Street Fighter Alpha Anthology -- Anime-inspired martial arts

Over the last few weeks, I've been going back into this site's archives and looking at my earlier writing in an attempt to better my abilities at transcribing my thoughts. Always a frightening ordeal, I know. But when I did, a few features stuck out as feeling unfinished and, worst of all, totally phoned in. The fact that some examples include a couple of the Street Fighter related posts disturbs me greatly. I think an extended director's cut edition here would be silly, so here's an excuse to do the Street Fighter Alpha thing again with a review of the PS2 collection: Street Fighter Alpha Anthology.

In a sense, you could almost include Street Fighter Alpha and its progeny as an anime adaptation, given how it was based on the success of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. Its concept was born of curiosity for the background story of its characters, especially the one's focused on in the movie - because you just knew a 100 minute feature couldn't balance a cast of 16 characters. This isn't to give any kind of importance to the story of a fighting game (it's not), or to acknowledge that the movie's story was any good (it isn't); but the fact that it was fun was good enough, so why not transfer that into the game's.

That idea gave birth to the first Street Fighter Alpha, which featured a downsized-though-reanimated 13 characters (ten initially with three hidden). You may or may not have liked the changed art style depending on your preferences - with Alpha shifting more towards anime rather than the faux-realism style of Street Fighter II - but it made plenty of sense upon seeing what it was based off of. From observing that, you could surmise that Alpha was definitely for dedicated fans that had stuck with the series and absorbed its plethora of merchandising with open arms. On the other hand, you could also blame it for relegating the franchise to one that now only appealed to a specific niche.

But what about the game? Well, Street Fighter Alpha somewhat refined the classic Street Fighter formula with a gameplay style that was a little more with the times for the mid-90s. The controls were tighter than II's, and the game was much more forgiving with its combo inputs. This game also allowed chain combos similar to what was introduced in X-Men: Children of the Atom, which involved stringing a succession of hits together to form a pretty big and damaging combo pretty easily.

It's hard to put into words, but it feels as if there's something missing from the first Alpha title. It feels like the team at Capcom took a bunch of ideas and slapped them into the game without any concern for how to implement them. The result feels like a haphazard beta released at full price to test fan reaction to everything introduced. It's acceptable, and better than your average fighting game (i.e. it still manages to distinguish itself from the Street Fighter-alike games that were prevalent at that time. Why hello there Fighter's History and World Heroes!) , but it feels like the prelude to something better. Of course, this feeling is especially prevalent after you've played the second game, which released not even a year later. In other words, it feels like what a lot of people think King of Fighters XII is.

Though the game gets a special place in my heart for introducing the single best character in the history of the franchise: Dan Hibiki.

It isn't until you play the two of them back to back that you realize how big of a leap Street Fighter Alpha 2 is. It may not look that way at first glance, but when you play both of them, you'll realize the frightening realization: Capcom actually fooled us out of our money or quarters with the first game, and the second game is the real product. That's because Alpha does everything better than the first game. Lack of stages? Well now everyone has their own stage. Too slow? Now it's much faster? Lack of "oomph" in the music? This time, it has more of a beat. Not enough characters? Capcom added five more here (six if you're including the Gold edition) Not enough fan service? Well, this one has much more.

Boy does it ever have more fan service. SFA2's new character is Sakura, a character so obviously made to cater to anyone who liked Ryu and had a schoolgirl fetish. It's definitely pandering, but Capcom knew that they were doing, and knew they had a goldmine of a character at their disposal. Despite being an apprentice story wise, she's a pretty capable fighter, which has unsurprisingly made her very popular.

What made SFA2 important for fighting game fans was that it was tournament viable. The first Alpha game just felt too blasé for its own good for anyone to really take interest in it, but SFA2 is one of the most balanced games Capcom put out at the time. Dan was a little better, but Akuma, thankfully, was quite nerfed from his way-overpowered Alpha 1 counterpart. Despite that, though, the tournament scene was later dominated by nothing but Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Rose players, since they were pretty sizable advantages over the rest of the cast. Nice try, though.

But that didn't stop SFA2 from being a superlative product, though. The game has an energetic-yet-subtle approach to how it deals with its gameplay, and all of this is mainly why it's the most highly regarded of the three Alpha games.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 is an entirely different beast than its two predecessors, mainly because of everything it includes. Capcom clearly took the gloves off for this one and made the gameplay quite disparate from the first two games. More juggles are possible, many characters have new moves and animations for more combo possibilities, and the character roster was almost doubled. These are enhancements you would expect for a game releasing around two and a half years after the second game, and they're definitely for the better...and worse.

SFA2 took an energetic-yet-subtle approach to its gameplay, but SFA3 removes any sense of subtlety the games previously had. It's way over-the-top with some crazy juggles, characters jumping all around the place with and after landing attacks, and a massive cast that will ensure a lot of experimentation; even though that last point can be bad for the sheer amount of match-ups you'll have to learn for a single character, and that's not even including the fact that some characters have different forms. It can be pretty overwhelming going from the second game to this initially, but it's perfectly easy to adjust to after familiarizing yourself with all of the new mechanics.

In terms of fanservice, though SFA2 increased the amount of it over the first game, this game is loaded with it. It has extensive back stories and endings for every character, which is necessary given how this is the last Alpha game. The story will be required to link this to Street Fighter II, especially since every character from II is included here (if you're including the home version and renewed arcade version). It's a pretty big achievement for a game with a cast of 31 characters, still the most ever in a Street Fighter game (especially in the PSP version, which has four more characters).

The changed feel of the game is also reflected in the music, which drifts away from the new age soundtrack of the previous games and embraces techno. This also means the familiar character themes that had been prevalent since Street Fighter II are all completely gone. It's kind of the antithesis of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike's soundtrack, which had some heavy rap influences.

Though it's different and a bit unbalanced because of how over-the-top it is, SFA3 is still a lot of fun to play. The sheer amount of experimentation in the game is what makes it so addictive that you're guaranteed to come back over and over to experience it. And that's regardless of the, uh, six systems the game is available for.

So yeah, the Street Fighter Alpha franchise (sub-franchise?) is really great, though it didn't start out that way. I didn't really hammer the point in how good the second and third games were in my original feature, but thankfully a blog like this presents second chances. The last two games in the series are still playable today, though it would be best if you did so on the official Anthology released for the PS2, thanks to them being perfect ports of the arcade games.