Although there were a handful of things I liked better about the older title, in general, SFA3 was quite a bit improved from SFA2. The presentation of SFA2G was dated; the music sounded primitive and, frankly, kinda silly. The inter-match graphics are also more primitive (although less stylized and strange than in SFA2G.)
Notably, the controls were less fluid and responsive. I was surprised to find that out, because I expected that it would be more or less the same. They must have made some gameplay tweaks and corrections to make the characters feel a bit more responsive. In particular, after doing the Shun Goku Satsu (Instant Hell Murder) Maxed out super move on SFA3 several times, I was surprised at how difficult it was to pull off in SFA2; the timing is really much more precise, and I was used to the SFA3 timing anyway.
So... any faithful readers (ha! As if anyone besides me reads this blog anyway) know how much I like lists, so let me list out things that I liked and didn't like from each version. At least as I saw them from a simple, single playthrough with one character for purposes of comparison.
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
1) I had forgotten that SFA2 still retained the old Street Fighter 2 convention of doing throws by simply hard punching or kicking at a certain range. I always liked that better than entering a special command to throw. Although SFA3 replaced this feature with a special two-button command (which makes throws something that happens extremely rarely in my games), as do the SFIII titles, Capcom later returned to this mode for the Capcom vs. SNK series.
2) I love some of the stages. Dhalsim, Adon, Gen, Ryu, Sagat and a few others just have very lovely or interesting stages, and the "hidden" stages of the Venezuelan waterfall and the Australian grasslands thunderstorm are really nice. SFA3 has nice stages too; but I really missed a few of these that I had always quite liked. I wish that the Hyper Street Fighter Alpha allowed to you mix and match stages from all three titles, but it was not to be.
Unless I've got that wrong. Since I don't frequently have someone I can play against that enjoys playing it very much, I haven't actually done much with HSFA. Maybe it does allow that and I've forgotten! I don't think so, though...
3) As an improvement on SFA2 non-Gold, you can now select from six colors by simply selecting with one of the six basic attack buttons. Much easier.
4) Alpha counters were always pretty dumb. I remember back when I was first playing SFA2, I'd do them accidentally sometimes. That doesn't happen now, but I still don't really like them, or see the point in them. I can see how they'd be useful strategically, but it doesn't seem worth it in the cost from your super meter.
5) I really don't like how you do supers, where to get the maximum strength one you have to hit all three buttons. Especially on a PS2 controller, that's really a PITA. So, I rarely do supers higher than second level in this game, and frankly, make a lot more use of my 1st level supers, whereas in SFA3, I always use the highest level super that I can.
6) I find that I actually don't miss a lot of the characters from SFA3 Upper after all, since a lot of the added characters were ones that I was less likely to want to use anyway. So, if I really want to play those characters, I obviously can't play them in this game, but eh... for the most part the characters I'm most likely to want to play are here.
7) Hate the music. Granted, this is about the same era as the Dark Stalkers and Marvel Superheroes, or at best, the first of the Marvel vs. series, and the music sounds similar in many respects to those. But I've gotten used to better over the years. Even the SNK releases of old titles have "remixed" soundtracks with really good versions of the themes. Wish they could have done that too. Since many of the themes used in SFA2 are the same ones used all the way back to SF2 itself, they've also made appearances on the HD remix game and SF4 soundtracks, so I've got high expectations of what they could sound like.
8) Kinda liked the concept that each character had their own individual boss depending on what their story was. Granted, it made the boss feel a bit less like a boss, but still... it was a fun idea.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
1) Really like the expanded character roster, although sadly many of the more "esoteric" characters show up very infrequently in regular arcade play, so unless you play against friends who like to use a varied stable of characters, you may not see them much, or see their stages or listen to their themes. Unless you pick them in versus or practice mode, of course, but that's not the same thing at all.
2) Final Bison is a really cool boss. Of course, he makes playing with "regular" Bison a bit of a letdown, but meh. For some reason, the PS2 version doesn't seem to want to allow me to continue if I lose to Bison, although in the old PS1 version I know that I could.
3) Smoother gameplay, air blocking, air recovery, dashing, etc. probably make up for throws being crocked.
4) Great stages and great themes. I know that there are few (if any) tributes to the original soundtrack, and that's occasionally missed (SF4 and SSF2THDR all showed that the original themes could be spruced up to be cool again) but instead, we get quite a few really nice ones. Of course, a lot of them tend to run together and sound too similar to each other after a while, but I'm OK with that because when the themes here are good, they're really good. I'm especially fond of Rose, Chun-Li and Karin's themes, but Blanka, T. Hawk and Cammy also have quite nice ones.
5) The story is intriguing, but impossible to make out from the game itself. Without online plot guides, I'd be lost.
6) Some of the newer characters are redundant to say the least. We've already got Ken, Ryu and Akuma (and Dan) all of whom are very similar to each other. Do we really need to add new versions of both Ryu and Akuma to the mix? Cammy and Juli and Juni are also to a certain extent very much like each other too; Juli and Juni in particular playing like move-impoverished versions of Cammy.
7) This is true of all the Capcom fighters (and the SNK ones too); the PS2 controller is a poor subsitute for a good arcade stick. While in many ways I like the PS2 controllers a lot, it does a poor job for certain moves, and makes some characters nearly unplayable because their specials and supers are so difficult to pull off. This also contributes to making all that character diversity a bit of a false promise. The big grapplers in particular suffer from this--double 360 motions on a d-pad are a nightmare.
I'm convinced after playing this that revisiting SFA2 Gold will be a relatively rare occurance for me, and will mostly just gratify my sense of nostalgia, while SFA3U will still be the go-to game for SF action for me, as it already was. But it was fun to revisit SFA2 again, and remember some of the things that I liked better about that game after all.
