Street Fighter II is a series with so many iterations across so many different pieces of hardware that's it's hard to keep track, but the game at the core of it all remains so good after 25 years that you can sit two players in front of just about any of them and have a good time.

So it is with the iteration now coming to the Nintendo Switch as Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, a Frankenstein's monster of a package that doesn't bring much new of value to the table but is still an excellent way to play the game.

The main attraction here is essentially 1994's Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but with with some smart balance tweaks, Akuma added as a playable character and the introduction of two characters never seen before in the series: Evil Ryu and Violent Ken. As the names imply these are slightly redone versions of the two most popular fighters (and both actually have appeared before in other series), but they play differently enough to add some new flavour for veterans.

The game copies the HD visual style and re-recorded music from 2008's Turbo HD Remix, and looks great on a big TV screen or the smaller Switch display. Some won't dig the clean presentation — since the game retains the jerky animation of the original it can be a bit incongruous — but thankfully the option is there to revert to the 25-year-old graphical style and sound, which are awesome in their own right.

Like Tetris and Minecraft, Street Fighter II is one of those games I've played countless times before but will happily buy again to have it on Switch (even at its hard-to-swallow $60 asking price). The portability of the console and its instant two-player chops means not only can you defeat M. Bison on the train, but you can bring out the machine to settle a grudge match with a friend absolutely anywhere, at any time. 

This brings Ultra Street Fighter II closer to its arcade roots than just about any prior home version, and certainly closer than any portable version. If you're so inclined, you can also connect online to take on random challengers to prove your dominance, like they do at arcades in Tokyo to this day.

It would have been nice to get a truly new take on Street Fighter II, or even some decent added extras, to celebrate the game's quarter-century of enduring greatness. But that's not what this game provides. In fact just about everything in Ultra Street Fighter II that isn't 25 years old is divisive at best, and at worst seems outright lazy.

The ability to edit the colour of any fighter's skin and clothes is a fun touch, as is the inclusion of a digital art book previously published in physical form in Japan, but they're passing novelties.

A new feature that lets two people take on the Arcade Mode side by side is a novel idea given the multiplayer focus of the machine, but it's cheaply implemented and looks incredibly weird given the 2D fighting plane.

Even though I'm a big fan of the two marquee new features — the HD graphics and the addition of Evil Ryu and Violent Ken — it's clear that they're hardly "new" in any real sense of the word.

None of these features take anything away from the excellence of the core game, but their mundanity only highlights the massive missed opportunity to either reinvent or celebrate the game.

The only feature here that I'd outright call bad is a new mode called "Way of the Hado". Shifting to Street Fighter IV's 3D art style, this is a first-person mode where you play as Ryu and perform Hadokens and other special moves by physically flinging the Joy-Con around. It's dumb, ugly, has nothing to do with Street Fighter II and the motion controls only sometimes work.

None of these negatives seem so important though when you hand a friend a controller, each pick your favourite fighter (Cammy for life), and let the fists and feet fly. 

Ultra Street Fighter II is out on May 26.