Studio 8 before being shut down. The game was released on February 28, 2006, in North America and April 7, 2006, in Europe.
Why It Lost The Fight On The Streets
- The game suffered from executive meddling from Capcom. Originally, it was going to be a different game called Final Fight: Seven Sons, which was more faithful to the series, including cel-shaded graphics, a different gameplay system and a new cast of characters, but for some reason, Capcom instructed Studio 8 to change it into a GTA-wannabe to chase that trend at the time, as Capcom themselves published the Grand Theft Auto games over in Japan. Many people didn't know its predecessor even existed until Unseen64 broke the news in 2011, covering everything on what the game could have been.
- Insane story, which starts just fine, canonically taking place after the events of Final Fight 3 (Cody is kidnapped and his brother Kyle must rescue him), but quickly becomes a jarring, stupid mishmash of sci-fi, street gangs, religious beliefs, and drug use.
- The game is offensive to Christians, as they're portrayed as heartless psychopaths who kill others because they don't like them, then proceed to turn them into mutants using drugs and rein-act scenes found in the Bible using their mutated corpses.
- The game has notably had things that are for mature audiences, which Final Fight never had these things in the previous games. Which explains the M for Mature rating.
- One cutscene shows Nicky Wissell (known as The Weasel in-game) receiving oral pleasure from a prostitute, and you can also hear him and the woman moaning.
- The game also has forced excessive strong language, like its cousin, Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance.
- The theatre you meet The Weasel in has a porn movie playing in the background, which you can hear moaning.
- While the game encourages exploration of Metro City's four districts, all of the areas are rather small and lack any rewards for doing exploration.
- The reputation aspect of gameplay doesn't make any meaningful differences to the world. Earning more respect simply amounts to getting a different reaction from an NPC.
- To gain access to story missions, you must play the mini-games which range from mundane to bizarre. These include but are not limited to entering keycodes, matching pairs of cards, trashing cars (a callback to one of the bonus games in Final Fight 1 and 2) and stomping on cockroaches and drug-induced rats.
- Level-specific mechanics which don't work. In one stage, Guy and Kyle must escape from a burning house before it explodes. To do this, Kyle gets a fire extinguisher to extinguish the flames blocking their path. The problem is that some fires can't be put out unless you spray them from a specific distance, and the time limit is very short. Guy's AI can be quite erratic, too. At least there's a sound effect to let you know that you're spraying at the fire while you're trying to.
- The challenge of defeating enemies is only based on their numbers, not their skill in combat. Put simply, the enemy AI is dumb for some of the parts.
- Acquiring additional attacks are made obsolete due to the idiocy of your enemies, which means you can defeat them by simply hitting one button. You'll quickly choose to buy upgrades to your attack damage and health instead.
- Outdated graphics, despite 60 FPS support.
- Camera frequently becomes obscured by objects or zooms in too close, which is especially a problem when fighting enemies.
- Much like Sonic '06, this game doesn't have autosave and only saves at certain points. Even worse, if the game crashes, all your saved progress is lost.
- It includes a port of the original arcade game, but it runs at a low framerate and controls awkwardly. Even Tekken 5 which was released 1 year before this game ported 4 arcade games (Tekken 1-3, and Starblade) and they ran correctly and the controls are functional.
- Blatant product placement for Slipknot and their third album Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses.
- The lip-syncing is off in some cutscenes, notably the final boss cutscene where you fight a mutated version of Cody. Kyle will say "You sick bastard!" but his lips are not moving.
- This game killed the franchise permanently, outside of ports and many characters appearing in the Street Fighter series.
Redeeming Qualities
- Good soundtrack. You even get to switch between songs during gameplay!
- Passable voice acting.
- Decent, if unspectacular fighting system.
- Two-player arcade mode can be fun.
- It's great to see Cody, Guy, and Haggar once again.
- The characters' facial animations look decent.
- Cammy (from Super Street Fighter II) makes an appearance when you fight in Guy's Dojo.
- Despite outdated, this game is seems acceptable for PS2 graphics.
Reception
 "What were they thinking?"
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Streetwise received mixed to negative reviews upon release. The PS2 version has a Metacritic score of 43 based on 37 reviews, and the Xbox version has a Metascore of 42 based on 29 critic reviews. It was also a commercial failure, selling only 70,000 copies across both platforms worldwide. The PlayStation 2 version on GameFAQs has a 3.23 out of five stars from 107 users, while the Xbox version has a 2.78 out of 5 stars from 32 users.
As a result, this game killed the Final Fight franchise. The only things that it kept it going is the charaters' appearances in the Street Fighter series and ports of the original game. With the revival of the beat em 'up genre in late 2010s and onward, thanks to the likes of Streets of Rage 4 and River City Girls, Capcom has done nothing with the franchise to make a proper revival and even ignored their 30th anniversary celebration.
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