Making sense of Street Fighter pt.1 ...

I'm a big fan of Capcom games and the game that started my liking for most of the companies older out put was "Street Fighter II: The World Warrior". When I first played this game in 1991, I was amazed by the gameplay and concept. In this game were 8 unique characters beating the hell out of each other with crazy moves like fireballs, sonic booms and hundred hand slaps.

  Before SF II, the few fighting games that were available, including Street Fighter 1, were kind of boring and after Street Fighter II came a slew of other fighters, some good (Fatal Fury), some bad (Dragon Master) and some were just weird (Fighter's History). As all these were being released, Street Fighter (or the company that made the series, Capcom) decided to make improvements to the SF but not in sequels but in special editions of SF II. At first, this was ok, with two players able to play as the same character and being able use the four boss characters and in later games 4 new characters but it just left me, and I'm sure fans of the game, wanting a 3rd in the series. In 1995, there was a new Street Fighter game with a new design and better graphics but it was not sequel but a prequel. Not what I was expecting but anything is better than another SF II.

Street Fighter Alpha (Zero in Japan) takes place after Street Fighter I but before Street Fighter II, making it a side story. Alpha provided back stories for the few street fighter II characters that were in the game, brought back some characters from street fighter I, brought in characters from another Capcom game,1989s Final Fight, and provided two new characters who a important to the street fighter universe. The new animation was incredible, a show of the updated graphics system Capcom began using, and as mentioned earlier, the new character designs gave new life to the series, even if some were a little over exaggerated. Still, this was an amazing game that I know I was addicted to the first time I played it. Capcom went and on to release a sequel the next year, Street Fighter Alpha II (Zero II),doing the same in bringing back characters from previous games and introducing new favorable ones. But a couple of  years later, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released and it showed, to me at least, that whoever was behind this game either got a little too ambitious or purposely made the game, storyline wise, weird as all hell.

To Be Continued