How do you follow up a game that single-handedly rejuvenated the dying arcade scene, transformed the entire notion of the two-player game, raised the bar for sprite art and animation and introduced hitherto unseen levels of controller and hit detection accuracy?

You can’t really, can you? For the longest time, Capcom certainly couldn’t, and so ended up hiding behind Alpha and Darkstalkers and X-Men games for several years, perhaps using each new series as a testing ground, to see what things worked and what things didn’t and what was popular to get some idea of what the playing public wanted from SF3.

February 1997 saw the fruits of this alleged research brought to light and it was instantly clear that unlike SF2, which blasted the existing gaming landscape into mildly radioactive dust, kicked off a genre mania not seen since Space Invaders and inspired countless jealous imitators, SF3 was a cowardly mixture of casual player-pandering and long-established fighting game concepts, its single true attempt at innovation, the ‘parry’ itself nothing more than an attempt to recreate the close-in, ‘brawling’ style of combat that the nascent 3D fighting genre was busily making its own.

In theory the concept behind parrying (or ‘blocking’ as it’s known in Japan, because they call blocking ‘guarding’) is an exciting one - to bat aside a hapless assailant’s flailing limb with pixel-perfect timing and counter with your own punishing blow is oh-so kung-fu, and there’s no denying that parrying a sequence of strikes in the heat of battle is quite a rush, but at the same time it changes the core feel of the game, removing much of what made SF2 such a long-lasting success in the first place.

The total nullification of things like fireball traps, tick throws, block damage, the more advanced zoning strategies - things that SF2 lives and dies by - makes it much less fun to play, and much less tactical. Parrying robs the game of much of its character diversity, they now all weigh the same and move the same and hit the same; while SF2 had slow characters who needed you to block, characters who needed you to jump, or throw fireballs in order to win - the introduction of a one-stop, mindless catch-all solution that at best randomises and at worst totally removes the value of such tactics is a step back, rather than forwards, and history has revealed it as a significant movement on Capcom’s part to seduce casual players back into the game by removing supposed ‘cheap’, or ‘cheesy’ tactics; tactics more experienced players have always revelled in, as part of the elaborate, chess-like mindgames that classic SF2 is celebrated for.

While perhaps a ‘generation’ away from SF2 in an aesthetic sense, from a gameplay POV it’s more a drunken, incestual mutant sibling, made deliberately dumber and easier not just by removing many of the problems and solutions that kept players hooked for years and years, but also in design and execution as well. There are no more charge supers, no 720 supers; the game’s lone grappler, Alex has a (single) special throw performed with a half-circle back motion, and a super performed with a 360. There are no ‘pure’ charge characters at all, merely a couple of stunted hybrids, and even the inclusion of a dizzy meter, under the life bars, reduces the art of scoring and capitalising on a dizzy into an exercise in meter-reading.

The character’s single super combo (another step back from the Alpha games) now named the ‘Super Art’, chosen from a possible three is a novel idea, but apart from the name itself, which is totally awesome, it seldom ranks important enough to have any real impact apart from ‘choose the best one, win.’ It certainly doesn’t make it feel like three different versions of each character, the way SFA3’s ISM system would, a year later.

The rest of the game functions are copy and pastes from other games - while the removal of air-blocking is an attempt to reintroduce more a ‘classic’ feel, parrying cripples any hope it had of succeeding, and the introduction of a greater range of mobility - long jumps, dashes and quick-stands is welcome, if not particularly inspiring and owes much to SNK’s King of Fighters games.

If it sounds uninspiring at this point, it is. Moreso ten years on, when expectations and standards have changed, and a wider frame of context has become apparent - SF3 is just boring, frightened and patronising. It’s untested (Ibuki’s one-button infinite is infamous, several other characters have very simple 2-3-button infinite combos) and it’s unfinished. Yun and Yang were obviously supposed to be two separate characters, but end up here sharing moves, animations and a character slot, while maintaining individual super arts, character art and win quotes. Recent advances in emulation have also revealed that 2nd Impact’s Hugo was originally intended to appear in NG, his background, as well as his unfinished sprite present in the NG rom data.

2nd Impact itself came along just seven months later, in September 1997 and fixed a lot of the more basic problems (while introducing several more) It’s the game that NG was allegedly supposed to be, and a bit of polish and variety does go a long way.

But while NG is less than impressive to play, aesthetically it’s still an absolute marvel. The second game to use the powerhouse CPS3 arcade board, the level of detail and artistry on display is nothing short of stunning.

The game is infused with a gritty, urban feel, less grounded in fantasy and stereotype than its predecessor. Many of the fights in the game do actually take place on streets, in alleys and on rooftops, and combined with the soundtrack and presentation do go a long way to giving the game an interesting and somewhat unique ‘end of the century city brawling’ flavour - a concept taken further still with the steely, ‘urban’ presentation of the series’ final entry, Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike.

The art and animation is peerless, even today. It’s easy to take it for granted, but if you sit and actually watch it closely, and then compare it to the SFAs, the SF2s, to any 2D fighting game at all - the jump in both quality and sheer volume of animation, details, effects is absolutely phenomenal. Cloth flows and blows, muscles flex, mouths move in time with voices, incidental animations, such as the ‘chip’ damage KO, quick get-up and parry animations often take centre stage due to the sheer level of detail and complexity.

The background art is similarly fantastic, the fights taking place against huge, impossibly-detailed murals, many screens high and slanted at crazed angles. Tricks like the blurring of distant objects, forced perspective of structures and an almost pastel shading style have all been used to amazing effect, and many of the stages change, completely, between rounds.

In some ways it’s almost a shame that the Vampire, VS and Alpha games got us used to huge, full-body portraits, elaborate background art and elegant user interfaces - a straight jump from 2 to 3 with nothing in-between would have killed most players, outright, through sheer awe and amazement.

The music takes a similar approach, the CPS3 sound chip providing a much richer, more textured and complex accompaniment to the action. The soundtrack isn’t quite as simple and melodic as SF2, although all tracks are still eminently hummable, it’s just there are no real *anthems* in there on the level of Ryu, or Chun-Li’s SF2 themes.

The voice work is similarly high-standard, full of one-shot voices and effects, and contains the first use of actual English-speaking voice-actors in an SF game, for Alex, Dudley and Gill.

If SF2 was a comic book then SF3 is a graphic novel; the tone is darker, more ambiguous and more complex than previously, suggesting a design team that has grown up and gotten bold with the incredible success of SF2, one that has improved their craft immensely. This extends to the character designs too - the broad stereotypes and clunky spritework of SF2 is conspicuously absent, in their place a dense cultural mishmash, a combination of ideas not as instantly recognisable or rewarding as the old ones, but infinitely sleeker and more intricately realised, and certainly no less cool or charismatic. And while Capcom invested even less time than ever in the fleshing out of these characters in terms of profiles and background history, the games themselves present the player with an intriguing group of fighters with more onscreen character and personality than anything witnessed in SF2.

The end boss of the game, Gill is a fine example of this. While this Greek God of Street Fighting’s startling appearance and aggressive manner (not to mention infuriating overpowering) suggest a typical villain, his reasons for fighting are clouded. Unlike M. Bison, who remained a hissable pantomime villain to the very end, Gill is not actually evil, supposedly the saviour of the world, hunting for ‘chosen ones’ to lead the way into paradise. It’s a shame this doesn’t really come across in the game as strongly as it could have done, like a lot of the best character pieces it only shows up in obscure Capcom-sanctioned plot guide books, robbing the character of some much-needed accessibility.

Overall I have a lot of fondness for this game, though mainly for nostalgic reasons. It’s very *1997*, and it was almost bodily exciting tracking its development through the ancient medium of ‘magazine previews’. After all, there was a time where the mere thought of a Street Fighter 3 would send one into gibbering fits.

And there’s no denying, like its CPS3 brethren it represents the very peak of 2D art and animation in fighting games. Even today it’s beautiful to look at, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just so small and limited - it may be the first of a series, just like Street Fighter 2: World Warrior was plagued with problems, but while that was a genuine pioneer, SF3 isn’t, and there’s just no excuse for any of its failings. This isn’t some novice company nervously releasing their first ever effort, this is the company that, two years earlier, released Super Street Fighter Mother Fucking Turbo 2 and two years before that released Street Fighter 2 Cock Sucking Hyper Fighting; both absolute giants of the fighting game scene. And expecting leniency, despite having been making superlative fighting games for more than five years at this point, despite borrowing mechanics from several existing successful, competent titles Simply Isn’t On. Ten characters when players are used to almost twenty Simply Isn’t On. And most importantly removing a lot of what made (and indeed still makes) SF2 great while pandering to the masses that did (and probably still do) think throwing and fireball traps were ‘cheap’ is nothing short of unforgivable.

In some ways this review serves as an epilogue to the other three on this site. Coming almost ten years after they were written, it’s smug with hindsight and written with explicit knowledge of just how the series panned out, how Capcom fighting games and indeed 2D fighting games in general ended up, and as such it’s far harsher than it would have been back then. I still stand by it, but at the same time I’m aware how the passage of time changes our viewpoints and how things new and shiny can grow eventually tiresome. As a fighting game by itself, New Generation would probably be a decent game, but as heir to the Street Fighter 2 legacy it’s a poor imitation, and the score given reflects that.

It’s still a shame Capcom didn’t go ahead with their plans to
call the game simply: THREE. The arrogance of that is hugely sexy
The art and lettering are superb, the character roster less so
Supers in SF4 will be activated by complex motions such as ‘Up’
or ‘punch’
The presentation is, literally, heavenly
Glorious levels of background detail on display

A new generation of funkiness

The weird ‘other dimension’ background effect during Super Arts is
pleasing to the eye, but can be spatially disorienting

Ibuki, parrying Ryu’s Hadouken. The irritating blue flash (just
before this screenshot was taken) was mercifully removed from later versions

I get this sort of thing round my gaff all the time. Uh, guv’nor

A spectacular Super Art finish

More than anyone else, Elena is a one-character showcase of fantastic 2D animation

Fancy some buttsex?

• Publisher/Developer: Capcom
• Score: 73%
• The Accessibility: 8
• The Audio & Visuals: 10
• The Depth & Lastability: 6
• The Features: 7
• The Plot & Characters: 7