I reinstalled SFV on the PS4 the other night. I'll play through the General Story again, and I fooled around a bit in the arcade mode, including using a character that I haven't really played much since Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES (Charlie. Or Nash, I guess, as they call him in this game.)
There's a lot of ways to "count" which games follow which games as successors/sequels. One obvious way is in the numbers: Street Fighter is followed by Street Fighter 2, which is followed by 3, 4 and 5, etc. The Alpha series don't really fit into this scheme since they don't have a number, but I'm sure most people would sandwich them in between 2 and 3, since that's where they fit in release order as well as technology.
Another way, of course, is release order, which is similar to the above with the Alpha series officially mixed in.
Another obvious way is the chronological order that they take place. Street Fighter, the Alpha games, the II games, the IV games, V, and then III last.
I actually think that an interesting way to see them is to see what game play they seem to be trying to channel out of the past of the series. One of the secrets of Street Fighter II's runaway success was that at its core it was a relatively simple game. Anyone could sit down and play it (at least up until the last few iterations of it) and expect to win at least a few rounds, no matter you're skill level, against the CPU. On the other hand, simplicity doesn't mean that it lacked tactical depth that could be learned and exploited by the more serious gamers. One (of many) reasons that Street Fighter III failed to resonate with the same audience is that the devs lost their vision of making a game for everyone, and focused on more on creating a game with a lot of technical depth for players to explore and master, and one that has seen a fair bit of success in the competitive circuit scene. Of course, exactly what made this successful in this scene is what makes it get a big meh from non-competitive circuit scene players.
The Alpha series can perhaps be seen as somewhere in between, and maybe heading off in a different direction altogether. Because it uses the same engine and graphics (and sprites, ultimately) as the Marvel games and later the Marvel crossover games, one could possibly say that the direction they went was less on the tactical side and more on the gratuitous wahoo side for button mashers and the hyperactive. This isn't really fair, though—while certainly playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 (or 3) feels like what an out of control ADHD kid who missed his dose of Ritalin must go through, the Alpha games were tactically very good. While the depth may not have been quite as focused on clever uses of regular and special moves and modest combos and focused a bit more on setting up the big super combo or chain combo finishes, Alpha 2 Gold and Alph 3 Upper are among the best games in the greater Street Fighter franchise, and the Alpha series overall is one that I see as hugely successful. Both in terms of their actual success, I believe, but also in terms of their "classicness" even today over twenty years after they came out.
According to this scheme, you could say that the Alpha series and Street Fighter IV were both more trying to be direct sequels to Street Fighter II, and Street Fighter V feels more like a sequel to Street Fighter III. It's no wonder, then, that after all these years, I actually still prefer SFIV to SFV.
Anyway, I found this recent (recentish anyway) article ranking the better Street Fighter titles. I'll do the same, although I'll rank less of them, and the ones I don't rank will just kind of sink into the morass below those that I do. This article ranks obviously non-Street Fighter games. Sometimes its because of a tie-in title, like Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight, even though it's obviously not a Street Fighter game. Sometimes it's a similar game with a crossover character or two, like Rival Schools, even though that's also obviously not a Street Fighter game. I'm going to allow myself one non-Street Fighter game to be entered into the mix, although it is made by Capcom, plays like a Street Fighter game, and utilizes tons of Street Fighter characters. Literally Street Fighter Alpha sprites in most cases. It'll be obvious in the ranking below. For some titles that got iterative updates and literally replaced the files on your hard drive of the earlier versions, it's hard to rank "sub" categories within them. So, for SFIV and V, for instance, I'm only ranking the final version with everything unlocked that you wouldn't have had early on.
9. Street Fighter. While this is old and primitive enough now that it's frustrating to play it for too long at a time, I spent many hours on cabinets wherever I could find them playing this back in the later 80s. I loved everything about the concept when I first saw it, and only after better games that followed it up came out did I move on from it. It deserves a place here for starting it all, and for being a very good game for the time in which it was made.
8. Street Fighter III: Third Strike. While I agree with the article linked above that this is really the only version of Street Fighter III worth bothering with, I've never been nearly as enchanted with the Street Fighter III subseries as some other fans have been. The lack of a compelling story, compelling characters, a compelling villain, as well as the botched roll-out, the ugly music, etc.—while I can recognize the technical acumen involved in this game, it's an academic recognition rather than something that I really appreciate or even like, sometimes. I do have this game on the Dreamcast, and I've been thinking of buying the 30th Anniversary edition so I can have it on Steam as well (I don't even know for sure that I can get my Dreamcast to play anymore. It's obviously pretty old and has some mechanical issues. I've been able to overcome in the past, but I haven't tried for years.) But the reality is that I don't really miss this game all that much. I never really got all that into it, and never saw very many good reasons to do so either.
7. Street Fighter II. Arguably this is the game that kicked off the entire genre. It's not the first game in the series, but it's the one that made it count. Not only did this game keep arcades in business for the better part of half a dozen years after they should have folded as an industry, it was a killer app on some of the home systems it was released on. It was a "launch" title with my SNES when I got it way back in 1994 and the title that I played the most (I only played Link to the Past long enough to finish it, for instance.) I give the nod to the original rather than Champion edition, because Champion edition (and Hyperfighting) were obviously iterations on this rather than new games. Super Street Fighter, on the other hand, felt like it went out of its way to be more than just a little tweak, but a more significant overhaul, so it'll get referenced separately.
6. Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold. In some ways, this game has been overshadowed by its own immediate successor, but let's not forget that this was a really good game back in the day. Alpha 3 actually fairly significantly overhauled the game system, so Alpha 2 was kind of "peak Alpha" style gameplay, in at least one way of looking at things. It's true that with Alpha 3 Upper, I'm not very likely to actually play this game anymore all that often, but let's also not forget that this game got a tremendous SNES port. It's kind of astonishing that they were even able to port it to that hardware, but because I was a very late adopter of the Playstation hardware, I played the heck out of my Alpha 2 SNES cartridge. It really opened up a whole new world of Street Fighter gameplay to me personally, so it has a fond spot in my heart even so. I do have it also on the Alpha Anthology for my PS2 (and I can't ever imagine parting with my PS2; I've got so many great titles for that system still) but like I said, I don't actually play it very often.
5. Super Street Fighter II. I loved this overhaul of the classic Street Fighter II game. It didn't just give us a few more characters and colors and stages; it made some pretty significant changes to all of the other characters as well. Most people would ask; why not Super Street Fighter II Turbo; isn't that the obvious end point of the Street Fighter II trajectory? Well, yes, I suppose. I didn't get that until quite late on a Capcom Collection for the old Xbox, though, and to be honest with you, I was surprised that even on the lowest difficulty setting, it never seemed to play like the Street Fighter II arcade experiences that I'd had for years and years. Every other version of Street Fighter did, but either SSF2Turbo was wildly unbalanced for Arcade Mode vs. CPU play, or I'm much more of a terrible scrub than I ever thought. But again, given that it only happens with this title, that doesn't seem like the likely answer.
Besides, this is the game that I had in my arcade and put who knows how many dollars worth of quarters into, as well as the game that I had for my SNES (beyond the original SF2 game) so also the one that I played at home a ton. I never even saw Turbo until I got it on collections long after the fact.
4. Street Fighter V: Champion Edition+. As with the Street Fighter III subseries, V's release can probably pretty fairly be considered a "botched" launch. I actually had no real interest in this game for years after renting it early; not until the Champion Edition came out with an arcade mode included, and a much stiffer roster of characters to choose from. Although to be fair, the somewhat unusual (for a fighting game, anyway) general story mode is usually the most likely mode to bring me back jonesing to play again a bit more. But when I do, I always go through the arcade mode a bunch too. Even so, in many ways I see this as a step back from Street Fighter IV. It doesn't even look better, which I'd think the developers would be ashamed of. (Then again, I'm one of those kinds of guys who doesn't necessarily think that Street Fighter III necessarily looks better than Street Fighter Alpha either. Yeah, yeah—frame-rate, I get it. But that's not the only thing that contributes to the look of a game.)
The Arcade Mode is actually quite clever too, if embarrassingly late to the party. Sometimes the character selection is interesting too; there's some real unexpected and interesting choices here and there, although of course that also means that there's a few glaring misses. Some of the character redesigns are really quite good ("hot" Ryu being especially notable here) while others are laughably stupid ("dandelion" Akuma being especially notable here.) All in all, after it finally finished releasing all of its content (actually, as of this writing I'm still waiting on a few characters from Season V before I buy it) it ended up finally fixing its badly botched launch, but the real question was; was it too little too late to save it from customer apathy?
3. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper. A much better game than anything Street Fighter III was doing, even though both subseries were released during the same few years. It's got a better story, a much better roster of players, I actually prefer the gameplay as much more reminiscent of "classic" Street Fighter rather than spergy catering to a niche market of overly technical players. And as I mentioned above, even with a lower frame-rate and a few aging sprites that could use an overhaul, I actually think it looks at least as good as Street Fighter III does. Maybe I just prefer the style a little bit more.
This is one of the early games I got for my PS1 when I could, and while lots of people complain about frame rate and a few other graphical sacrifices on that version, I think it's a fantastic port even so. I also have it, of course, on the Alpha Anthology for the PS2, but I do sometimes miss the World Tour mode; a kind of early prototype, if you will, for the General Story mode in SFV. I've had my Dreamcast (and therefore Third Strike) almost as long as I've had my PS1 and therefore this game (as well as a few other Capcom PS1 ports of more or less the same vintage, like Marvel Superheroes and Darkstalkers 3.) I think by far this game is the best of the era, with one exception (see below.) and still one of the absolute best titles ever to sport the Street Fighter name explicitly.
2. Capcom vs SNK 2. While not explicitly a Street Fighter title, it's worth pointing out that almost half of the characters come from the Street Fighter franchise, and the gameplay is a slightly updated version of the Street Fighter Alpha 3 gameplay, with a few other features borrowed from other games that can be optionally layered in by picking a different groove. (It should be noted that other than a few trials, I don't play any groove except C, the Alpha 3-like groove. N-groove, the King of Fighters 97-like game mode is the one I'm second most likely to attempt. It's also the one that's closest to C-groove in how it plays.) I also don't really play with ratios or even three on three teams, preferring most of the time to simply pick the same character for all three, so it plays even more like a Street Fighter game. And as such, well—it's one of the best Street Fighter games. One that also happens to have a buttload of SNK characters in it to make it even more fun.
That said, there are a handful of missed opportunities. Most people remark on the laziness of reusing some of the oldest and least advanced sprites as looking really bad. The 3D backgrounds are actually not very attractive or interesting, with only a couple of exceptions. I think the inclusion of the Last Blade and Samurai Shodown characters don't really fit the modern martial arts vibe that the rest of the characters do, and they should have been replaced with someone else that fit better. (Plenty of choices in the King of Fighters or Fatal Fury series.) And the music, while not actively offensive like the Marvel vs Capcom 2 music from about the same era, is still really quite bland and boring. Top Hat Gaming Man is really on to something by pointing out that curiously the older style 2-D "hand" drawn stages have aged better than the 3D ones, feeling more classic and timeless, whereas the early 3D stages of Capcom vs SNK 2 (and Marvel vs Capcom 2) really date the game to the turn of the century and make it feel stuck there.
1. Ultra Street Fighter IV. Great gameplay. Great visual and musical presentation. Great character selection. Great timing and a well-done release that kept hype up well into the life cycle of the game. There's very little about this game that I can complain about. Almost everything that it's done is really great. It's also notable for being the first game, since it was 3D graphics throughout, that allowed radically different alternate character looks, which was tons of fun. In some ways, it's still better at this than SFV is, although there's some real stinkers in the roster of alternate looks out there, of course. In fact, one whole series, the animal costumes series, was a misbegotten terrible idea from the get-go. Although I suppose it comes across as a very Japanese idea.
In fact, the only thing really that I have to complain about is that very late in the game's life span, literally its last update, in fact, it introduced half of an update, but it feels half-assed and half-done. The Omega mode was such a serious overhaul of how many characters played, that it feels like a major update... except that you can only use it in a couple of game modes, and they never even entered the movelist into the game; you have to refer to a separate pdf to know how to play the Omega moves!
This feels like teasing an update which never actually came, and now that we're seven years and a whole new entry in the series out, never will. We would have been perfectly satisfied with Ultra Street Fighter IV, but I, at least, feel kinda gypped that we were teased a vaporware Omega Street Fighter IV update. All they had to do was add the moves into the movelist and make them playable in arcade mode and a few other of the modes. Wouldn't have hurt them to add a character or two, while they were at it. They could have used models that were already in the then current Marvel vs Capcom title, like Mike Haggar, who was a perfect fit. I wouldn't have complained if they'd had an "Easter egg" character who didn't completely fit the tone, like Morrigan or Strider Hiryu, or even someone like Dante or Jill Valentine. And they could have done it on the cheap, since those characters were already in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3.
Speaking of the new characters, though—pretty hit or miss. Characters like Crimson Vyper or Juni are pretty awesome, and characters like Oni, Decapre and Gouken were interesting and further develop the mythos of Street Fighter. On the other hand, characters like Hakan, Rufus and El Fuerte are embarrassingly stupid. And then we have Abel, a boring cypher of a character who is sometimes held out like he's supposed to be a kinda sorta protagonist. Like Alex was for Street Fighter III; another boring character that most people that I'm aware of never really got into or cared about.
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