782nd played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: Arcade/Playstation 1/Dreamcast
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

I’ve played a bunch of Street Fighter games before and, well, I think they’ve been looking better over time. Now while this might seem like another variation of the third game, based on the title, it’s actually part of the Street Fighter Alpha sub series, which.. does something with combos that I don’t quite get because, well, you really need to be into the genre to understand the words. Perhaps playing the game will make it clearer.

Our Thoughts

One of the daunting things when playing this game is that it starts off asking you for a fighting style. These are A-ism, V-ism and X-ism, terms that are absolutely meaningless to me and even a bit confusing from the manual (which, in our case, was based on the Alpha Anthology, so more confusingly laid out as it combined bits of all three games in the series). I understand that this has something to do with how your combos build and fire, but I don’t think I quite got the differences, and the combos mostly went unused.

I suppose that means I missed out on one of the major selling points of the series, and what sets it apart, but as always this genre seems to enjoy expecting you to figure it out without much guidance (probably thanks to its arcade roots) and so I struggled to really care.

When you get past that system, this is a standard fighting game. It’s decent fun, I enjoyed exploring it a bit, while I managed to progress a bit, but at the same time it doesn’t offer anything special. It really is quite similar without that one feature and it feels like it could have pushed it further, made it a more readable part of the gameplay that I could actually do something with.

Final Thoughts

By 1998, home console were a major enough thing that arcane arcade games weren’t as necessary. I doubt the original manual would have given me more to go on, but here it especially didn’t explain much and the game just never grabbed me as much as it should have.