Street Fighter III: Third Strike is nothing more than an attempt by CAPCOM to wring out another buck of its top man-whore, the wandering brawler Ryu. From the first Street Fighter to all of the modifications made on its sequel and passed off as brand new games, to the Street Fighter Alpha prequels that beat out the Star Wars prequel trilogy by 5 years, and through the psychotic Marvel branch-offs, Ryu has seen it all and has changed very little. Unfortunately, neither have his enemies. Same ol' Bison and Vega, Barlog and arch-nemesis Sagat. The stage music hasn't changed much and is even harped upon in other games. That all began to change with the original sequel to Street Fighter II, sequentially titled Street Fighter III.
The original Street Fighter III brought over the usual suspects of Ken and Ryu, but with better animations, new characters altogether, new stages and a new art style. There was a catch to all this cool stuff: you only had the choice of ONE Super-Art (the Super Attack from previous games) out of 3 to choose from. That made it hard to trip up your enemy, but they made the Super-Arts work at different levels on the Super Meter so that one Super-Art can be used 3 times with good damage, while a Super-Art that uses up the entire bar will cause massive amounts of damage. There are moves that I wanna talk about, but only within the context of Third Strike, because those same moves can be found in Street Fighter III and its sequel, Street Fighter III: Second Impact.
Third Strike, the third "sequel" to the third sequel in the Street Fighter> series (read that last sentence back and you'll understand how ludicrous that is to everyone else, but not to CAPCOM execs) brings back some characters from the Street Fighter III series, adding new ones and one revamped old-school character. The formula would seem to say, despite its features, that this is nothing but an old retread of the other Street Fighter III games. That's where Third Strike changes it up with a very significant change to the music.
CAPCOM went straight hip-hop.
It was a shock when I played the game and heard hip-hop beats blaring as I beat my opponents and in the menus. It also allowed me to get deeper into the game than I ever wanted to. There are several instances where Street Fighter gets me and keeps me playing. Example of that are:
- Ken getting 4 hits for his Flaming Dragon Punch (Street Fighter II: The New Warriors)
- Ryu and Ken both fighting an insanely hard Bison--together (Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dreams)
- Fighting Shin Akuma at Ayers Rock, Australia (Street Fighter Alpha 2)
- Ken's gets an Air Hadoken (X-Men vs. Street Fighter)
- The VISUAL strike effects (Marvel vs. CAPCOM: Clash of Super Heroes)
- The introduction of Captain Commando with the other 3 members of his squad as backup (Marvel vs. CAPCOM: Clash of Super Heroes)
- The option of using 2 characters (Marvel vs. CAPCOM: Clash of Super Heroes)
- The option of using 3 characters (Marvel vs. CAPCOM 2: The New Age of Heroes)
- Three characters combining their Super Attacks together (Marvel vs. CAPCOM 2: The New Age of Heroes)
- Star Gladiator's Hayato introduced as a 2D character (Marvel vs. CAPCOM 2: The New Age of Heroes)
- The introduction of Sean and Elena, two dark-skinned characters of African ancestry that don't suck, are evil or boxers (Street Fighter III: New Generation)
- Street Fighter III: Third Strike. The whole thing.
She's dropped her Street Fighter Alpha tracksuit (so sad...T_T) and is back in her traditional costume. Her fighting style still has the high jumps and quick kicks, but shows a bit more grace in its animations. Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick has been changed so it doesn't look like she's doing a HEADspring and then spinning, but using a spinning momentum to get off the ground; so fluid it makes me happy to see it. She doesn't have a Kikosho, but her other supers are mean. Even her win poses are smooth, living things: Miss Zhang bows upon entering and the "V for victory" win pose is changed from static female-looking sprite pointing fingers upward to an excellent representation of Chun-Li having a silly moment.On the antithesis of silly (i.e., serious), I present to you Ryu's Super-Art moves, starting with the Denji-Hadoken. An upgrade from the Shinkuu-Hadoken, Denji-Hadoken gives you the option to CHARGE the already powerful Shinkuu-Hadoken, much like Sakura's chargeable Hadoken in Street Fighter Alpha 2. The obvious drawback is that people can already prepare themselves for or act on the creation of a Shinkuu-Hadoken. The benefit is that it's UNBLOCKABLE. 'Nuff said for turtlers. That's not the end to his strength, for he also has the baddest move on top of that: the Shin-Shoryuken.
Normally, Ken is the better of the two when it comes to the Shoryuken, pulling off more than the single hit Ryu is capable of. Ryu has come back with a vast improvement over Ken's Shoryu-Reppa and Shin-Ryuken, called the Shin-Shoryuken. This Super-Art is so strong, it has a backup plan for when it misses its initial ground strike. On the ground, the Super-Art only gets three hits. It also knocks off an amazing 50% of health from the life-meter. The real gem is when the three strikes go off in sucession: Ryu hits with the first hand (a "closed body" camera shot), then the camera gets a close-up of the opponent's mid-section for a second hit (an "open body" camera shot) and ending with Ryu sending the opponent skyward with a rising uppercut. It may seem tedious to you, but to me it's ballet.
Lest we forget that if he misses the ground strike, Ryu has a chance to make a 15-hit aerial combo. It's impressive, but it doesn't pass Sagat's 21-hit Tiger Genocide from Street Fighter Alpha 2.
Street Fighter III: Third Strike is a milestone in gaming for me; it put almost everything into a fighting game AND not a lot of people hogged it up at the arcade. When something like that happens to a fighting game, that means there's something in it for me and will probably earn a high mark with me.
RATING: 8/10
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