It’s sort of challenging to review a collection like this but I’ll try my best, I just won’t go super in-depth with each game. This collection is the one that got me into Street Fighter and other 2D fighters as a whole. This collection contains 12 games consisting of every main Street Fighter game from SF1 in 1988 up until Street Fighter III: Third Strike in 1999, making this an excellent introduction to the genre as a whole. Since there are so many games in it, it’s pretty easy to find a game to get comfortable with. My favorite out of the collection is Street Fighter Alpha 3. While it doesn’t have the iconic presentation of SFII or the advance play styles and gorgeously smooth animations of SFIII, it strikes a happy medium of those two. The character roster is great, the game is fast and technical without being too overwhelming, and the graphics and music have an excellent energy and 90’s anime feel to it (which makes since as it was inspired by Street Fighter II: The Animated Picture a few years before it was released). My only gripe with that game is that you can’t continue in the final battle against M. Bison, which even for the time is cheap. But the package does include save states for every game if you struggle with a certain fight. The worst game is obviously the original Street Fighter, but being one of the first of its kind, it’s not a surprise. The games themselves are all emulated very well, and while the pixels maybe slightly skinny, it’s not intrusive at all. The game comes with online play, but it seems that the servers aren’t nearly as active as they used to be because recently, finding a match takes a while. Other than that, you always got local player with every single game if you want to duke it out old school style, which is more ideal for a game of this nature. There is also a museum section which features a lot of deep cut fun facts and a pretty comprehensive timeline of the franchise up until 2018. Overall, I think it’s a very solid package that is worth the price if you are interested in playing the classic fighters on a modern console, but that doesn’t mean it’s without it’s flaws. While every game presented here comes with it’s arcade release, and that’s what every game should be in the collection, the only game in which I would beg to differ with is Street Fighter Alpha 3. Don’t get me wrong, the arcade version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a fantastic game, but the home versions are often superior in many ways. Each home port of the game includes new characters such as Guile, Yun, Balrog, Fei Long, T-Hawk, Dee Jay, and other deep cut characters, the base arcade game is missing all of them. It would’ve been nice if they added more characters but since every other game uses the arcade ROMs, I understand why they did this. Another addition I wish they added in was extra game modes such as Dramatic Battle or World Tour modes from previous games. It probably would’ve been a time consuming endeavor for the developers but I think it would’ve paid off. But for what it’s worth, this collection is an excellent entry point for those who want to either try out Street Fighter for the first time or just want a way to play these classics on a newer system.

Reviewed on Jan 03, 2021


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