Roster reviews, Street Fighter series part 1

This is just me noodling around with the rosters and discussing how much I like (or don't like) the various characters and why. Not sure how this will play out. I suspect I'll get the first Street Fighter game done. As we get further along, the rosters get significantly bigger, but they also feature significantly more repeat characters that I won't have to redress again and again. Chances are I'll be able to get two games in most posts at some point. When I'm done, I'll switch to either Fatal Fury or King of Fighters and do the same thing.

I. Street Fighter I introduced us to the original playable characters, Ryu and Ken (and for years, we pronounced it RAI yoo like Ryan with a different second syllable, in this and other games that used the same name, before spergy, weeaboo nerds and beta nitpickers had to try and "correct" us by saying REE oo or ree YOO or however exactly they pronounce it. Which is equally incorrect from a Japanese standpoint, I'll note, but I don't care—I don't speak Japanese, nor do I care to. In English, it was always RAI yoo, and it will remain so to me.) In retrospect, they don't seem like the most auspicious of characters, but when you're pioneering an entire genre, you can get away with fairly vanilla designs, because they haven't been done before. When the fourth or fifth game in a row tries to make copycat Ryu and Ken characters, that's lame, but when the first one does it, they become icons.

None of the other characters were playable, of course, so in some sense they don't count. However, many of them have become playable over time, so they're worth bringing up. When playing you must pick either Japan or the USA as your first country to go to. If you go to Japan, you face Retsu and Geki. Retsu is the iconic cloistered monk martial artist, which is a stereotype that dates back to early Hong Kong cinema movies of the 70s at least, if not even earlier. He's never appeared in anything else, doesn't even have any special moves that I can remember, and is pretty non-memorable, even given the context in which he appeared. They've tried to link him to various characters in the backstory by saying he was friends with Gouken or Oro or Dhalsim, and that he was excommunicated from his temple (which is curious, since that's his stage) but none of those appear in the game, and they feel like much later after the fact desperate attempts to make him interesting. Geki appeared on the shores of a lake or bay with Mt. Fuji in the background at sunset, and was a pretty classic 80s ninja, with throwing stars and everything. Today, the 80s is far enough away that it probably feels like a foreign country to people who didn't live through it, so you'll have to take my word for it that the 80s and ninjas had some major mojo together, which always made Geki mysterious and cool. It's a bit of a shame that he's never really made any other appearance except in non-canonical comic books and mangas, etc. Not only did he throw stars, but he had a claw-like weapon (less dangerous looking than Vega's, though) and could teleport very short distances. All part of the Shinobi mystique of the 80s. And maybe that's why he hasn't reappeared. He's kind of a dated, frozen piece of 80s pop culture, even in Japan, I suspect.

If you picked the US, on the other hand, you fought Joe and Mike. Joe was extremely anonymous; he's a blond spiky haired guy, like a potato-faced Billy Idol. He's got red pants and sneakers, and is shirtless. It's believed that he's based on Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, who was a popular competitive martial artist. Joe features Benny's real life signature move, a spinning reverse kick, as his only special move. He may also be based on the kickboxing legend Joe Lewis, who was supposed to appear with Bruce Lee instead of Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon, but couldn't due to a scheduling conflict. (He actually beat Norris in at least one championship. He's considered the father of martial arts in the West.) But all that backstory aside, and we certainly didn't know any of that in 1987, he's just kind of a boring character. Mike was clearly based on Mike Tyson, although he just wears a red t-shirt and faded blue-jeans with tennis shoes. Although his story and appearance are almost identical to that of Balrog, Capcom have always insisted that he is not the same character. However, in SFV, one of the alternate costumes for Balrog is called "Mike-like" and he looks just like him. If you play the SFI version of arcade mode, he's one of the characters you could face as well.

After beating both of those countries, you have to pick again between China or Britain. If you go to China, you face Lee, a character who's never appeared again. While probably based on Hong Kong cinema characters like Li Shuwen or Beggar So, he comes across as just a generic Chinese guy to Western audiences. Again, Capcom have referred to him obliquely here and there in the backgrounds of almost every other Chinese character (apparently only about half a dozen people live in China, and they all know each other or are related) but this comes across as special pleading. Gen is the other character you fight after him, and this is the same Gen as appears in the Alpha series and Street Fighter IV and a brief cameo in Street Fighter V. His design is based on a very popular martial arts movie character (in turn based on a historical figure, but his interpretation here is much more informed by the movies) from several movies from Hong Kong, Bak Mei. Of course, he's developed more on his own within the Street Fighter franchise, but he's always hewed close to his source material in many ways. His pressure points Fist of the North Star type kung fu is also heavily influenced by cinema and manga, making him a bit of a classic of Oriental entertainment. Granted, you don't see a lot of that in the first game; it comes out more in the Alpha series. In typical "lost in translation" fashion, the fact that he's a serial killer and gang member doesn't mean that he's not a hero to Oriental audiences, something which Udon has occasionally struggled to reconcile in their comic book interpretation of the story, in which he had to be a criminal "in remission" who Chun-Li berates for his criminal past. No such vibe was present in the original, because hey! Surprise, surprise: diversity means actual difference and Oriental audiences have a different moral compass by which to judge his actions than Western audiences.

If you go to England, on the other hand (or after you've defeated China, when you have to go to England) you'll face Birdie and Eagle (no idea if the avian theme was on purpose or not. Or maybe it's a reference to golf.) Birdie has appeared in three subseries, and changed his appearance drastically in that time. In the first game, he's a white guy; a pretty typical punk from the English punk rocker scene from the late 70s or early 80s; tall, muscular, clad in leather and and with a blond mohawk. For some reason when he appears in the Alpha games, he's been race-swapped and is now a thick-lipped black or maybe high yellow man with a super-exaggerated and physically impossible mohawk with a hole in the middle of it, and bizarre mutton-chops. His signature move gradually becomes throwing out chains and grabbing you with them and slamming you around, while in the first game he only uses them sparingly in a single grab and squeeze move. By the time SFV rolls around, he's become extremely overweight and gross and is played for grotesque comic relief in a way that is typical for Asian entertainment, but which doesn't translate very well to the West. Eagle, on the other hand, is a butler who uses two nightsticks, or side-handled batons. Sometimes they're called escrima or tonfas, but in nitpicky fashion, those are not all exactly the same thing (although very similar) and given his British background in the 80s, I think the nightsticks make the most sense (although given that Capcom is a Japanese company, maybe the tonfas do.) He was originally intended to be an homage to a bodyguard character from Fist of Fury, but he seems to have migrated with his minor appearances in CvS2 and the handheld SFA3 game to being more clearly based on Freddie Mercury. Sort of. His more elegant dress and appearance is supposed to be a counterpoint to Birdie's cockney punk appearance. Either way, the Japanese interpretation of the English doesn't seem particularly flattering.

Finally, if you beat all eight fighters at all four of the countries, you travel to Thailand, where you face the final two: Adon and Sagat. Both are fairly well known; Adon also appeared in the Alpha games and SFIV, although he looks pretty different, and Sagat appears in every SF series except III (and, as far as we know, VI, although that's not out yet at the time of this writing.) Both are meant to be Thai Muay Thai boxers. However, it's worth noting that neither one of them look very much like an ethnic Thai. Adon would be abnormally large for a Thai; he's bigger than Ryu and has spikey red hair. He dresses like a traditional Muay Thai boxer; shorts, wrapped wrists and ankles, no shirt, and with  a headband. In later appearances, this spiky hair turns into a bizarre flattop that looks like an ironing board, but it remains red, or even more orange-ginger like the Weasleys. If Adon is big, red-headed and white-skinned for a Thai, Sagat is even more freakish. At supposedly 7'5" and quite lean, muscular and healthy (i.e., doesn't exhibit the side effects of gigantism), he's a freak of nature for any population group, especially the notoriously short and slight Thais. Although normally bald and somewhat brown-skinned, there are some alternative costumes that show Sagat with reddish-brown hair. I'm not sure what to make of all of that other than that Capcom and/or the Japanese in general don't really care about ethnicity at all, or their art style just kind of ignores it. Sagat also has solid white eyes in most appearances. Or eye, rather; he has a patch over one eye, of course. Sagat's an interesting character; he went from being a pretty one-dimensional "I just want to be the strongest" boss in SF1 to becoming an angry mobster who wants revenge in SF2, to gradually becoming a more honorable rival to Ryu, who felt really pushed by Ryu's own skill to becoming much better himself in later games (even Alpha, which is a later game than SF2, but which takes place earlier.) By SFV he's ended his association entirely with Shadaloo, and his place as one of the three lieutenants to Bison is taken by F.A.N.G. instead. This was good character development for Sagat, but of course, F.A.N.G. is literally one of the worst characters ever developed for SF, so we lose otherwise. The rehabilitation of Sagat is a curious one, because it seems that with Street Fighter in general, over time, they are reluctant to make any character too evil. Even Akuma has some redeeming moments. Bison seems to be the only one immune to this treatment, but a lot of other former villains end up being simply rivals over time. SNK has done something similar with a number of Fatal Fury and King of Fighters characters; Billy Kane being a notable example, or even Iori Yagami.

For the most part, the characters that never really left the SFI realm: Joe, Mike, Retsu, Geki, Lee, and Eagle belong in that left behind pile and its probably good that they looked for more inspiration elsewhere. Eagle maybe had some potential, and Geki is one that I've always had a little bit of interest in, being a much more iconic shinobi character that anyone else in the series, including even Ibuki and Guy. They could have maybe gone somewhere, but didn't. Sagat is a total winner as a character; there's nothing not to like about him. Adon and Gen are... OK although it really took Gen's strange rivalry with Akuma to make him pop. And, of course, Ryu and Ken are iconic and over time have developed into really interesting characters with the time and attention they've gotten over the years. Birdie started off fairly generic, and actually got worse with time, to the point that I actively dislike the character now, and feel kind of irritated with what they've done to him, especially in the jump from Alpha to V.

SF6 reveals and series retrospective

Over the last few days, Capcom released a Street Fighter 6 trailer. Almost immediately after, a bunch of character design, and probably the majority of the launch roster was "leaked." I say "leaked" in scare quotes, because both Capcom's and the access media's reaction to the "leaks" don't seem consistent with a leak, but rather with a planned promotional stunt. That's obviously very circumstantial, but I think it's more likely. We'll see. Maybe they'll admit to it down the line. In any case, the leaks have been confirmed, pretty much, by Capcom themselves as being real, and they did so without any hint of regret or even "aw, shucks." I think we can count on them. And the access media would never have posted the details of, or even talked about, the leaks if they were genuine leaks that Capcom wanted to suppress in any way. The only other explanation, and I think it's less likely, is that Capcom just decided to roll with the leak and accept it immediately, and even use it promotionally the best that they could. In my experience, there's hardly a company in existence with judgement that good or that quick, and Capcom themselves have demonstrated repeatedly that they don't have it. I still think the "leak" was a planned promotional supplement to the official trailer is the most likely explanation.

In any case, before I talk about the content that we now know of for SF6, let me give a real quick summary of each of the SF subseries, how they were supported, and what they mean in relation to the new material. This will give us some context. I'll even hit SF1, even though it's not very relevant anymore.

Street Fighter [1] The first Street Fighter game, released in 1987, set the stage for what the game series would be in terms of 1x1 martial arts competitions and traveling around the world. It also introduced the main characters, Ryu and Ken--initial main antagonist Sagat, as well as their basic special moves, like dragon punch, fireball and hurricane kick.

Street Fighter II However, it wasn't really until the release of Street Fighter II in 1991 that the series hit high gear. I'll only briefly mention this, because it's kind of obvious by now, but Street Fighter II's building off of the foundation of SF1 is what defined the entire fighting game genre. Multiple characters, with multiple playstyles, an arcade ladder through a progression of characters, and then bosses (or at least a boss. Street Fighter II has three sub bosses, and later in its life-cycle, a secret extra boss too), snappy trash talk between matches, and the brief story endings that actually gave each character some... well, some character development and personality other than just as a collection of moves or as a tactical set of options. SFII was obviously a huge hit; it's credited with, like I said, creating the fighting game genre almost overnight, with saving the arcade business model for at least a few more years, and it sold over 6 million copies on the SNES alone during the 90s. By any standard whatsoever, SFII was a significant success.

While iterative patches and additions seem to be more closely associated with computer games at the time, which you would buy and then also buy expansion packs and expect patches of broken things, SFII tried to pioneer a similar strategy in arcades, releasing iterative updates to the game, starting with Champion Edition which added a second color so you could play two player matches with the same character, as well as making the four bosses playable, increasing the available character selection count by 50%. I suspect an unintended side effect of this was the paradigm at Capcom that they didn't have to get it right the first time; every Street Fighter subseries afterwards, except IV, seemed to have varying degrees of botchedness to their roll-out. 

Street Fighter Alpha You'd expect SFIII to follow SFII, but actually it didn't. The Street Fighter Alpha series followed SFII, on the same hardware as the latest SFII iterations, and in the same style as new (at the time) comic book style or anime-like games such as Darkstalkers and X-Men and Marvel Superheroes, which Capcom also made as SF-like fighting games starting in the mid-90s. The first Alpha game was released in 1995. Although super moves had technically debuted (at least on Capcom games; SNK games had developed them first) in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the Alpha games made them more integral to the experience and were built around the concept that expected you'd use them. A "cool play budget" of sorts was created wherein you'd charge up your super meter, and then spend it on either alpha counters or super moves, depending on what you thought you needed and what made for a cooler play at the time. The first game in the series was pretty bare-bones, but Street Fighter Alpha 2 was meant to "replace" that in the canon, and it perfected the mechanics as well as bulked out the character select roster to an acceptable level. (It also had greatly improved stages.) Street Fighter Alpha 3 added a number of other characters, and did a fairly radical tear-up of many of the Alpha 2 mechanics. Some fans consider this a step-backwards, as they quite enjoyed the Alpha 2 gameplay, while other fans (myself included) consider Alpha 3 as by far the best of the Alpha subseries and possibly the best of the entire Street Fighter series, at least to date when it was new. (Curiously, many people also consider Capcom vs SNK 2 one of the best games of this general era, and it played very similarly to SFA3.)

Another interesting aside is that the Alpha series, which was a prequel to Street Fighter II, brought in a number of both Street Fighter I characters and Final Fight characters, as well as a number of stages that represent Final Fights setting of Metro City, clearly establishing that both games take place in the same continuity. It also had a number of unique new characters that were Alpha only characters added, like Karin or R. Mika, for instance.

Street Fighter EX in 1996, game company Arika, under license from Capcom, created some 3-D polygon games for the arcade, but especially geared towards porting to the PS1, which was the most popular game console in the world at the time (actually, that's still true today.) Frankly, I think the polygon-based fighters from this era are really ugly and haven't aged well, but SFEX never seemed to really catch on at all, when games like Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Soul Edge did. But even those are ugly in their early iterations. This is probably best viewed as a strange dead-end spin-off rather than a part of the series overall. The characters that were unique to the EX series do not belong to Capcom anymore, and have popped up more recently in Arika-produced games like Fighting EX Layer.

Crossover Titles In 1996, Capcom also released X-men vs Street Fighter, which combined sprites from the X-men game with those from the Alpha games, but which ramped up "superhero-like" mechanics, including much flashier super moves, super jumps, and character tag-teams. This series, or perhaps family of related series, continued for some time and likely distracted Capcom from its core Street Fighter titles. There were four games in a vs. Marvel crossover titles, and two in a vs SNK series. While the vs SNK titles retained a very Street Fighter like feel, tone and roster of characters, with Capcom vs SNK 2 in particular playing very much like Street Fighter Alpha 3 in many ways but with better graphics and many redrawn sprites, the vs Marvel games always had a very different feel and honestly gradually migrated away from Street Fighter in many ways, instead adding tons of characters from other Capcom games.

This sub series, after lying fallow for the better part of a decade, was rebooted after the successful launch of SFIV, including three more Marvel games, vs. Tekken games, and more. Of course, by now, character crossovers are pretty commonplace. Ryu appeared in Super Smash Brothers. Terry Bogard seems to be making the rounds all over the place, appearing in Fighting EX Layer, another Super Smash Brothers iteration, and more. There's even a girl version of Terry who popped up in weird spin-off SNK game. 

Street Fighter III Talk about a botched launch! In 1997, Capcom put out the first Street Fighter III game. In a YouTube video I made a year or two ago, I pointed out that while Street Fighter II sold over 2 million copies to home consoles, SFIII only sold 100,000 across its home console release (which was limited to the Dreamcast.) It has since, especially in its third iteration, Third Strike, had a bit of a renaissance, selling in decent (although unknown) numbers since in compilations and in other "retro" guises, and it has some fans, certainly. I do not however, believe that it has pulled in casuals; I think the community of fans around Third Strike are more competitive and online players, and I think the numbers are still woefully behind what II and IV sold. There's a number of reasons for III's relative failure: 1) crappy characters that nobody liked, and the elimination of almost all classic characters. Even in Third Strike, we only had four legacy characters, and of the III unique characters, only a few have managed to stand out as keepers from all three iterations of the game: Dudley, maybe Yun and Yang, and maybe Elena and Makoto and Ibuki. 2) the villain/boss was absurd, and is nothing at all like the classic iconic-ness of M. Bison. True; M. Bison has been used enough that he needs to be retired, but Gill was a joke. 3) the game play was quite technical and focused on fundamentals relative to Alpha 3. While I can understand why its fans think this is a good thing, even they, if they're honest, have to admit that that's poison to casuals and broad appeal. One of the greatest features of SFII was that anyone could sit down and play it and do... OK, at least, even with no experience at all. Capcom focusing on the hyper-fan and the competitive "fighting games community" is a major mistake. I've seen guys make the sensible point that using trophies as proxy for data, we can infer that ~85-90% of people who've bought the game do not play any online or competitive content. That was a vast mistake on the part of Capcom to assume that that's where the customers were, and they've made that mistake more than once (see below.) 4) The look and feel of the game is very dated. Now, personally, I like 2-D animation, and I'm glad to see that it's made a come-back. There's a kind of timeless quality to good animated 2-D games that polygon 3-D games (especially from the mid to late 90s and early 00s) simply do not have. Nowadays Tekken 2 or 3 looks incredibly dated, while Streets of Rage 4, which is even more cartoony than SFIII, admittedly, looks amazing, but Streets of Rage could, with a little bit more pixelation, have been made 25 years ago. I think there's now an appreciation of some of what SFIII did visually, although at the time, I think it was under-rated and under-appreciated. Certainly by games journalists and professional reviewers, if not necessarily by the fans. But the fans probably did too (I think Tekken leapt to the top of the popularity charts for the genre because of its accessibility to new players more than its graphics, though.) But, 5) presentation-wise the rest of SFIII isn't very good either. The colors aren't nearly as bright and often look strangely muted or grayed out and the music is absolutely terrible. Not only did it sound terribly dated almost as soon as it was released, but it only appealed to a niche market even in the mid/late 90s.

To me, the poster child of the mistakes of this sub-series is the parry. While there's nothing wrong with the idea on its face, the reality is that there was a fairly steep learning curve to figuring out how to be any good with a parry, and it was designed to be a move the converted fights of the more traditional mold into something that resembled a fast-paced chess match. Again, I can see why people who love it do so, but I don't know if the people who love it can see how it reduced the gameplay to something that only a relatively tiny niche were ever going to find very intriguing. But it did. And both Capcom and this niche exist sometimes in a bit of an echo chamber, where Capcom caters to that niche, and only hears their voices, and then wonders why the vast majority of their would-be customers are getting turned off and put off. 

I'm very concerned that with SFV and (possibly) SFVI, Capcom seems to be reliving the same mistakes that they made with SFIII. With SFV, they kinda/sorta fixed it, but also not really.

Street Fighter IV After SF3 had a botched launch, the Marvel license expired so the popular Marvel vs games had to end, and SNK went bankrupt so that the SNK vs games also had to end, Capcom seemed to put very little effort or attention into fighting games, which of course meant that their early 00s efforts after those series were poorly received because they were poorly made. The entire genre, at least with Capcom, went dormant for a number of years until one passionate middle management employee's personal crusade came true and he was put in charge of developing a sequel. This was 2008's SFIV, which is widely credited with reigniting the entire genre again. Coming out on the PS3/XBox 360 generation, the games used 3-D models (much improved from the early Tekken or Virtua Fighter days) but with a very traditional 2-D Street Fighter-esque gameplay. SFIV eschewed the overly technical gameplay of SFIII and feels much more like a spiritual successor to the Alpha series, although I don't mean to imply that it played exactly like them, of course. In addition to many other improvements, it had pretty cool remixed "techno" versions of classic musical themes, it had much more colorful and "Streets of Rage 4" like looks to the characters and their stages, there were quite flashy additions to the special and super moves to make them really look like they had some weight, but not the crazy spastic feel of the Marvel vs. games. Some of this was very stylized, like the appearance of brush ink-strokes or splashes in the air briefly when certain moves are performed. And the roster! Admittedly, because I missed the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, I only picked this game up relatively late when it was on Steam with almost the final update already available, so I've only known it with a roster in the mid-40s or more, but even at launch, it had a decent amount of characters available. Many characters were new to this iteration, and while those were pretty hit and miss (El Fuerte and Rufus being the biggest misses; Juri and C. Viper being probably the biggest hits--unless you count the Oni and Evil Ryu versions from this game, which were significantly different than what we'd seen before), and I think every iteration needs to stretch out beyond the classics and try to add something new.

In short, SFIV was familiar to old hands, and yet fresh and new. It was accessible to new players as well as offering depth to returning players. It was everything a SF game should be, and its sales numbers attest to that. It was a resounding success, it kicked off an entirely new generation of fighting games in its wake, both within and without Capcom. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best SF game of the entire series.

Street Fighter V Even with the best of intentions a launch can be botched. 2016's SFV was a game that seems to have been botched not because Capcom had a bunch of bad ideas (although it did have some) but because they simply weren't able to meet their timeline. SFV launched without any real single player content, with an impoverished roster, and with a gameplay that was more of a spiritual successor to SFIII than to Alpha or IV. Even now, I feel like it gets too caught up in wondering what the "fighting game community" is doing while forgetting that roughly 85-90% of sales go to people who don't belong to any such community. With a defensive "watch your opponent for an opening" flat gameplay that's more technical than IV, while being different yet again from III, it took many iterations and several years before Capcom had a game that would have any appeal to the big market of SFIV players, and by that point, they'd probably already lost most of them. As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and three years later is way beyond that chance.

In addition to a botched launch with almost no meaningful content and a focus on only a small niche of their potential market, SFV had other problems as well. The migration of console generations should have ushered in a much better-looking product, and yet in most respects, the game is considerably uglier than its predecessor. Some of this is technical; extremely plastic-looking models and really bad clipping and janking issues with hair and clothing in particular, but most of it was simply art direction and style. The characters looked like strange clay-shaped caricatures or cartoon characters rather than the rather attractive and cool looking comic-bookish look at SFIV had had. Some of the designs almost looked like the designers hated the character and hoped to sink him into obscurity (Ken, Alex, Akuma, etc.) They also rolled out, although later than it should have been rolled out, a fairly lengthy story mode, and while the idea was actually a really good one, the dialogue, plots and "acting" were so stupid as to be embarrassing, and the game focused on characters that often were not fan favorites and yet we were subjected to long, long stretches of being exposed to them. I've seen enough of Karin after a few playthroughs to last me a lifetime. 

SFV also significantly tweaked the roster, and some popular characters never made a reappearance, while other new characters were questionable additions, at best (F.A.N.G. being the most absurdly egregious here.)

While I kinda sorta made my peace with SFV (as I did with SFIII) after a time, it's not my favorite SF by a long shot, and I consider it mostly a very rough and ill-advised step backwards from SFIV.

Street Fighter VI It's too early to see what Street Fighter VI will be like, although just based on my gut-feel from watching the trailer video, I'd say that it looks more like SFIV, including using stylized "paint" spray which looks a lot like the ink from SFIV. The "drive engine" subsystem may or may not be too complicated, and looks to add a variety of stuff that you can do, including bringing back parrying in a different form. Because of this, some others have thought it looked an awful lot like SFIII, which I hope is not to be the case, because if they can't pull in casuals and make the game accessible to the non-hardcore "fighting game community" then it's going to flop harder than SFV did. 

There seems to be some belief that maybe a good portion of the game takes place within Metro City (instead of all over the world, as they usually have been) although this is kind of speculative and may not be true. It does seem to finally take place chronologically after SFIII, and makes no reference to Gill or any of his ridiculous group, or to Bison and Shadaloo, which has been defeated at least three times now, and it'd be nice if they stayed defeated for a while. Some "leaked" (see above) artwork purports to show most of the launch roster. It is pretty heavy on the original World Warriors—none of the bosses are there, but otherwise the entire group makes a return. Although they have new, improved looks for the most part; reminiscent of their original look in many cases, but improved. Ryu, for example, takes after his popular "hot Ryu" alternate costume, and Ken looks like he's trying to imitate Terry Bogard.

Dhalsim also looks older (although he did in SFV too) and Chun-Li looks... maybe not older, but more mature, if that makes sense, while the rest of them seem to mostly just be sporting costume changes. Given that starting with IV, alternate costumes have been commonplace, that's not so shocking anymore at this point.

The next wave is a collection of classic characters, but not quite as classic as the original eight world warriors as well as some newer characters that seem to have been among the possible keepers from IV and V. As you can see, it includes Cammy, Dee Jay, Rashid, Juri, Ed and Akuma. Cammy's redesign is pretty cool, while Akuma's seems to undo the damage done by "dandelion" SFV Akuma while still keeping true to the spirit of that hairier redesign. I don't know how popular Rashid really is, but I think because the Middle East is a growing market for this kind of game, they probably feel they need him for regional appeal. I'm sure he's popular in Arabian countries, at least, even if I don't really see the appeal in him.

Dee Jay looks a little bit insane, but otherwise, this isn't a bad collection of redesigns. 

This last group is the collection (so far) of new characters, although the first one, Luke, was actually released recently as a season 6 character for SFV, although it was clear even then that it was a "pull-ahead" sneak peak at SFVI character.

After Luke we have the absolutely masculine unit Marisa, from Italy, which might be an OK design if it were a man, but is super off-putting as a woman, Jamie from Hong Kong, which looks like a slightly "streeted up" remix of the Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves character Gato, Mimi from France, who has very strange pink hair with a short cut but insane sideburns, who looks like a modern bizarre King of Fighters character more than a more down-to-earth Street Fighter character. Lilly is a little Mexican girl, and for some reason, going back to T. Hawk, Capcom thinks that Mexicans are identical to American Injuns. Mysterious and aristocratic-looking JP is from Russia (as well as somewhere else based on the mystery flag), Kimberly, the little black girl with an old-fashioned Walkman, who on first glance looks like she's likely to be very annoying, but I'll withhold final judgement for the time being. If Capcom were an American company, I'd suggest that she's the super annoying "diversity" inclusion that they'll really drop the ball on designing and then call the fans racist when they don't like her, but being a Japanese company, I have no idea what to make of her. Probably a Japanese interpretation of what American "street" culture is like, so highly caricaturized.  A.K.I. is the last one, and allegedly she's Chinese. If so, the best thing I can say about her so far is that at least she's not F.A.N.G.

Alts

So, when I fired up Steam a month or so ago for the first time in several months and started playing around with USFIV again, one of the things that I finally broke down and did was figure out how to swap out some of the alternative character costumes with fan-made ones. EVERY character has at least one, if not multiple, alternate costumes that are super whack. Some of my favorite characters only had one or two costume that I even liked at all. So it was fun to rehabilitate the "style" of some of them by swapping out something else. Ken's bathrobe and cowboy outfits were probably the very first to go, for instance, but I've got lots of alternatives on lots of characters, with more waiting in the queue for me to get around to. Maybe. (I've already gone pretty deep on the bench with characters that I'm likely to play, for instance.) I also found another app that allows you to "turn off" certain elements of character costume models. So, for instance, Akuma's first alternative costume, which is pretty cool except for one thing; a gigantic bow made of super thick rope on his back, which looks insanely ridiculous. I took that off. Now that costume is... well, it's not necessarily great, but it doesn't offend me with its silliness anymore either.

So now I've started on a project of playing through all of the costumes. I'm doing vs CPU, and going through every color of every costume for a character, vs a random com character on a random stage, and then when I'm done, I'll play through the arcade mode with that character, and then move on to the next. This will take some time, and I'm not doing this for every character, just for "my" characters. I've done Ryu and Ken so far, and I've started Akuma. Evil Ryu and Oni are next, followed by Sagat and Sakura. We'll see if I still have mental stamina left to pursue this project after that, or if I need to walk away from it, but I do have lower tier characters that I still sometimes play beyond that. Probably nearly a dozen more. And then maybe another dozen after that that I don't really consider my characters, but which I sometimes play. And then at least another dozen after that of characters that I've never really dived into in USFIV, but which I have in other games like the Alpha series, or something, so I've always kinda wanted to.

I've talked before about it being important to think that the character you're playing is cool in some way. The alternate costume idea was a great one in that regard, because it could turn a mediocre or even poor design into a good one. Being able to mod them even further helped with this, because honestly, the designers costumes were sometimes really, really bad.

Even before we had 3D models where alternate costumes were easy to implement, a lot of home console ports did have color palette editors which did a little bit of the same thing, although not as well. Sometimes characters just changed their look and evolved from game to game to game. On the SNK side, Athena is famous for having a different outfit in every single King of Fighters game, and Kyo has a different outfit every single major series--so he's on his fourth now.

Anyways, it's just one more reminder that whomever that complete and total tool who tried to tell us that people didn't care about Magneto being in Marvel vs Capcom Infinity, because Magneto wasn't actually a character, he was just a mechanical function, is a complete moron. He's not a normal person. He's some kind of spergy, lizard simulacrum of a human, like Mark Zuckerberg. People like their characters because they're characters, and they identify with some aspect of them, and they want to see them represented in a way that they can identify with.

What's wrong with SFV?

I just finished again playing the General Story earlier today. I had a lot of costume customizations, and it had been a while, so it was reasonably fun to go through it again. It reminded me of a lot of reasons why SFV will never be one of the best games in the series, though. In fact, it seems like it's the odd numbered ones that have struggled the most, finding cult followings among the super competitive set, maybe, but otherwise being rather unremarkable in their performance in the marketplace. This assumes for the sake of argument that the "zero/alpha" sub-series is an even number, of course.

A few technical things first. Why the devil are load times sooooOOOoooo bad on the PS4? The game is native to that console, fer cryin' out loud. I don't know if its better or not on a good gaming PC with the Steam version, but the load times for SFV on the PS4 are embarrassingly bad. Just absolutely terrible. Worst in the series. SFA2 on the SNES was better.

I deleted the from my PS4 for months and then redownloaded it again. For some reason, since I've gotten it back, I've had a hard time staying logged into the server for more than about half an hour or so before I get booted and have to get back on it. And for some extremely stupid and inexplicable reason, the game wants you to be online even in totally single player experiences. Getting booted out of the general story mode because you lost your connection to the Capcom server is beyond stupid and really, really annoying. I NEVER play any online modes; if I'm not playing a story mode, I'm playing arcade. I should never EVER have to connect to the server unless I'm browsing the DLCs. This doesn't happen with any other game, it doesn't happen when I'm streaming movies, or using other devices, etc. To be fair, I do occasionally (although much less often than in SFV) get have hiccups in our video conferencing software at work too, though. I can't completely and totally rule out that my own internet service is causing the problem, although the likelihood of that being the case is extremely low since everything else works like a charm. Even so... why do I even need to be online at all?

The story mode is also pretty embarrassing, although I admit to liking some aspects of it. The plot, though... gah. Who wrote this, a fifth grader? And the dialog... Look, I know it's probably translated directly from the Japanese, but why do Japanese anime and other storytelling formats always tend to sound like a bunch of pretentious blowhards reading out of context fortune cookies at each other in an attempt to sound like somebody has some depth to them? The "comic relief" such as it is, is so cringy that it makes me feel like I need to go to the gym just to recover from the beta that's all over it. The live-action Street Fighter movie with Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made that got a wide release, but that comes across as a masterpiece of craftsmanship compared to this story mode storytelling.

SFV is also a shockingly ugly game most of the time, although it isn't consistently so; sometimes it actually looks really good. Sometimes the ugly is technical, like the incredibly plastic looking models, and the really bad clipping and crazy spastic behavior of hair and clothes. But sometimes its just the art design. Somebody really hated Ken and Akuma, for instance, and went out of their way to make them look absolutely retarded. Meanwhile, Ryu and (most alternates of) Chun-Li look quite good. The "hot Ryu" redesign is so good that it is up there with the Mark of the Wolves Terry Bogard as a kind of "this should have been his design in the first place" kind of redesign. Recent DLC character Akira looks tremendously good. Alex looks like he has a broken leg in his normal standing stance. It's really kind of all over the map, but when you compare SFV to some of its PS4 generation contemporaries like Fighting EX Layer, King of Fighters XIV, SNK Heroines, Tekken 7, etc. it really stands out as a mostly tremendously ugly game.

Character selection and prominence was quite weird. Did Karin go and become a fan favorite sometime when I wasn't looking? She was in one game as a totally forgettable rival; she is to Sakura what Ken is to Ryu, except that Sakura isn't as iconic as Ryu and she doesn't really need a Ken. Even the UDON folks completely ignored her other than an off-hand reference that Sakura's friend from school makes. And they LOVED pulling obscure characters out and finding ways to use them for something. There are plenty of fan favorites and original world warriors that don't show up, yet we also get a lot of kind of obscure and odd characters. Even very prominent characters from the last game don't show up except as cameos. Really? No Crimson Vyper? But we get Seth come back as a girl? Seth the boss that nobody really liked, and who was one of the weakest parts of SFIV? (To be fair, not very many of the SFIV original characters are very good. Rufus? El Fuerte? Somebody should have been fired over those two.)

I will say that at least at this point in the game's lifecycle, the gameplay itself is pretty solid. Not the most exciting SF gameplay I've ever seen, but it's not overly simplistic, it's not overly spastic, and its not overly technical. It does kind of hit a sweet spot that the best Alpha and SFIV iterations did. But given that almost everything else about this game is mediocre, disappointing, or otherwise fails to live up to the promise that it should and could have, and those other games with equally compelling gameplay are still around and can be played quite easily, it's a little weird to expect us to get very excited about this title still. 

The Lost Street Fighter characters

I noticed that on the PS4 store you can buy Fighting EX Layer, and that it is 80% off from now until the some time in early September; about a week or so away. From $40 to $8 was a deal too good to pass up (it cost almost that much to add Terry Bogard as a DLC character!) so I bought it this morning (and Terry, because... c'mon, c'mon. It's Terry.) I've played it just a bit, and have some very early commentary.

• I played with Kairi, who's the kinda sorta Ryu clone. My first thought is that he doesn't actually have a lot of moves; two or three "unique" moves, three special moves, and three similar and kind of unimpressive supers. Maybe there's some combos or something that I don't know about that will make him more fun to play, but in general, I thought he was a bit simplistic to play and I got a little tired of him extremely quickly; he just didn't have a lot of tactical diversity to bring to bear. Against the CPU, at least.
• The game seems specifically geared towards online competitive play. Two different versus modes, one for online and one for offline are listed before even arcade mode. I've heard that the netcode is particularly good, and will match you up with players of your same skill level much better than almost all of its competitors, so that you actually have a fun experience playing online games, instead of just getting blown out by freaks who practice all of the time. But I can't comment on this first hand, merely note that the single player experience seems to be a bit lacking.
• Not only that, the arcade mode wasn't particularly interesting to play. Instead of best two out of three, it was best three out of five matches. The CPU blocks a lot, so you throw out a lot of attacks that don't do anything before you finish your matches. I had several matches end because time ran out. Not the funnest way to play either. 
• The characters have potential but Arika do absolutely nothing with them. Very little personality exhibited, and no story to speak of. Just a brief paragraph as an ending, which told me very, very little about the character. This is another indication that the competitive play is the focus for the developer. In my opinion, any game, no matter how much the devs want to focus on a multiplayer experience, that doesn't have a good single player mode is going to be one that eventually people don't play much of. No matter the genre. Look at Star Wars the Old Republic, for instance, and how they added a massive single player experience that they didn't expect to (and that they claim at least 80% of their players are focusing on). Look at Overwatch, which nobody played for more than a few months because it was all running around with bratty little kids and there wasn't anything else to do. There's a handful of exceptions here and there, and a good cooperative or competitive scene is important for a lot of games, but people better be able to just sit down with the machine and play it without relying on someone else, or they'll likely be disappointed pretty quickly. I think the devs made a mistake with their focus here.
• The game looks quite good. In fact, it just highlights how incredibly ugly Street Fighter V is in general, although that's a post for another time, because it's a big topic. The characters look fantastic, if occasionally a little plastic. I didn't see any clipping going on, and the character and stage design was just well done. The strange anime character portraits at the select screen (which also show in the win and lose images, as well as in small form at the top of the HUD) are sometimes hit or miss, but the actual 3D models are great. The stages are really good too. Some of them have a weird deja vu feel to them, like Terry's train ride through the desert southwest of "West Albuquerque", although there's probably a reason for that, because it's Terry. But why does Hokuto (and Shirase, formerly known as "Bloody Hokuto") have a giant snaky background that looks like Mukai's stage in King of Fighters 2003? Anyway, all very well designed from a visual perspective. Nothing at all to complain about here.
• There are hints offline that there is some kind of potentially interesting story here, even if it is derivative, about sealed demons breaking loose, forgotten memories, the main character Kairi turning into an Akuma-like creature, but not realizing it because he's lost his memory, etc. Sure, sure... the story seems to be ripped off from other games that already did it better in the genre; a kind of Orochi Lite, or something... but there's something here that sadly they do nothing with. In fact, you kind of don't know anything at all about it unless you look up stuff on Arika website (or other wikis), because it's not really in the game at all.
• A lot of people probably enjoy this about the game, but I found, quite honestly, the barrage of options that you have to pick before you even start playing to be kind of strange and overwhelming to someone new. What is Classic vs Progressive? No explanation given. What the devil are all these different "Gougi" modes and what to they mean? No explanation given. Again, I have an internet and a browser, so it's not like I can't get some answers out there somewhere, although the game is sufficiently low key that there's less information on it available than you'd probably like to think. 

Anyway, I certainly recommend getting it at that price while you can, if you haven't. At that price, heck, even if you only play it for a few hours total, it's probably still worth it. I doubt it's going to really creep up into superstar status, rivaling King of Fighters or Street Fighter, but it's not a bad game so far, and there are a lot of things that it does do really quite right. It's also the repository of a whole bunch of lost Street Fighter characters, the legacy of the EX spin-off series, and the fact that it has Terry Bogard as a DLC character opens up interesting crossover possibilities that I wish more of these jokers would get on board with. Let's face it, the fighting game genre isn't the top of the heap anymore like it was in the early to mid 90s, and all of the developers need to do more to keep their brands and their profile higher, I think. Or at least keep their existing fanbase excited to keep coming back for more. Big crossover games, and characters that are familiar but in a new setting, like Terry in this game, or Akuma in Tekken 7, or a female Skullomania in the SNK Heroines game is a fun concept, and fans eat that kind of stuff up. Keep doing more of it! In fact, that whole crossover potential is part of what prompted me to start this blog and the Google Sites for Karate Supers that I have. Sure, sure... I could just collect and play these games on my own. I could even record my playthroughs or something and put them on YouTube. But what I really want to do is imagine what it would be like to imagine this whole thing as the "karate supers cinematic universe" which, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would tell stories, somewhat "remixed" or redone with occasionally very different details to them, and mix up characters who otherwise might not be seen together in the same games already.

Terry Bogard appearing with the "lost" Street Fighter characters from the EX games in Fighting EX Layer is just a tiny taste of what I'd like to see more of.

Street Fighter vs King of Fighters

The year is 1998. Capcom has released, this year, its arguably most polished—and still considered one of its best entries in the entire Street Fighter series even now, years later—Street Fighter Alpha 3. It's in between the releases of Street Fighter III: Second Impact (1997) and Third Strike (1999). Its vs series has just barely graduated from Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (1997) to Marvel vs Capcom (1998) which expanded the roster from just Street Fighter characters to include characters from other Capcom franchises like Megaman, etc. That would be greatly expanded in the next game in the series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, but this was the first game that started the real trend of gonzo, spastic, novelty value of having such a tonal dissonance of characters all appearing in a crazy crossover game. Prior to that, the Marvel crossovers had been marginally more serious, and the Street Fighter games themselves obviously so, with a consistent tone and feel throughout. In many ways, 1998 was "peak Street Fighter" for a whole decade, while the franchise lingered under lazy, uninspired efforts, before being revived with Street Fighter IV in 2008.

Meanwhile, SNK also released King of Fighters '98 in 1998, obviously. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 also came out that year, which although a tremendous game, had already had the spotlight taken from it to migrate to King of Fighters. While here in America, this was never really the case, in many markets in Asia and in South America in particular however, SNK was as popular as Capcom at the 2-D fighters, and the supposed rivalry between the two companies was catnip to games journalists, especially seeing as what even many years later many fans see as two of the best entries in both Street Fighter and King of Fighters came out in 1998. This fact was not lost on people at the time, of course, and both games were covered in the press, often in fact, in the exact same issue. At least one publication, Arcadia, plastered the title Street Fighter vs King of Fighters on its cover, and at least some fans, tantalized by that title, thought that that meant that some kind of actual crossover game was coming, as opposed to the magazine merely reviewing two of the best competing entries from each company in the same issue.

Whether this is literally true or not, this fan and journalist fervor is supposedly what prompted Capcom and SNK people to talk to each other and hammer out the license for what was to become the various Capcom vs SNK (and SNK vs Capcom) series of games. From the get-go, however, this concept was tainted by what was going on in the crazy, spastic Marvel vs Capcom stuff; the idea that we needed to add characters who had no tonal resonance with the others, just because the whole point was throwing everybody in a giant bag of a game and shaking it up until it broke. The Capcom vs SNK games were more serious in most respects than the Marvel vs Capcom game of the same era (2000-2002 or so) when they did finally come out in response to that stimulus in 1998, but for my money, they never quite lived up to the premise and promise of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters described in the headlines.

There are some other titles that qualify as similar in tone, of course, although most of them have already had some kind of crossover of sorts with the two flagship franchises. On Capcom's side, Rival Schools and Final Fight have always been associated with Street Fighter; Sakura appearing in Rival Schools and more recently, Akira appearing in Street Fighter V's final season. Final Fight characters were all over the place in the Alpha series already, and more of them have been more and more integrated into the Street Fighter franchise since. Although going back to 1989 already it was clear that they were going to be the same canon; the crush the car game from Street Fighter II was borrowed from Final Fight, and Final Fight's original title was going to be Street Fighter '89! Darkstalkers is a little more difficult; while the Darkstalkers titles have more or less the same vintage as the Marvel and Alpha games, and are obviously very similar to them in many, many regards, they do have an occasionally more gonzo tone than the Street Fighter games, at least. Although other Darkstalkers characters would fit in more closely with the Street Fighter cast. Curiously, as far as I'm aware, no Darkstalkers or Street Fighter character have actually ever appeared in the same game unless it was explicitly a crossover game (or puzzle fighter or something), however, and there hasn't ever been a Street Fighter vs Darkstalkers type property except for a comic book series published by UDON. I find this observation oddly compelling to noodle on. Some of the Street Fighter characters, especially Akuma, but also maybe Gill and Urien and Rose (and Menat) and more recently G (and Q) have the kind of vibe that would fit quite well in a Darkstalkers game. And with the successful relaunch of Street Fighter again, there's certainly been a call to do something with the Darkstalker characters besides an occasional cameo or cosplay alternate costume from many fans, which so far seem to have been unanswered and unaddressed. Curious and curiouser.

The King of Fighters games were always meant to be crossover games, of course, but they were primarily based around the concept of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting and other similar characters; even characters like the US Sports team, the Psycho Soldiers team or the Ikari Warriors team were remade into a Street Fighter-like character representation. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters, of course, were already in that mold. From time to time, characters who were a little more outré have popped up, like Nakoruru being a significant part of the plot of King of Fighters XIV, or some of the weird sub-bosses that showed up in King of Fighters XI, or especially all of the strikers that showed up in King of Fighters 2000. And curiously, a number of their actual bosses have always had a Darkstalkers like vibe too; I mean, what is Mukai and Magaki and Saiki and even Orochi for that matter, if not Darkstalkers in a Street Fighter-like game? The NESTS saga was less supernatural, but that only meant that it much more closely resembled the Street Fighter Alpha games, and later the G-project Street Fighter III stuff.

A few other games merit some mention. The Street Fighter EX games were, of course, Street Fighter games, but they were developed by Arika, and had a reasonably diverse cast of characters that have not appeared in mainline Street Fighter. The reason for this, it appears, is that the rights to those characters remained with Arika all this time, so that even if Capcom wanted to use them (which isn't at all clear that they ever did) they couldn't have without making some kind of new deal with Arika to do so. Arika have not that long ago finally released a new Street Fighter-like fighting game of their own, featuring these characters. Curiously, they made a deal of some kind with SNK so that Terry Bogard appeared in their game, and Skullomania appeared in a strange King of Fighters spin-off. This raises the tantalizing question of including these Arika Street Fighter EX characters in with the Street Fighter and/or SNK characters as certainly plausible. 

There are a few more even more obscure but also tantalizing connections. Data East released a Street Fighter II-like game called Fighters History and Fighters History Dynamite, its sequel or upgraded version. This was released on the Neo Geo and just based on the look and gameplay of it, it's mostly a late Street Fighter II vintage copycat. These characters would fit very well. In fact, Capcom thought that they would fit so well, that they sued Data East for copyright infringement. They lost because of the scenes a faire doctrine, which in fact suggests that Capcom was right in believing that the FHD characters are basically Street Fighter wannabes. Curiously, the rights to use these old Data East characters are currently with SNK, and although they've done precious little with them, they have on occasion had crossovers and cameo appearances, including a FHD character appearing in one of the Maximum Impact King of Fighters 3-D games, and a crossover cellphone game using Fatal Fury and Fighters History characters. I'm not quite sure why they haven't introduced a few of them into their mainline King of Fighters series since they have the rights; maybe it's because they don't know that they'll retain the rights forever and don't want to be stuck unable to sell a title that they've produced. But it'd be pretty fun to see a Fighters History team or two, even if they're DLC "non-canon" characters make an appearance in a King of Fighters game.

A final one I'll note is another Neo Geo game, but one developed by another studio, Visco. This is Breakers and its update Breakers Revenge. For my money, this one is even more overtly Street Fighter II-like (with a handful of Darkstalker nods; I actually think Alsion III is a better manifestation of the mummy concept than Anakaris, for instance) yet it was Data East that got sued.

Both Fighters History and Breakers have cult followings for various reasons; the super solid gameplay of Breakers Revenge, for example, and some of the odd character designs for Fighters History Dynamite. While they are largely forgotten (if they were ever known to begin with) by the mainstream as merely Street Fighter 2 copycats, the fact that they were such clear Street Fighter II copycats, not to mention the occasional cameo of some of the characters in other games of the same type, raises the question of whether or not there's any value in adding a Street Fighter vs Breakers Revenge or vs Fighters History Dynamite angle to this crossover. Probably not, because hardly anyone is asking for it, the characters don't have as much depth or interest for the most part, and frankly just with Street Fighter vs King of Fighters alone you've got too many characters to choose from anyway. But... it remains a tantalizing feature; how do (or at least how can, the Darkstalkers characters, EX characters, Fighters History Dynamite and Breakers Revenge characters somehow get worked in to this massive crossover game that yet somehow still manages to have a consistent feel with characters that all feel like they belong there for the most part, without having bizarre characters that don't belong, like Megaman or Amingo or Phoenix Wright, or other characters that actually have appeared in crossover games? Probably mostly just to provide novelty value for the silliness of the concept of adding them, honestly.

Whew. So, where am I going with this? I don't know yet. I'd like to think that eventually I'll write a big fan fic that crosses over the Street Fighter and King of Fighters characters, with some nods towards Darkstalkers and maybe some of the other titles, but honestly, I'm not really doing anything there and not likely to in the immediate future. I am, however, putting together a more complete list of character on my Google Drive. I already had a list of mainline Street Fighter characters. I needed to add the recently announced Luke to the list, and decided, why not create more tabs and go all out? I've now done the EX characters tab, using all of the EX games, including the various iterations of Street Fighter EX and the two games that Arika published that are not Street Fighter. Next will be Darkstalkers, and then I can turn to the SNK titles. I'm doing that one last because it's by far the biggest and most difficult of them all to do.

UPDATE: I really buckled down and finished the lists after a couple of free hours. The King of Fighters rosters were—as anticipated—the most difficult to do. It also reminded me, actually, that there are a lot of really dumb King of Fighters characters. The developers, going back to the very beginning, really, have a strange fondness for introducing characters with bizarre "Japanese street fashion" outfits, although that's admittedly gotten much worse since Falcoon started working for the company. They also have a really bizarre tendency to like to enter little kids in the game, and there are tons of high schoolers and even younger kids padding out the roster. 

Whatever I do with these characters (including simply playing the games) I will very studiously ignore the worst of these.

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