New tag: story summaries

Like I referred to off-handedly in my last post, I'm going to do some story summary posts, mostly for reference. I don't want to have to watch a twenty minute YouTube video narrated by a guy with a really strong accent, or read a wiki entry that is borderline incoherent either to understand the major storylines in the various series. I've created a new tag, and this post is the first to sport it, called STORY SUMMARIES where I'll summarize the storylines from the games. The reality is that although it's a little hard to perceive them sometimes, most of these games have crazy-insane comic book-like stories with genuine supervillains, super-technology, superheroes and more either trying to take over the world or stop someone else from taking over the world.

I've got high priority and low priority posts to make; the low priority ones might or might not actually get made. Also, I'll split both high and low priority lists into an SNK and a Capcom list. 

I should point out, although maybe I already have, that my definition of karate supers is a bit less anime, and certainly is weaponless (with the exception of a few people who do have weapons occasionally, like Billy Kane or Rolento.) I've never really gotten into Samurai Shodown, for instance, because it's historical and uses weapons. I've never gotten into Guilty Gear or Blazblue or any of those kinds of games, because they're way too whack and anime to have universal appeal, and they also often use weapons. There's been a lot of attempts to cross properties, but I'll reiterate here again, that I'm only considering "in scope" games from the following series: Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Darkstalkers. I'd actually be OK including the Marvel Crossover games too, except that I don't really want to try and use Marvel characters here. The Capcom vs SNK games (and SNK vs Capcom: Chaos) mostly count too, although a few characters here and there stand out as not fitting very well, in my opinion. I'm not sure what order I'll do these in, but certainly the high priority ones will all be done before I worry about the low priority ones.

HIGH PRIORITY

Capcom

• Street Fighter II: while the story line here is actually fairly simplistic in most senses, this is kind of where it starts. The story started to develop as the series developed, mostly through character endings. It was obviously pretty simplistic in the first iteration, but as more iterations and more characters were added, it developed a bit more depth than you'd think. SF1 didn't really have any story at all, but it was kind of retroactively added by Street Fighter II. However, because of the bizarre time-hopping nature of the series, I'll do this out of order; Street Fighter II will be the second Street Fighter summary I attempt. 
• Street Fighter Alpha: Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 don't have separate stories; Alpha 2 is basically considered a refined and upgraded version of Alpha 1. However, Alpha 3 has a separate story that takes place after Alpha 2. Because the Alpha games came out after Street Fighter II, but take place before them, I'll actually start here. I'll just add a brief summary of Street Fighter I's story here to set the scene for Alpha. However, regardless of when the stories take place, the order in which they were created matters, and of course, when these stories came out, Street Fighter II was already long finished. 
• Street Fighter III: Another one that I'll probably do last of the higher priority ones. While this is still one of the earlier titles, in terms of release, it is the last one in terms of when it takes place. Sigh. It's also one of the most confusing of the titles. Exactly what the story is and what supposedly is the "canonical" version of what happened is hard to figure out. 
• Street Fighter IV: We go back in time again, to about a year or so at most after Street Fighter 2 takes place. While some characters get relegated to just being silly, for the most part, Street Fighter IV is a pretty decent game storywise, with plenty going on, and it's less confusing than some. Partly this is because of how much it rehashes the plot of the Alpha and II games rather than because it's necessarily told so much better, admittedly.
• Street Fighter V: Now we're a few years after Street Fighter IV yet still before Street Fighter III. This one has the easiest story to follow of any Street Fighter title, because of... the story mode, which is optimized for attempting to tell stories! Each character has a little backstory vignette, and then the General Story mode, of course, actually tells the full story of the game.

SNK

• The Orochi Saga, which makes up the first several King of Fighters titles. 94, the first game, was kind of retroactively fit into this greater saga which otherwise takes place in games 95-97. 98 is the "dream match" capper to the series, which is all about gameplay.
• The NESTS saga, which makes up the next chunk of King of Fighters games: 99-01. 02 is the capper.
• The Ash Crimson saga, which is makes up the last phase of the King of Fighters storyline, including 2003-XIII (minus XII.) Yeah, yeah—I know that a fourth saga has started, but with only one game (of presumably three) released yet, it seems premature to attempt to summarize the story at all.

LOW PRIORITY

Capcom

• Darkstalkers (all three.) While I see cameos or even major uses of a few Darkstalkers characters as part of my own Capcom-SNK crossover symbiosis, I don't think that summarizing the story of the series overall is nearly as important. But I'd like to get to it eventually.

SNK

• Fatal Fury. To be honest, the storyline for Fatal Fury isn't really all that complex, even if you get into the Real Bout games and the scrolls of immortality, or whatever exactly they were called. Besides, half of the games in the series are dream matches without an official story, and several of those that remain basically tell the exact same story, just with a slightly rotating cast of supporting characters. This becomes a bit of backstory for some of the King of Fighters characters, and to be honest, they're not the most important King of Fighters characters anyway, especially in terms of KOF story.
• Art of Fighting. Whatever is true for Fatal Fury is, if anything, even more true for Art of Fighting. Technically, Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury take place in the same timeline/continuity, while the King of Fighters games take place in an alternate continuity that just happened to have a lot of the same backstory beats, albeit compressed in time. If you imagine the situation similar to what Marvel was doing in the 00s, then the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury timeline could be seen as the "normal" lines of comic strips, while the King of Fighters was the Ultimate Imprint; same characters and basically the same stories, but retold in an updated and different fashion. Except while in Marvel's case the most recent Secret Wars ends the Ultimate Universe and folds some of its characters into the "main" universe, in SNK's case, the opposite happened, and the KOF timeline is the only one that's still active. This was largely, but not entirely, true even before SNK's bankruptcy. Of the original timeline, only the occasional Fatal Fury title still limped along next to the KOF timeline.

King of Fighters titles

No matter how you cut it, the King of Fighters series is one of the most important in this genre. Heck, I tend to limit my participation specifically to three series: Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters (not counting spin-offs that contain Street Fighter, Fatal Fury or King of Fighters characters, like Capcom vs SNK, for instance.) I recently watched a few videos on YouTube from a guy in Morocco of all places, who's a big King of Fighters fan. I found his channel while looking for a summary of the plotlines of the various sagas within King of Fighters, since I was a little rusty on the details. He did one on each of the main sagas: Orochi, NESTS and Ash, and they weren't bad. I'd actually like to make posts summarizing the plots myself, if for no other reason than so I have them archived for my own use. (Who am I kidding? This entire blog is a journal for my own use. Nobody else reads it.) But one video that he posted I found kind of interesting, in which he rated all of the King of Fighters titles. Now, he made exceptions: he completely ignored the Maximum Impact line (just like most Street Fighter fans usually ignore the EX line, or at most make a mention of how they're not considering it) as well as any hand-held titles. He limited himself to mainline titles only. This is more or less what I'm going to do, but I'll be going through the titles that I have and talking briefly about how much I do or don't like them relative to each other and the genre as a whole.

I should point out a little bit of context. I say that I'm a collector, but I don't mean that in a very obsessive sense. I don't have any arcade cabinets, or AES hardware, nor do I go out of my way to have all kinds of versions on all kinds of hardware. I mostly just want to have a decent port on piece of hardware I have of all of the titles. I'm also kind of notorious as a late hardware adaptor. I usually adopt one generation of console when the next generation is on sale, for instance (my PS4 adoption is an exception, but we mostly got that for my teenaged boys for Christmas one year, not for me.) Because of this, I've had a lot of titles on older hardware for a long time.

The King of Fighters games, of course, being subject to some of SNK's financial troubles, didn't always get very wide releases in North America, so sometimes I had to get them on whatever system I could get them on. Over time, I gradually picked up loads of systems (my wife isn't super happy about that. Not for the cost, more for the systems sitting around in the basement issue.) Let's go through my systems that have a King of Fighters title on them, in chronological order, and I'll talk about the games that I have for that system briefly. To be fair, I haven't fired up my older playstations in a couple of years at least, so it's been a while since I've played any of these titles. But I'm feeling the itch again, and I think I can actually coopt an old spare monitor with some adaptor cables and have a dedicated older console set-up here soon. 

One quick note about the series: one of its main conceits, of course, was the three man team conceit. I don't like three man teams. I don't like trying to mentally switch gears between rounds from one character to another and what are the special moves again, and what is the timing, reach, priority, etc. again? I like big rosters, and I like playing multiple characters, but I like playing one character at a time. To be fair, most of the home ports offer a 1x1 mode alongside the 3x3 (or 4x4 during the NESTS saga) that does best two out of three matches; in other words, playing more or less like Street Fighter or Fatal Fury does. This is actually my most common way of "consuming" these games, and those that don't offer a decent 1x1 mode are much less likely to appeal to me, because I greatly prefer playing that way to the team play. I know, I know... I'm allegedly missing the whole point. Can't help it. I just very much prefer that style of play.

Playstation

King of Fighters '95 While the oldest chronologically, I think this is the second title I ended up picking up (for whatever reason 99 was available all over the place for a while there.) It's not a bad title. I don't really love the early system with the charging super bar that the first few KOF titles had, but it's not horrible. This is, I believe, the first console port (not counting the AES home system by SNK) of a KOF game, and of course, it came to the Sony Playstation, the biggest and best system of its generation. People often knock the Sony Playstation for its supposed inability to do sprite-based fighting games well, but I'll be honest with you: I've got a lot of titles from this era on this system. Sure, sure... now I play them on my PS2, which being backwards compatible, only requires a PS1 memory card in order to work. Hardware wise, it's perfectly capable, but the games on disc will feature less frames and some reduced graphical quality. For the most part, I only occasionally notice the difference, though. Some of these PS1 fighting games are just fantastic, and are the definitive way most people played those games. 

I don't play this much anymore because at the end of each saga, the "definitive" game that gave you the best gameplay experience for the entire saga came out. Why play '95 when I had '98 on the Dreamcast, and later '98 Ultimate Match on the PS2? Well... that's a good question. Occasionally I'll still whip it out just for old times sake, although to be fair, even then I'm more likely to play this now on my PS2 Orochi Collection. The old PS1 '95 title is just been made obsolete on more than one front. Which is kind of a shame. I'm not going to say that this is one of my favorite titles in the series or anything, because it's not. But I have a lot of good memories playing this when I didn't have very many other options yet. Although a little stiff and primitive looking in some ways, the backgrounds were amazing and impress me even now. The sprites look a little Street Fighter 2 vintage, though. Most of the characters would be redrawn soon.

King of Fighters '99 This doesn't really seem to be a fan favorite in many ways, and I saw it for sale cheap all over the place. I really quite like it, though. I think its a fabulous game. The menus and select screens were, admittedly, kind of ugly. I'll be honest; I wasn't a huge fan of the striker system. You have to select a striker even in 1x1 play, because a striker is an integral part of the game play (although to be fair, I don't necessarily use my striker all that often either.) I've said before that I think 99 has more atmosphere than almost any other game in the title. Its look is tons better than even the sequels within the NESTS saga (which sadly, often featured a number of really ugly backgrounds, even if everything else about the games seemed to work OK), the kind of vaguely cyperpunk EDM soundtrack for many teams really enforced the atmosphere... There's a lot to love about this game. When the only two KOF titles I had were 95 and 99, both on this system, I greatly preferred this one. 

Dreamcast

King of Fighters '98 Of course, the actual Dreamcast title was King of Fighters: Dream Match 1999 because they didn't want to sound out of date, but the game itself was actually 98. One curious thing that the King of Fighters series did was that it had "sagas". Several games made up a continuous story; four in the case of the Orochi saga (94, 95, 96 and 97.) Once the saga was over, they did a "dream match" which brought all of the characters that had been in the saga at all back together again for a dream match. It had no story significance, but it was the best gameplay and the best roster. In short, unless you were specifically playing for the story or to see a specific background or something, it made all of the games within the saga that preceded it kind of obsolete.

Now, this game didn't literally (at least in this release) feature every character who had been in any game of the series, although it certainly had most of them. For many years, this was considered the pinnacle of King of Fighters development, and many fans even considered it a real contender for best game in the entire genre. I can't argue with that. While I doubt that I would have ever picked it over Capcom vs SNK 2 or even Street Fighter Alpha 3, I can certainly say that I liked it nearly as much as those. The Advanced Mode, from 97, is a great improvement over the older Extra mode (like 95 had) and made it play quite a bit more like a Street Fighter super gauge, quite honestly. Which is OK. I always preferred that mode to any alternatives I've yet seen. The 1x1 mode works as well as the 3x3 mode, and I naturally played that more often. I even thought the awkward Dreamcast controller worked decently well for the four button King of Fighters layout. I don't actually know that the Street Fighter six button layout is an improvement on the SNK four button layout, especially now that we're in an era of home console playing, not arcade cabinet playing, and four buttons is the standard face of any controller for any console I've ever seen. In fact, for many years, this was by far the Dreamcast game that I played the most of. 

I also have 98 on the Orochi Collection, although it's not, I don't believe, the slightly upgraded Dreamcast version, and is more like the AES version. However, the game that makes it completely and totally obsolete is the King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match for the PS2. Getting, finally, all of the characters involved, further tweaks to the gameplay and a bunch of new stages (some of which are great, but some of which aren't actually improvements on the originals—and the game seems to prioritize new ones in arcade mode, unfortunately) the game is even more a contender for best in the series. Of course, by the time it came out, Capcom finally got their act together and released Street Fighter IV, which ended the long hiatus, kind of rebooted the genre into a more modern age, and threw out prior rankings of what was and wasn't the best that the genre could offer. But the Ultimate Match is still a great game today, and is still a serious contender for best King of Fighters game, if not best SNK fighting game. If not best game in the entire genre.

Xbox

For whatever reason, I ended up getting an original Xbox long before I got a PS2 (the Sony entry in the same generation.) Technically the Dreamcast is considered the same generation, which means that all of the major systems for this generation are systems that I owned. Sadly, my Xbox stopped working long ago, so I haven't been able to play the titles that I have only on this one, but I haven't gotten rid of them, on the off-chance that I either buy a new box or install a good emulator to run the discs on my PC. Both of which are, of course, possibilities.  This ended up being a good choice for a time, because there were a number of SNK titles that only got Xbox releases, and fighting game fans were pretty irritated that Sony was reluctant to approve some of their titles for fear that they would make the console look backwards or primitive, because the SNK titles weren't exactly graphical marvels by any means, especially in the day and age of 3D graphics. After my Xbox died, I did end up replacing most of my Xbox fighting game titles with the PS2 versions of them, often on collections when I could get them, but there were a few that I either didn't or couldn't replace, either because the price point just didn't seem worth it, or because they never got a PS2 release in the first place. I'll cover only those titles here.

King of Fighters 02 This game is similar in many ways to 98, being a retrospective "dream match" that combines the supposed best of the NESTS saga. Curiously, the whole striker system was ditched, making it play much more like a traditional KOF game. This game (as well as the one prior) were developed by Eolith, a South Korean company who had picked up the KOF assets when old SNK went into bankruptcy. Playmore, a company formed by the remnants of some SNK staff, is also credited, although I'm not sure exactly what the relationship between the two of them was; I think Eolith was the developer and Brezzasoft, later Playmore was the publisher/distributor. I've heard other reports that it was the other way around, which in most ways makes more sense. Playmore ended up rebranding itself as SNK Playmore, and became the emergent, post-bankruptcy version of old SNK, but I think they actually had to fight for a while to get some of their own brands back.

That isn't to say that Eolith did a bad job on these two games. I do think that they lack some visual punch. The sprites were mostly already the same sprites that had been used for several years, but the backgrounds were mostly kind of terrible. (To be fair, they were worse in KOF01.) The gameplay, balance and roster here were, on the other hand, pretty good, and this is yet another contender for best game in the KOF series. This is especially true once the Unlimited Match version came out. I'll talk about that here, even though I have that on my PC (my version is from Steam, but I can't find it on the Steam store anymore. You can, however get it from gog.com.)

I would say that unless you really loved the striker system, that the NESTS games are, on average, not as good as 98 anyway. This game doesn't do strikers, but it does for the NESTS saga what 98 did for the Orochi saga. A few minor details from 99 that I like, probably as much for nostalgia reasons as for any other, I miss, but otherwise, I think this completely and totally obsoletes all of the games in the NESTS saga, and there's no reason to revisit them anymore at all. This is mostly true of 98 Ultimate Match too; once you have 98 Ultimate Match and 02 Unlimited Match, there's very little reason to ever revisit any of the games between 94 and 02 vanilla versions ever again.

King of Fighters 03 I was really excited about this game for what is probably a stupid reason; Terry made his debut in the King of Fighters game in his leather bomber jacket Mark of the Wolves sprite. Sadly, the game hasn't aged quite as well as I'd have hoped. The game makes two significant changes to the way King of Fighters had been done previously:

1) It started a new saga, since NESTS was done. This is called the Ash Crimson saga. While the storyline and the villains seem kinda cool, they introduced a new protagonist again (Kyo being the protagonist of the Orochi saga and the flagship character, in a way, of the KOF series overall; K' being the protagonist of the NESTS saga.) Ash Crimson is, to put it bluntly, not a very likeable or attractive protagonist character, and he doesn't even play all that interesting. His moves feel like an abbreviated version of Guile. SNK was notorious for designing very "SNK-looking" characters, i.e., stylish in a charitable description of the word, and the word that SNK designers themselves prefer to use. Most normal people just say "super gay and stupid" instead of stylish. Ash, although supposedly a man, looks like the blonde girl from ABBA and has a smirky, smarmy, gamma attitude. If he's the protagonist, why design him in such a way that the only thing anyone will ever want to do with him is punch him in the face and get him out of your sight? That said, the storyline was pretty good, kinda complicated and interesting. Of course, because it was told by Japanese writers of a fighting game, it's almost impossible to actually figure out without going to someone else who's interpreted it online and can summarize it for you, but still; a good attempt at storytelling was always one of SNK's strong suits relative to Capcom, until Capcom stepped up their game in the Alpha series to match them.

2) It introduced a tag-team approach, which felt like a lame attempt to rip-off Capcom's own vs. Marvel games. I actually don't love that in the Marvel games, so seeing a lesser iteration of the same idea here was a poor choice. But not to worry! I prefer 1x1 play anyway, right? Well... the 1x1 play kinda sucks too. Instead of having best two out of three Street Fighter style 1x1 matches, you get three health bars as if you were doing a three man team, and you just fight the one round. Speaking of this team approach, you had a pick a team leader, and only the leader got the maximum super combo, the so called "leader desperation move." Everything about this tag team system was really screwed up, and I never liked it. And because it made even the 1x1 play not really work, this game was always disappointing to me. Which is a real shame; from a presentation standpoint, I quite liked it. The characters were great, it introduced a lot of new characters to the series from other games that had never really done KOF before, the backgrounds were beautiful. This was especially true for the 3D backgrounds developed for the PS2 and Xbox ports. But the gameplay just isn't there.

The game is available for the PS2, so I could replace my unplayable Xbox copy, but for whatever reason, it sells for no less than $50. I'm not paying that much for an 02 game that I don't want to play anymore because I already have an advanced version of it available instead, and an 03 game that is flawed to the point that I'll likely not play it very often if at all. I'll work on getting a decent Xbox emulator first, and then maybe I'll throw my old Xbox disc in and try that out just to say that I can every once in a while.

King of Fighters Neowave This was an odd game. It seems that it was developed mostly just to test new hardware, and it is the first KOF game to move off of the now very aged Neo Geo hardware; to Sammy's Atomiswave system. Of course, this is a bit of a moot point for home ports, but this didn't get a lot going on there either; in Japan and Europe there were PS2 ports, but in North America, it only got an Xbox port. Given that the game was (mostly) just a remake of 02 with few slight tweaks and new backgrounds, you're not missing much by not picking it up. For whatever reason, I didn't really get into this game as much as I did my other KOF titles; I'm quite sure I played the very similar 02 much more often than I did this one. This is odd; there's nothing really wrong with this title, it just feels like it offers very little. I remember thinking that many of the backgrounds were boring, the music was flat, and I just never got excited about playing it. I don't overly miss not being able to fire it up right now, and if you never picked up a copy, you're not missing much. Just get 2002 Unlimited Match instead, and don't look back.

Playstation 2

King of Fighters 94 As part of the Orochi collection. This title is, sadly, almost unplayable nowadays compared to its more advanced relatives. That's an exaggeration, of course, but stuff that we take for granted from better members of the series often weren't present at all here yet, the character selection is pretty Spartan. It's kind of fun to occasionally revisit where it all started, but there's very little gameplay reason to ever go back to this.

King of Fighters 96 I'll skip the PS2 version of 95, since I've already talked about that in the PS1 section. This is a transitional title. There were a few memorable new characters that became iconic that were released here (Vice, Mature, for instance) and a few gameplay tweaks like hops and evasion, which became standard for the series. But because every game after it had these too, it seems like only a minor update to 95, really. Although I have to give this game credit for having some of the best stages in the series. Some of them are still beautiful even by today's standards.

King of Fighters 97 This is the end of the Orochi saga in terms of story, which makes it important (although sadly, the main villain characters that represent this Orochi threat were... supremely underwhelming, to say the least.) The gameplay had a number of advancements, most of which were carried forward as is to 98, so I've already discussed them above I also have the original 98 on PS2 as part of the Orochi collection, but I won't be discussing it again either. Sadly, except for the story, 97 offers us almost nothing that 98 doesn't. 98 has all of the characters 97 does and more. 98 has all of the gameplay improvements and tweaks that 97 has. 97's presentation wasn't wonderful; it probably has the worst soundtrack in the entire series, and only a couple of stages even rise to the level of being adequate, much less beautiful. It's hard not to recommend just playing 98 Ultimate Match instead and reading a summary of the Orochi saga, or watching a YouTube video of the cutscenes or something instead of subjecting yourself to having to go through the experience of playing lesser entries in the series just to get the story. I would say that in general, that's a major problem with the King of Fighters series overall. I have the Orochi Collection... but I never really play it. Why would I, when I have King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match right there next to it, and it's everything that's good about every Orochi game and then some all in one game? The only thing that I wish that it'd done was add all of the backgrounds from all of the games as selectable in vs or training just for the heckuvit. The same is true of the NESTS saga to a great degree. I don't really love the striker system, so I'd much rather just play 2002 Unlimited Match rather than fire up any of the games of the saga itself. They've all been made completely obsolete by their own successors.

King of Fighters 2000 I never really got into this game as much as I did 99, although from a purely objective standpoint, it's certainly an improvement on it. It added a few more iconic new characters, like Kula and Lin. The striker system was vastly improved, including adding a whole bunch of interesting cameo options; characters from other games that otherwise probably wouldn't ever merit a KOF release. I suppose the reasons I don't like it as much are emotional and non-objective: I think 99 is a much prettier and more atmospheric game, and I played it a lot on the PS1 when I didn't have access to a lot of other KOF games; by the time I got this one, I had access to better KOF games already. Made for a somewhat disappointing experience, where I just kinda only played it a bit to say that I had, rather than because I was really enjoying it.

King of Fighters 2001 Everything that I said about 2000 goes for broke on 2001. Gone were the cameo strikers in favor of a tactical order system, which tried to make more tactical implications for who and how you designated your strikers—which were back to being just selectable characters again. The music was OK, although the NESTS music in general was very different to what had been the case for KOF before in most respects. The backgrounds were almost uniquely unattractive and bland. The game is notable for 1) finishing up the NESTS storyline, and 2) being the first (of two) games developed by Korean company Eolith after SNK's bankruptcy before SNK Playmore, the new company that replaced SNK, was able to reacquire the rights to make their own games again. While I appreciate the story implications of this game, other than that, I find it rather forgettable. Again, 02 Unlimited Match makes this game completely and totally obsolete; there's no reason to play it when I can play 02 instead. To be honest with you, even the vanilla version of 02 did that.

King of Fighters XI Curiously, this is one of the better KOF titles, and one of the ones I come back to most frequently, even with lots of other options to choose from. Commentators make a big deal out of the arcade hardware change for this one; like the Neowave test game, this was on the Atomiswave arcade board; the first "mainline" KOF title not on the NeoGeo. Since I play it on the PS2, as does almost everyone who plays it at all, I don't know why that matters very much. It still uses the same sprites as before, and the backgrounds are 3D like the Xbox and PS2 ports of all of the last several titles. What's the big deal about arcade hardware when arcades hardly exist anymore?

Rather, the game is fun in its ported state in part because it has pretty solid options for play; a modified tag team still carries forward from 2003, but it's much better than it was. Of course, you can also ignore that and play a classic 3x3 team form, or they have a really good, solid 1x1 mode too (guess which one I play most?) The new characters have that overly SNK-gay vibe to them, but what makes this one fun is the wild variety of characters from SNK's past that haven't really ever had a KOF release before. Bringing Duck King and Tung Fu Rue from Fatal Fury back? Brilliant! Odd mid-bosses from obscure titles like Buriki One and Savage Reign to add a lot of variety to the roster? Excellent! In general, although it's not literally the largest roster from a KOF game (without double checking, I'd guess 02 Unlimited Match has that honor), it is one of the larger rosters, and it's certainly the most unique and interesting roster.

That said, the backgrounds and music are a bit on the bland side, and the boss is super cheap. But then again, the whole concept of the "SNK boss" didn't come from nowhere.

PC

While all of my PC games in this series were picked up on Steam, they're not available as near as I can tell in the steam store anymore, and have to now be bought via Good Old Games, as mentioned above. I have two titles from this series from Steam, 2002 Unlimited Match, which I've already talked about on my 2002 entry above in the Xbox section, and XIII. XII seems to not be available at all, but that's totally OK as it isn't a part of the storylines (curiously) and seems, if anything, like an overpriced beta for XIII, which is the "full" game XII should have been. As near as I can tell, owning XIII makes owning XII completely and totally superfluous.

Sadly, the art and visual direction XII and XIII went was abandoned with XIV which went 3D. I've rented that for the PS4, but I don't see much need at this point to buy it; but I'm sure eventually I'll get around to it. It's relatively cheap. Somehow it just didn't grab me, though. Since XIII finished the Ash storyline, maybe I'll just wait it out for a few years and see where it all goes from here.

King of Fighters XIII One sad thing about buying the Steam edition is that I have no way to upgrade this to the "galaxy version" which you can buy in Good Old Games. That's OK, I think, since it doesn't seem to have added too much to the game other than two or three characters that I don't really care about anyway. While still using hand drawn sprites in this game, the hand drawn sprites were completely redrawn in high resolution. A lot of them have really significant graphical overhauls, not just in the technical aspects but in terms of how they look, too. All in all, I think the look of this game is certainly one of its stronger traits. 

The lack of a 1x1 arcade mode is it's weakest. Maybe most fans aren't bothered by that, but I find its absence both inexplicable and inexcusable. Games that don't have this type of mode, or don't have a good one (like 2003) are ones that even if I otherwise would be well inclined towards, I struggle to feel motivated to play much. And both 2003 and XIII would be among my favorites in the series with that mode, but drop significantly without it.

I will also state that I think it's a shame that the Ash Crimson saga didn't get a "capper" game like the Orochi and NESTS saga did. In both of those cases, the capper game; the "dream match" that came out after the saga was over, bringing everyone back with the best mechanics for the best gameplay experience, are considered the best games in the series; 98 and 2002. Especially in their updated "Ultimate Match" and "Unlimited Match" versions. I understand why they didn't and couldn't; all three games of the Ash saga were on different original arcade hardware; MVS for 2003, Atomiswave for XI and Taito Type X for XIII. In addition to that, the complete redraw of the sprites between XI and XIII is a deal-breaker; and after XIII, they abandoned even those new sprites for 3D models. 

But knowing and understanding why something couldn't be done and being happy about it are two different things. I think they should have kept the XIII sprites for one more venture and made an Ash Crimson saga dream match. Although given all of the crazy characters brought in for XI, that would probably have been prohibitively expensive, because they would have had to draw tons of new character sprite sets. Ah, well. I can dream about dream matches that we didn't get, right? And while I'm dreaming, I'll dream that Terry's bomber jacket version was the one that they used in XIII instead of his very dated ripped sleeve Levi jacket. What a step backwards there. (I notice that SNK developers have a real thing for various Kyo looks too. They keep wanting to bring back his Orochi version, even though it's by far the worst design. And even XIII actually has two Kyo versions; the Ash saga outfit and the NESTS saga outfit.)

In summary, King of Fighters is an interesting series. Capcom is my favorite in the genre, and Street Fighter specifically among Capcom, but King of Fighters has always been a worthy alternative. During the 00s, when fighting games were on a bit of a hiatus in most respects, I actually started almost liking some of the better KOF titles better; had there not been the unexpected rebirth of Street Fighter and the release of SF4, I might have eventually started liking some of the KOF titles better. Of course, that also assumes that other might-have-beens would have happened, like an uninterrupted progression of KOF titles without SNK's bankruptcy and the chaos that that introduced into the series, not to mention all of the farting around with different types of graphical styles; old fashioned legacy MVS vs newly drawn hi res sprites vs boring 3D models that look like every other game out there. It also might have helped had SNK not gone really hard into bizarre, androgynous characters. Wokeness is a thing of Western civilization, and to a lesser extent in Latin American civilizations, but it doesn't really have a direct counterpart in Japanese culture. But if it did, I'd say the wokeness of the character designs is a major flaw in more recent SNK offerings. Ah, well. Mistakes were made, and the timeline we got wasn't the best timeline we could have gotten. What're you going to do?

If for some reason you're a fan of this type of game, but haven't ever dabbled in King of Fighters, I recommend going to Good Old Games, following the link I posted above. You can get both 98 Ultimate Match and 02 Unlimited Match for $12.99 each, and both of those are almost certainly the best games in the series. After trying those, maybe you'll still be interested in some of the Ash Crimson era games like XI or XIII. The former is available on Playstation 2 if you can still find a used copy kicking around, the latter can also be bought on GOG.

SFA3 and CvS2

I recently watched some Top Hat Gaming Man YouTube documentaries. I've actually seen these before months ago, but I'd kind of forgotten about a handful of specific conclusions he reached. Now, he's got his finger more on the pulse of what fighting game fans think than I do, presumably, although of course there might be selection bias in terms of the data input he receives. He also (as well as some other fighting game YouTubers) make reference, particularly in regards to the Street Fighter fandom, to a distinction between the "FGC" or fighting game community, and casual fans. I'm not 100% sure that I fit very well into either of those buckets; I don't feel like my fandom is necessarily all that casual, and yet I certainly don't compete online or do much with any "community" other than watch YouTube videos and stuff like that. I'd say I'm a casual fan who's casualness is suspect because I'm a bit of an obsessive collector sometimes, and because I do a lot of stuff when not actually playing related to my fandom, but who's behavior is otherwise quite similar to a casual fan in many respects.

Anyway, either way, THGM made a few conclusions; two major and two minor, that I 100% agree with yet I thought that the fandom in general did not agree with. What's more, he implied that these same conclusions were fairly general. Not everyone, of course, agrees with them, but a significant plurality if not majority does. This is both surprising and also somewhat gratifying if true. The "if true" being a big limiting factor, because I don't know that it is. But if it seems to be true to him, I'll trust that he's in a much better position than I am to see that, and trust in turn that it's much more likely to be true than I had previously suspected.

Anyway, what are these shocking conclusions? First the two major conclusions that he discusses.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 is considered the best SF game of the entire greater series by many fans. I don't actually think this anymore, because after I got Ultra Street Fighter IV back in 2014 or 2015 or whenever I got it on Steam, I came to believe that one was the best one. V is still growing on me, and it's TBD what I feel about it long term. But I seriously can't ever imagine that it would pass up IV in my esteem, and after IV, is definitely SFA3. I don't hesitate to recommend it to anyone as a timeless example of the pinnacle of karate supers development, or even fighting games development as a whole. 

It's important to remember the context in which this game came out too, though. The revolution caused by SF2 felt like a long time ago to us (although it wasn't really; less then ten years.) SF2 clones that were a dime a dozen were out there. Street Fighter itself had had a lot of development. The Marvel vs. series was in full swing by this time, and in fact, the alleged pinnacle of that series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, was not far away from being released at this point (about 18 months or so.) The 3D fighting game revolution was also in full swing; Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Soul Edge had been in arcades for years already. In another direction entirely, so had Mortal Kombat by this point.

That said, the PS1 release of SFA3 (which is the one that I played the heck out of for years, by the way) was considered a great release by most, and was immensely popular. I guess I didn't realize that the Alpha series was considered so good by fans, though. I hear all kinds of noise about the classicness of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, or the finely honed tactical, technical, competitive gameplay of Street Fighter III: Third Strike. I consider both of them significantly less fun to play than SFA3, however, and that they apply to a niche market within SF fandom. I guess I'm not as alone as I thought in that opinion.

To be fair, plenty of people don't think it's the best of the SF series. Heck, there are people who don't think it's the best of the Alpha subseries, and who prefer SFA2 still. But, although I don't change my mind because of this kind of thing, it is still somewhat gratifying to know that there's a significant plurality that agrees with me on this one.

Capcom vs SNK 2 is considered the best 2-D fighting game of the entire genre by many fans. Although kind of a quiet "sleeper" hit compared to the Marvel vs Capcom 2 game which came out the same year, it's more serious, Street Fighter-like gameplay, great roster of characters, and general vibe appeals to fans of the genre in many ways more than the hyperactive Marvel vs. games do. I think it's worth pointing out that to the majority of Street Fighter's audience, SNK was not really a rival, but rather a distant second who made some games that they were vaguely familiar with. Not saying that this is fair, but I think it's still true. The SNK fandom is concentrated in 1) certain parts of Asia, 2) South America. In Europe and North America, the only ones who knew SNK well were 3) people who are a bit less casual about their 2-D fighting game fandom and went out of their way to become familiar with series like King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, etc. During the 90s, I'd offer up the observation that most arcades had a few Neo Geo cabinets, probably because they were a good deal for arcade owners. I rarely saw large crowds around these cabinets, though, like I did when a new Capcom, Namco or Midway game was out. (Samurai Shodown's release being a notable exception.)

So I suspect that the portion of the fandom who thinks this is a bit less casual than the Joe Blow who buys a Street Fighter title for his Playstation, plays it a bunch, but then kind of puts it aside and forgets about it when new stuff comes out. It's more for the kind of fan who returns to this type of gameplay time and time again over long periods of time, because he really likes this kind of game more than just about any other kind of video game. Guys like me, in other words.

I also suspect that the people who think SFA3 is the pinnacle of Street Fighter development overlap a lot with the people who really esteem this title. In spite of a few characters who don't really fit the vibe of the game because they come from different enough types of games that they don't really fit (this problem was orders of magnitude worse in the Marvel vs games), it's really Street Fighter vs King of Fighters, and both were really very similar types of games with a very similar vibe to them. The gameplay is heavily based on the SFA3 style of gameplay, and while there are other options you can mess with with the groove system, I still think it's fair to say that the default is very much like playing a SFA3 game except with a bunch of SNK characters thrown in too. It's no wonder that I consider both of these games the very best of the pre-hiatus titles by Capcom if not by anyone (which I might think too, but I do have to acknowledge King of Fighters '98 in particular as a contender there) given in many ways how similar they are, and how both seem to be tailored specifically to my own taste. But again, it's nice to think that my taste maybe isn't such an outlier out there after all. 

Anyway, let's move on to the two minor conclusions which, again, I didn't think very many people agreed with, but which were certainly true for me.

The 2.5D style of 2D sprites fighting over a 3D background isn't very attractive, and looks very dated. The well-done 2D backgrounds of earlier games actually look quite a bit better and more timeless. This is, in particular, a feature related to Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Capcom vs SNK 2. Most of the titles up to that point had still used 2D backgrounds. It doesn't help, of course, that the actual stages weren't really all that attractive to begin with. They were simply poor designs. Of course, there are plenty of 2D backgrounds that are also poor designs and which I don't much like over the history of the genre. However, none of the stages from Marvel vs Capcom 2 stand out to me as even vaguely interesting, except possibly the boss stage, and none of the stages from Capcom vs SNK 2 stand out to me as attractive at all except, again, the two boss stages (the rainy castle roof and the fiery destruction stage.)

Of course, I don't really think that this is necessarily a problem with 3D stages, just that at the time these 3D stages were made, the technology and context for the artists wasn't there to make 3D stages that actually looked good. They certainly look good in Street Fighter IV and V. In fact, in V they made a deliberate effort to recreate, in 3D, a number of the classic 2D stages from the past. This includes loads of the Street Fighter II stages and a few Street Fighter Alpha 2 stages.

In fact, in general, I think my copy of Capcom vs SNK Pro has much better looking stages than Capcom vs SNK 2, even though those are 2D stages, and they're on the PS1 (the Dreamcast versions look even better.) Granted, I don't love the design of all of these stages either, but the ones that are good are really good. To be honest, I've often kind of liked some of the SNK stages better than Capcom. I think they have a slight edge in making really attractive stages compared to Capcom. Although it's not really super dramatic or anything, I still absolutely love the stage progression of this little neighborhood park from King of Fighters 99. I think stage design doesn't get much better than that, and since you usually play this game in teams of three, the stage will advance through all three "morphs" before you move on. This is the kind of thing 2D stages could be, and it is a kind of timeless look. These animations aren't actually all of the animations that playing the game would show you, but you get the idea:

That said, I think the stages is one of the presentation areas that Capcom vs SNK 2 really botched, and it does tend to depress my enjoyment of playing the game. The other minor conclusion is also a presentation issue, and it does the same thing as the stages; make me wish for a way to fan-sub it out for something else. That is:

The music from the late 90s games, specifically Capcom vs. SNK 2 is really bland, uninteresting and "Dreamcasty" and really dates the game; also not timeless like the earlier Street Fighter II themes. To be fair, this may be mostly THGM's opinion rather than one that's shared overall. Even in the comments to his video that he posted saying this, he got a lot of flack from the "This is true love we're making" fans. Blegh. The worst track from the game. That said, I suspect that the fans who like that like it in a kind of ironic way rather than a legit fashion, just like they like "Gonna take you for a ride" theme of Marvel vs Capcom 2. Nobody actually likes that song, but they do laugh at it and can become fond of it because of association. I don't; I dislike the music from most of this entire era. Marvel vs Capcom 2 has the worst music of any fighting game that I know of. Street Fighter III Third Strike also has pretty terrible music with only a few standout tracks that I don't mind, like the Yun/Yang "Chinese James Bond" music being a good example of one that I do like. Sadly, when ported into SFIV to accompany the characters that came from Third Strike, their music wasn't rearranged enough to dilute the terribleness of it. Dudley, Ibuki, Makoto, Elena, etc. I'm looking at you. Of this era, I'd actually probably suggest that the Capcom vs SNK music was generally the least offensive and dated sounding, but that isn't to imply that it isn't pretty bad. 

This is another arena in which I think SNK might have had a leg up on Capcom. Granted, SNK were prone to do a lot of experimentation with lots of different styles, and the smooth jazz soundtrack of Blue Mary, for instance, might have been a poor fit for a fighting game, but I do kind of appreciate the willingness to take risks and really put out there some intriguing types of music. Again, from King of Fighters 99, check out this boss theme. It's about the same vintage as Capcom vs SNK 2, but nothing on Capcom vs, SNK 2 sounds as good as this.

To be fair, maybe my own personal fondness for certain types of EDM make me prefer some games' BGM to others, but I think that really classic tracks from the SFII era done in the SFIV EDM style sounds kind timeless too. The late 90s early 00s style of music is just a very dated sound, with its weird Eurodisco rap and hip-hop influences. But again, dated or not, I hated it when it was new. It's just not my style at all.

And comparing it to King of Fighters 99 might not be entirely fair. While the vintage of the games is about the same, King of Fighters 99 was probably the most atmospheric of all of the KOF games, which makes is more atmospheric than any other fighting game. Nobody else has managed to compete in that particular front. The dark, secret society cyberpunk edge lurking just under the surface of what appears to be the normal world that we were familiar with is just brilliant. I do think that 99 is a criminally under-rated entry in the KOF series, unfortunately. The problem with the KOF titles, if I can be allowed a small digression at the end of my post (and of course I can, because it's my blog; I can write whatever I want) is that they tend to overwrite themselves. There was a clear progression from 94 to 98 where once the newer one came out, there was little reason to look backwards at the earlier entries, and 98 in particular was meant to capture the best of the entire 94-97 run in a single game. This is especially true of the Ultimate Match re-release. The next phase is kinda sorta treated this same way by KoF02, especially the Unlimited Match re-release. But what gets missed if you do it this way is the atmosphere and story of each individual game in the series. Sure, if what you mostly want—and I'd wager most fans, even me, do want this—is all of the characters and gameplay in a single game, then Ultimate Match 98 and Unlimited Match 2002 are all you really need to have for the entire run of King of Fighters between 94 and 2002. But that's a little bit of a shame, because you miss out on some cool little details here and there that way. 

Season V

Just in the last 24 hours, Capcom announced some updates for Season V and also issued a 25% discount on the season V pass. I went and bought it. 

On August 16th, we'll get Oro and Akira and the new Akira-themed stage, although it's just a derelict underpass scene at sunset supposedly near the school of Rival Schools where Akira made her debut. 

They also announced the final character and it's.... Luke! Uh, who? Exactly. He looks like a fairly routine MMA style young fighter. Hopefully there's something interesting about him, but y'know, whatever. I didn't get Geki, and lots of other people didn't get what they wanted either; instead we got Akira who wasn't on anyone's radar, and Luke who they just made up for this update and otherwise nobody knew who he was supposed to be.

I've only got a couple more things left to buy, and then I need to figure out and pay better attention to the extra battle mode costumes, because I'm kind of at the point where that's all that's left.

SFIV vs SFV

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.

SF Characters

I still haven't reinstalled SFV, much less gotten the season five, which I guess is pretty old now. Honestly, after the wonderfulness that was SFIV in it's full version, SFV just feels like a disappointing missed opportunity. Even when it did things relatively well, it was only... relatively.

In the end, SFV ended up (unless something else still gets added yet) with 46 characters, one more than SFIV ended with. Of course, as much as I like SFIV, I don't love everything about it, in particular, I think the character selection could have been somewhat tweaked. (And a lot of the costume options were really stupid.) Other than that, I'd make a few small tweaks to some of the modes. I'd make stage selection possible in every mode, I'd make stage or character music selectable in every mode. I'd make the Omega Mode movelist available in every mode and viewable in the system. It's really bizarre that they didn't do that, actually, and that you have to read the moves off of a separate pdf. What is this, 1995 all over again? (Well, to be fair, if it was, the moves wouldn't be in a pdf movelist. It'd be a text file on Usenet.) I'd have added the Mike Haggar sprite that was already in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, which is another bizarre shame that he still hasn't appeared in any Street Fighter title as a playable character. Ugh.

Anyway, I'd like to post what my ideal character roster would be, drawing from any and all games that makes sense to draw from. This is my own personal list. And I wouldn't want this to be a "dream match" kinda nonsense. I'd like a good story mode. That's one of the good ideas SFV had, although the execution was... still coulda been better. Given that SFIV had 45 and SFV had 46, I'll shoot for about that number of characters, but honestly, I'll just keep adding until I get to the point where I'm "meh" about remaining characters that then quit, regardless of the number.

1. Ryu
2. Ken
3. Chun-Li
4. Dhalsim
5. Blanka
6. Zangief
7. E. Honda
8. Guile
9. Balrog
10. Vega
11. Sagat
12. M. Bison
13. Akuma
14. Cammy
15. Geki
16. Adon
17. Guy
18. Cody
19. Rolento
20. Rose
21. Sakura
22. Evil Ryu/Kage
23. Dudley
24. Ibuki
25. Oro
26. Dan
27. Crimson Viper
28. Gouken
29. Oni
30. Necalli
31. Menat
32. Mike Haggar
33. Strider Hiryu

Well. I guess I came up pretty short after all. One of the advantages of lots of options is that you can afford to not care about a lot of them. Honestly, I only included all of the original crew because it seemed kind of sacrilegious not to. I don't honestly care about playing Dhalsim or Blanka anymore. Or any charging character at all, frankly—they're a real pain with a normal controller.

SF Story

I had to uninstall SFV from the PS4 to make room for some games my daughter got, which is fine. I've been playing a bunch of other stuff anyway (Star Wars: The Old Republic, mostly) and haven't really cared too much about Street Fighter lately, although because I love them and always have, I'll come back at some point. And I do want to pick up the Season 5 stuff eventually. The remainder of the new characters have been announced, and while I'm not really all that excited about any of them (except, curiously, I kinda want to see what they do with Oro), it's Street Fighter. How can I not eventually get around to it? That's sort of like saying that I won't eventually get around to watching a Star Wars movie, even though Star Wars movies suck nowadays and are obviously made by people who hate me and spite me on principle. 

Anyway, what I'd like to talk about is the metastory of the Street Fighter franchise. It's a little hard to figure out, because the game treats everyone's endings as if they were canon; you have to sift through them, see how they connect, look for patterns, and even then, go find statements, interviews and whatnot from Capcom that helps clear it up. But let me do my best to lay out the chronology of the Street Fighter story, which I think takes place over the course of about a dozen years. We're told in biographical stuff what Ryu's birthday is, but I don't think we're meant to "believe" that exactly; rather, I think that like Marvel superheroes, there's a sliding scale. I.e., time doesn't  move as quickly in game as it does in real life. If Ryu was meant to be 23 when Street Fighter was first released back in 1987, which was 34 years ago now, he's not meant to be pushing 60 years old now. Plus, the games have not been released chronologically; the game that's the "most recent" in terms of in-game chronology is Street Fighter III: Third Strike. It was released in 1999, and given that that's about 12 years after the original Street Fighter, that was probably more or less OK when it was released. But now even that was over twenty years ago, and we're still getting new Street Fighter content. In none of it does Ryu look over mid-30s in age. 

Anyway, like I said, we know for sure that Ryu was supposed to be 23 when Street Fighter came out in 1987. Let's divorce that age from the year, and just talk about the chronology of the series from that anchor point of Ryu's age in the first game. We'll call that Year 23 since that was Ryu's age. It's the first thing that happened in the Street Fighter chronology. My advancement is somewhat arbitrary; there's only a handful of anchor points that are official, like Capcom stating outright that two years takes place betwen Street Fighter Alpha 1/2 and Alpha 3, the general order of the subseries, and dead reckoning by estimating how old characters like, say, Mel are based on their size (I've had four kids, and my wife has babysitted a great deal more than that. I'm pretty good at estimating kids' ages.)

• Year 23: Street Fighter. There's no mention of Shadaloo or any of the supervillainous organizations; there's just Sagat who's a martial arts champion and all-around mean guy. Ryu and Ken, feeling that their training has advanced to the point where they can consider themselves "graduates" want to go out and test their skills in the world, so they enter the tournament. Ryu wins, Sagat is defeated, etc. 
• Year 24: Street Fighter Alpha and Alpha 2. Although not released until 1995; eight years after Street Fighter and four years after Street Fighter II basically invented the fighting game genre as we know it, this is the next one from an in-game chronology, and takes place not too long after Street Fighter. I'm rounding it up to a year, but it's feasible that it takes place even considerably sooner than that; maybe even only a few months at most after the first game. 1996's Street Fighter Alpha 2 isn't actually a sequel to this game, rather it's a rewrite; Alpha can be considered almost a first draft that was perfected in Alpha 2. Ryu comes home from the tournament he won to find that his master's brother, Akuma, has murdered his master. There's other stuff going on too; Shadaloo and Bison are introduced. Of course, they were actually introduced in 1991's Street Fighter, but this is their first appearance in the in-game chronology. Curiously, while Shadaloo was played up as a kind of gangster enterprise in Street Fighter II, here they're shown more like a rogue state almost; a kind of supervillainic organization that is directly analogous and in fact almost identical in scope and scale to HYDRA as shown in the Captain America movies, or Cobra Command from the old GI Joe stuff. The Alpha series has a lot of Final Fight characters in it, although they make their biggest bunch of appearances in the next game. I'm not exactly sure when the Final Fight's are supposed to take place, but I think it's pretty clear that they take place before Street Fighter Alpha 3. I tend to think it likely that they are in this range between Year 23 and Year 25 or so.
• Year 26: Street Fighter Alpha 3. One of the few anchor points we have in the chronology is that Capcom have told us that two years takes place between Alpha 1 and 2 (which, again, was the same storypoint, just perfected in a better version of the game) and Alpha 3. Alpha 3 was not another rewrite of Alpha 1, but a genuine sequel. Capcom have retconned a few things; Ryu now didn't actually beat Sagat, he actually lost to him, but then he drew on the Dark Side of the Force to sucker punch Sagat after already losing and scar Sagat, for instance. Ryu now seems more concerned with figuring out his fatalistic relationship with the Dark Side of the Force than anything else. Ken meets Eliza in this game. Or maybe that's Eliza in his ending in Street Fighter Alpha 2, although if so, they never mention it. Bison is HUGE in this game, and plays a major role in everybody's story, just about. But Bison is pretty much meant to have been killed and his psycho drive destroyed. Which is odd, because this is a prequel game to Street Fighter II where, of course, Bison is the boss character and he mentions the psycho drive. Based on the appearances of some of the Final Fight characters, especially Cody, we know that the Final Fight games have already taken place by now, too. Mad Gear is broken up, and some of the Mad Gear bosses like Rolento, Sodom (or Katana), etc., are out trying to figure out what to do with their lives, while Cody is in prison for his vigilante fighting, which supposedly went out of control at some point after Final Fight. Although he's arrested by Edi E. who was a corrupt cop on the payroll of the Mad Gear Gang, so it's entirely possible that the whole arrest and felony conviction are not justified. That might explain how he's in prison in Alpha 3 and even Street Fighter IV, but he's the new mayor of Metro City already by Street Fighter V.
• Year 27: Street Fighter II (all versions.) We don't know how much time passed between Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 2, but there are reasons to assume that it isn't too long. I'm going to round to a year. Those reasons include a lot of the information in the stories of characters like Chun-Li, Guile, T. Hawk, etc. who are clearly continuing efforts that were detailed in Alpha (again; they were detailed in SF2 first.) Given the general lack of progress that Guile has had in finding Charlie, Chun-Li in finding her father, or T. Hawk in finding Julia. This one is a bit speculative, but it works out well, and there's not much reason to assume more than a year's passage here. (on the other hand, Cammy developing from being a brainwashed teenaged girl Killer Bee in Alpha 3 and having already had a history as a Delta Red agent at the end of II seems awfully compressed.) However, we do have some more relative anchors put into place here. For one, it does seem likely that if Street Fighter, which was released in 1987 was supposed to have taken place in 1987, then Street Fighter II, which was released in 1991, was also supposed to have taken place in 1991. This was before prequels and timeline bending became normal, as well as before the plot got complicated, so this assumption seems likely to have been true at the time, and it also seems like Capcom have kind of worked around it. In fact, there's a vague timeline Capcom once published in Japan, and although I don't read Japanese, it's clear that only two dates are clearly given, 1987 and 1991. Ken and Eliza get married at the end (in Ken's ending) which also provides a useful anchor of sorts. Although Udon Comics had Eliza get married partly because she was already pregnant, that actually seems unlikely to have been Capcom's intention. This means that we can peg the timing between Street Fighter II's ending and Street Fighter IV's ending, when Mel is born, to have been unlikely to have been much shorter than a year. It could have been a little longer, but there's not much reason to assume that it should have been. Also; all of the versions of Street Fighter II are just iterations on the same story. None of them is a sequel to any other version of Street Fighter II.
• Year 28: Street Fighter IV (all versions). There's some vaguish comments from Capcom that Street Fighter II was supposed to take place in 1991; the year that the first version of it came out, and that Street Fighter IV, the next once chronologically, takes place in 1994. I don't know if this is really meant to be true or not in a literal sense, or even that it's accurate. I've only heard it second hand. Or more likely third or more hand. Street Fighter IV takes place at least a year after Street Fighter II, as mentioned above, but it could be three years. That gives Shadaloo, which was more thoroughly destroyed this time than it was after Alpha 3, time to regroup into SIN under new leadership, and it means that Mel isn't quite the honeymoon baby that he otherwise would have been. Keep in mind that this timeline originally had the final Street Fighter III game taking place in 1999, or "year 35." I'm trying to make the timeline fit that paradigm still. I should point out that the manual for Street Fighter IV suggests that it takes place "a short time" after Street Fighter II. I like rounding to one year instead of three years as "a short time", so I'm tentatively putting this at Year 28 rather than Year 30. Realistically, though, there's not a lot of reason to favor one over the other; you've simply got two potentially conflicting offhand comments from someone allegedly at Capcom, subject to translation, second and third hand distortion, and interpretation of what exactly "a short time" means, though.
• Year 32-33: Street Fighter V (all versions). Based mostly on Mel's appearance (although all characters are notably aged at least a little bit; Mel's is the best for dead reckoning, because going from newborn to a kid of 4-5 is a much easier thing to dead-reckon on physical appearance than going from late twenties to early thirties, this is about where I think the Street Fighter V games take place. This game also has the most clearly defined story, as well as finally tying the Shadaloo focused games to the Illuminati focused SF3 titles. There are decent reasons to assume that this doesn't take place too long prior to the first SF3 game. Most of the characters have about the same appearance, for instance. Mel seems to be a little bigger, but no more than a year or so.
• Year 34: Street Fighter III: New Generation and 2nd Impact. As with the Alpha series, III originally game out in it's first version, but was then "rewritten" and replaced with the second iteration of the series. Although, like with Alpha, the third game in the sub-series is a sequel to the first/second. For whatever reason, the storytelling really fell apart in this game, too. While there's lots of vague hints of stuff, it's almost impossible to actually determine what is supposed to have happened. And because Street Fighter III had very little to no mainstream appeal, only being popular with the competitive technical set, I suppose Capcom just decided that they didn't really care about clarifying anything going on in the story anyway. 
• Year 35: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Ryu actually looks older (especially in his bearded "hot Ryu" alternate) in SFV than he does in SF3, which is probably a good clue that they can't really be posited to take place too far apart from each other. We know that 3rd Strike takes place after 2nd Impact. When there's a "short time" between iterations, I'm rounding that up to a year, because there's never any reason to assume that it has to be less. There are good reasons to stretch the game out some too; Cammy for instance has a pretty intricate story and backstory that needs some time to develop. She can't go from being a brainwashed teenager Killer Bee assassin to a valued member of Delta Red who has a history and personal ties with her team in just a couple of months, after all. There needs to be some time for that type of story to develop. Of course, that is in contrast to what I said above that there are good reasons to presume that Alpha 3 and SF2 aren't that far apart. If there needs to be some stretch in the timeline, I'd put another year or two between those titles