Capcom

Capcom established itself as a masterful game developer with their crossover titles and vice grip in the fighting game world with Street Fighter 2. In ‘94, they developed  Street Fighter 3 without the direction of Noritaka Mizu, moving to the fantasy developer Tomosh Sadamoto with the idea of changing his original blueprints back to the more traditional style they had established. With the problem of a three-month deadline and a reconstruction within their company’s employment, with the hope of Sadmoto being the main producer for the rest of the series. However, with his team’s lack of knowledge of fighting games, they produced the game with the CP3 as a rebuttal to the emerging popularity of three-dimensional rendered games. So they finished the game and released Street Fighter 3 in 1997.

However, it was heavily canned due to its new direction and feel. Nearly seven months later, they released Street Fighter 3: Second Impact as a tip of the hat towards Sadamoto’s cousin Yoshiuki Sadamoto, the character designer for Neon Genesis Evangelion. With the help of Hidetoshi Izawa, they would tinker with certain mechanics, the main one being the newly introduced parry mechanics, which made the community quite heated. However, Street Fighter: 3rd Strike would establish the genius of Capcom and the version I will be focusing on. But are these times and flaws really with it? To get this resolution, we must analyze the combat and visuals to see it.

The combat within this game feels so good for the first PlayStation era. This is the first game with only two returning characters being Ryu and Ken. The rest are fresh characters that carry themselves for their pressing archetypes. One of the biggest improvements and somewhat introductions is the parry and counter mechanic. By clicking the block on an attack at the correct time, it causes a couple of invincibility frames and allows for counterattacks. All moves apply to this, now obviously there is some push back due to missing this causing block damage or pure. This mechanic opens up the defensive side of this game while refreshing the offensive capabilities throughout the roster. If this doesn’t convince you, then just look up the Daigo parry on YouTube, and it should be your coup de grâce. Fighting game YouTuber, Soctia96, believes this game checks off every box to be a masterful game.

“… It’s not just because of its tight gameplay and gorgeous visuals but because of…well, everything,” Soctia96 said.

The visuals are stunning, with the pixel work being so smooth. Just looking at their idle animations looks so smooth at a perfect frame rate to the point of not being able to see the sprite’s pixels. The art style combines the stylized take on mid-journey, while adopting the B-gyaru aesthetic to create a unique identity that carries it to this day. An anonymous user from Reddit thinks this game is one of the best.

“Literally peak. Peak graphics, peak artstyle, peak characters, peak lore, and peak music,” the user said.

Overall, this game is phenomenal and is one of the best fighting games and PlayStation games of all time. The type of movement this game garnered established a generation of fighting game fans to the point of ruling the entire industry.