Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 458: Street Fighter III

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

We awaited your return, warrior! Continuing our series on Capcom's famous fighting franchise, Diamond Feit, Shivam Bhatt, and John Learned parry an innumerable amount of blows in order to cover the entire saga that is Street Fighter III. Art by Greg Melo. Edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, one, two, five. Three, sir. Three. Yes. We did it. We've counted to three, everybody. Welcome back to Retronauts. More specifically, this is Retronaut number 4.58, and we are talking about Street Fighter 3. We've done enough Street Fighter 2. We've had enough Street Fighter 2. Alfa. Okay, we can do more alpha. I'm agreeing, we're going to do more alpha. We've got to finish more alpha. But for now, we are here, Street Fighter 3. And I am joined by two special guests. Let's start with our returning guest, please. Hello, I'm Shiven Putt. You might have heard me on the last dozen Street Fighter 2 shows that they did.

Thank you. And please, our brand new guest, introduce yourself. Hi, I'm John Lernad. Sometimes Free Lance guy, sometimes, Third Strike Junkie. It's great to be here. Thank you for joining us, John. You are here because you have made a lot of material about Street Fighter 3. We've talked about it several times, and you've got a whole, right off the top, why don't you talk about your video series? Sure.

So I have a modest YouTube page called Annotated Games, where I basically pick one game and do 20, 25 episodes. series on that one game, breaking them apart, kind of seeing where all the references come from, what makes the game tick, what's running under the hood. I did 20 episodes of Castlevania Symphony in the Night a few years ago. I love it. My albatross, thank you, my real problem now is I decided to start doing third strike in 2018 going character by character and someday I'll finish it, maybe before I'm 60. And we'll get there. But I'm about four-ish episodes to go.

We're sort of in the home stretch, but yeah, I love Third Strike. If you hold a gun to my head, it's one of my favorite games ever. I play it constantly even still. So I'm very happy to be here. Very. Thank you. Thank you for coming, John. And actually, while we're chatting, why don't you, because you have not been on a street fighter episode before, or even retronauts before, why don't you tell us a little bit about

where were you when you entered the street? of fighting what what happened where i found i found fighting on the street where i was okay i um so i was 11 in 91 when street fighter two came out and i was um i liked video games a lot i had sort of kind of seen the light a few years before that when the nes was was newish and uh i was in an arcade in toledo ohio where i grew up called the red baron and um i saw a couple of guys playing Street Fighter 2 against the computer. They weren't playing against each other. They were taking turns trying to beat Ken.

And I was that kid in the arcade. I just didn't give a crap. I would walk up to people and ask them questions about what they were playing or whatever. And I was kind of dumbfounded. I was like, hey, is this game good? And these two guys just looked at me like, I'm a jackass. And like, well, does it look good? So, like, all right, all right.

So I wandered off to the other open machine. And I started playing it. I'm like, this is what I do now. This is the thing that this will be me forever. And so I have been a Street Fighter 2 fan for many, many years. I was one of the few jackasses that bought Super Street Fighter 2 on the Genesis when it came out. There's only, I think, like six or seven of us out there. And I stuck with the series as they went on, as I moved on to other consoles, you know,

with the Alpha Games on. I bought a PlayStation 1. I was the first kid in the neighborhood to get a PlayStation, and I was also that kid that would call the video store, like, once a week, like, do you have Street Fighter Alpha yet? Is it out? Do you have it? So I could go rent it.

And I found that I didn't really like Alpha all that much. What? I know, I know. I know. Air blocking. Doesn't do it for me. So I came to Street Fighter 3. Like, I was always that I'm the kind of person that I find it

hard to let go of things. So, like, even though I had moved on to other fighting games by the time I was, you know, getting older and I loved my PlayStation, I was starting to get into Tekken and other fighting games and certainly all the RPGs that were on the PlayStation. I always kind of thought that, you know, Street Fighter 3 eventually comes out. I'm going to want to play this. I have to see what it is finally. And I'm sure we're going to get to this, but, you know, I played Street Fighter 3 when it was brand new in an arcade. I'm like, this is, so this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a. it, huh? This is the game. Hmm. But yeah, so not to get too far ahead of ourselves. I had a similar reaction, I think, as many, many, many people when they finally saw it. But we'll circle back to that, I'm sure. Shibam, how about you? Where did you meet the three? Okay, so as we discussed before, I was a

diehard street fighter junkie for two and various other spinoffs of two. and three came out in 1997 so I was like a sophomore junior in high school and by this point I'd already been like very deeply inundated into super super two I remember going to one of the first fanamacons at the basement of a community college

and paying a guy a dollar to play Street Fighter Zero on his imported Sega Saturn Wow and so like I was like super into this and when I started seeing the images of this game. First off, I was like, what the hell they made Raiu old? What's going on? But he looked so sick. And the first time you see Rai walk out there with the duffel bag, drop it, and you see that whole fluid animation of him walking and having just that intro. And like, if Ken is there, him doing the fist bump with Ken, I was like, oh, this is sweet.

And then I realized that none of the other characters were anything I'd ever heard of before. They were all super weird. I didn't know what was going on. But the game was so pretty. It was so, I mean, like imagine I'm in an arcade in like a fa restaurant right so it's not an arcade so it's like three standing machines next to it is uh time killers do you remember that fighting game which has the five buttons where you lop off arms and limbs and so you've got like time killers over here you've got um I think it was one of the virtual fighter games virtual fighter maybe in the first one and then you've got street fighter three and so you got two janky looking animation games and then this cartoon and I was like this game

game is sick. This game is absolutely sick. But then I tried playing it, and I realized everything I know about Street Fighter no longer applies, and I suck. So I stopped playing three for a long time until a third strike came out. And then until I didn't really click with it until I started playing it on the Dreamcast later. But I was one of the few people who was just like, I need this game because of music. The character select screen music alone.

Oh, my God, it's so good. Yeah, I'm positive. I saw it in arcades because I definitely was the kind of person who still went to arcades in 1997. But I'm also confident that I barely saw it. Like, I'm sure I saw it, but I also think, I think I only saw it a few times. So I never had enough experience with it firsthand. So for me, for me, it really was, this was definitely a dreamcast game for me. Like, this is one that I bought for my, um, my mom.

My modded Saker Dreamcast, so I got the Japanese version, and I was playing the Japanese version of Third Strike, and just, that was, you know, I would say maybe an entire summer, maybe even two summers worth, where I just, I played this game a lot. And I was really into it. And that's, in that sense where we just, we could just sit there a bunch of us as friends and hang out with it and sort of work it and sort of pull it apart piece by piece. And that, that to me was, was more fun. So if I saw it in arcades, if I played in arcades, it couldn't have been more than a couple times because, you know, once, it just, it wasn't, it never reached, you know, as we're going to discuss, it didn't really get the reach and breadth of locations that Tree Fighter 2, you know, Street Fighter 2, you couldn't miss it. I mean, it should be noted that because I live in like, when I was growing up in the Santa Clara Valley, Capcom was based here. So like a lot of the arcades that I would go to were Capcom test locations. Yeah, right.

So seeing Street Fighter 3 in the arcade was kind of like, well, of course they're going to put it. This is their home arcade, right? So I got very blessed with Street Fighter. Yeah, I'm jealous. Yeah, I think by the late 90s, most locations that I would go to, like, they would had, they just, you know, I still had, I'm still lucky that I had arcades to choose from, you know, both from the suburbs. Yeah, because this is before DDR really revitalized everything.

Right. Yeah. I mean, sure, if I went into the city and went to Chinatown Fair, like, it would definitely be there, but it's like, I didn't get to go to Chinatown Fair that often. So, you know, most of the more local places or the malls nearby, Like, they would not. They just didn't have Street Fighter 3. They would have had, you know, maybe Marr versus Capcom or, you know, one of the alphas. So like I never ever saw a second impact, for instance.

And Third Strike, obviously, once he became popular post facto, then suddenly every arcade had it. But when it came out, I definitely did not see that one in Arcades either. No, I've never seen, to this day, I've never seen a Second Impact Arcade Cabinet. And I've only seen an American Third Strike arcade cabinet within the last. like four or five years, and that I was dumbfounded. I walked into a barcade in Columbus, Ohio. I was like, oh my God, there it is.

And of course, like, you know, the two player buttons were all busted and nobody could play competitive. Oh, yeah, no. My college had a third strike. It was sweet. Really? But we were, we, my college arcade also had like a rousing fighting game scene. So we had like, you know, CVS and CVS2 before

it was really big anywhere else. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Third strike. We had all the tech. I mean, it was it was a fighting player's dream if you were, into that sort of thing. All right. So let's take a step back from our own personal tales, and let's talk about the tale of Street Fighter 3 because it started a lot earlier than you might think.

According to the interviews, and we'll link to some. of these interviews in the show notes, but according to these interviews, the development started in 1994, and that new generation name, that wasn't a subtitle. That was it. That's what they were calling it, and it wasn't going to be a street fighter at all, which is pretty wild, but also kind of makes sense when you realize how it ended up. But yeah, the teams of Capcom started working on this game, and they had the prototype, people were jumping around, and, you know, famous, you know, well-known artist, developer, Akiman, looked at this work and he's like, yeah, these

characters, they're not that great. What if you put you in here? Right. And suddenly pieces fell into place and it turned into a street fighter game. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Like, if you look at Street Fighter 3, just from like an objective raw standpoint, if you take all the skins off the characters and look mechanically, it does not play like any of the previous street fighters that had come out till then. It's a much more defensive game. It's a much more more spacing and zoning game. There's much, like, fireballs suck. Projectiles suck in this game.

This game, like, is balanced differently. It's flavored differently. And if you took Zune Ken out and just said, this is like, you know, one of the other Capcom, like random spin-off, dark stockery type things, I'd buy it. Everybody would buy it. They'd be like, oh, yeah.

I mean, that was a big criticism when it came out. Like, in high school, we were like, that doesn't look or feel like Street Fighter. Like, they change. Why do they change? all the characters. Where's my personal pet favorite from the 300 that were in Super Street, Petter 2, or

whatever? You know, it just felt so fundamentally different that I think if you didn't, I have those Lynchpin characters, Ryan Ken, it would not have clicked at all. It would have died entirely. Well, it kind did, but I'm sure I'll come back to that too. But yeah,

it's, you got to give them some credit for really, you know, taking a big swing on a new cast, but probably the way that they had done it was clearly not the right move when they with she was absolutely right it took a lot of flack for not having as many returning characters as it probably should at least at least new generation didn't they had slowly added more as the sequels went on i think capcom has definitely learned from new generation in terms of when we introduce a new street fighter you can

have all the new cast you want but at least a third of them have to be people you know right right Well, I mean, now that it's been so many years, the roster is so deep that even if they do put out returning characters, they can totally just kind of like reshuffle their move sets and make them different characters like Nash and Street Fighter 5 basically. But the recognition has to be there, right? If they're going to sell the game, if marketing is going to do their job, they're going to walk into those developers and say, all right, why don't you put like somebody people recognize in one of these games? maybe a few more of them. See how that works. But yeah, it's new generation was spearheaded

by a guy named Tamoshi Sadamoto, who was an old-timer, a Capcom who had been there since like the Section Z days. And he did the slam master's games. He was the lead on the D&D. Shadows over Mistara, one of the best games of all time. Yes, that game is spectacular. Very expensive for your guys,

Saturn, that you would have more than a dollar to play. But anyway, he also, we've got some interviews that we're going to link to this too. But the interesting things about these interviews, if you read them, they have some sort of conflicting viewpoints on what goes on here. And, you know, according to Sodomoto, like, it was just him and a couple of guys, you know, they were just sort of tinkering around with what would become like their new generation project. It was like him and an artist and a programmer. Yeah, let's just see how things kind of work in 94. And in 95, he says, oh, that's when things started ramping up.

But if you read absolute goddamn hero, Matt Leone's polygon oral history stories of all of these fighting games, including three, which Sadamoto was not part of. He is conspicuously missing in this. Akiman and the other Capcom staff were like, oh, no, we were working on this game, like, hard. We were really putting the time in on something in 94. and it was just flailing. Like, because these guys did not come from a fighting game background, all the, like, Sodomoto and the other developers he had, they had no idea what they were really doing.

And it was clear that, you know, we're still in the zeitgeist of fighting games. We still have to crank out fighting games. That's our thing. But if this doesn't start taking shape pretty soon, if this doesn't find some direction, even though we've already spent a ton of money on this, We're going to have to scrap it. And I think that's where Ackyman kind of walked in and said, I'm basically going to save you here.

I'm redesigning your characters. We're putting in a couple of older faces just we've got some reference that we can work against with the new characters. But this is a hot mess. And we need to fix this pretty soon. Also, if we can be honest for a second, this is maybe the peak of Ackiom's work. This is some of the greatest character designs he's ever done. every character in the entire saga in Street Fighter 3, all of them are stunning. Just absolutely gorgeous, distinct, vibrant and memorable characters.

And one thing that occurred to me as you were talking, like, the early 90s was the decade of Street Fighter, right? Like, this is where Street Fighter was owning every single magazine cover. It was in every arcade. Everybody cared about the series. And Capcom was just churning them out. And especially, like, and then once we start. you're getting the weirdos, like, you know, spinoffs, the X-Men versus Street Fighters and Marvel

versus Street Fighters and Alpha Series. Alpha 2 had come out in 96 and Street Fighter 3 has come out in 97. And when you look at these two games side by side, it is completely baffling to look at and see like, wow, Capcom thought this was going to succeed. Like Alpha 2 is a giant beautiful cartoon. It's super fast. It's got all those custom combos. It's got gigantic fireballs that look like they come out of Dragon Ball Z. It's got all of the big bubbly character designs. And then Street Fighter 3 shows up. And it's just like this old, hardened Ryuz, super just emaciated looking, all of these really different and unique looking characters.

And the fireballs are back to being like Street Fighter 2 style, small little fireballs. And it's like, wow, this is, it felt almost like if a car was careening out of control with Alpha series, this is somebody just taking the car and like, jamming the handbrake and you're just now like, oh, God, what's happening? You know, it felt like the C-bell did jerks you back because it was so slow and stately compared to all the Street Fighter games. Well, sort of to go off what both of you have been saying, you know, one of the behind-the-scenes notes is that even though Capcom was making so many fighting games, I mean, I would say Capcom has forgotten more about fighting games than we'll ever know, you know what I mean?

But even though they had all this talent and all the staff, they really weren't working on Street Fighter 3. According to Shinichro Obata, he said that 70% to 80% of the team members had no experience making fighting games. That's insane. Yeah. They must have just been desperate. He also said that the alpha team, you know, because obviously the alpha team was working, he said the alpha team and the team on three never really shared much information, which, I mean, to me, like, working in Japan, that totally makes sense to me. Like, I understand, you know, if you've got a big company like that, it's totally possible. But you're also kind of like, where was someone above them to say, hey, you.

and you, can you have drinks tonight? Can you, can you talk about this? Right. Yeah, right. Where's her Nomi Hodi to fix this, please? In a weird way, in a weird way that did become a boon to them later on when we get to Third Strike, specifically when we get to Chun Li. But you're absolutely right. Like, it's a company that size that has cranked out a lot of games. And according to Matt Leone's oral history of the Alpha games, especially Alpha One, all of those guys were brand new. Like the alpha team was basically like green recruits, rookies that they paired up with Funimizu and they're like, all right, Funimizu knows how to make a fighting game. Do it in three months. And they just like rip the band-aid off and cranked it out. Can you imagine how confident Capcom must

have been at the time at the power of street fighter? No shit. Yeah. That they're just giving this marquee series. Like today it's unfathomable to think about like, okay, we're making a new call of duty. So I got these college graduates. I'm just going to give it to them. birthday by. And do it before the summer's over. Yeah, this is their golden goose. Are you insane? And yet, and yet somehow, somehow they managed to find one of the greatest fighting games of all

time. Right. The alpha games did pretty well. I can't remember where this came from. Maybe it was from Sadamoto himself, but they're pretty open. Capcom now, anyway, is pretty open about the fact that, like, if the word street fighter was not on the title for any of their games, it just didn't do that well. Like the Dark Stockers games did fine.

Star Gladiator came and went. The crossover games were good, but again, those are Street Fighter. Those had Street Fighter in the title since the beginning. So they did well financially, but everything else was only kind of so-so. So this was another reason that Ackymon kind of came in and said, all right, we should probably make this a Street Fighter game because we've just sunk so much development into this at this point. But again, it took somebody like after a year plus of development to,

to sort of come in and say, we got to write the ship, fellas. I mean, it's just wild to think about, like, Street Fighter was, I mean, Mega Man was dead in the water. None of the other franchises that Capcom was really known for at the time were going anywhere. like 1942, who cared about that in 1997, you know, like Resident Evil kind of on the PlayStation or whatever. But Street Fighter was the thing that was pulling the ship. So I guess whatever it took to put a Street Fighter out is what they needed to do. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first Resident Evil was out, but that was one game and it did very well. But, you know, they had... But it's not Street Fighter. It's not a franchise. Yeah, exactly. And it wouldn't

build the dynasty yet. Yeah. It would be a few years and, you know, they famously had to scrap Resident Evil 2, like midway through development to try and start write that chip too. So this was a very challenging time for Capcom, I think. And one of the challenges they had was this was a game running on new hardware. This is the CPS3 board. It is not the first CPS3 game, but it is a very early CPS3 title. And, you know, the amount of work they're putting into this, you know, I think we've mentioned it, but we can just say it again, the animation alone in this game is kind of breathtaking. And I think it stands up 1,000 percent. You know, it just, every character, every character has hundreds, even thousands of frames of animation. I think it might have been

EGM that had the, they showed just a frame by frame layout of what you does when he throws a fireball. Like they said, like, look, look at how much, look how many frames information it takes to throw a fireball. And, you know, it's a magazine. So obviously you can't show it a motion. But yeah, just showing it that way was kind of exciting for me as a reader. I was like, oh, wow, this does look good. It was stunning even something as simple as watching Riyu throw a fierce punch. You see his elbow kind of go out there.

You see the strains and his muscles. And it's like, holy crap. You know what it reminds me of? I guess a contemporary example would be the food in Final Fantasy 15, which is like the most lovingly rendered salad you've ever seen in your life. But it, obviously

somebody spent like literally years trying to make this work but then when you look at like just the way the fluidity of his pants you can hear the snap of his ghee with every kick like when elena does her capuetta moves and is like flipping over you can see the jangle of the of those like bangles around her arms and legs and it's just i mean you could see the folds in ken's like you know the torn sleeves off i don't know i could sing praises of this game but i remember i wrote a report once, not a report, like an article. I wrote an article once just about Makoto's, like, throat grabbing animation in Street Fighter

Third Street, which is like the amount of weight that they can get into just silently grabbing, pausing for a second, and then twisting right at the Adam's apple, and you're like, oh, I can't even hear that and that hurt me, right? Like that animation, that flat, silent animation just caused me physical pain. I think you touched on something really interesting in that. Um, this more than any other street fighter game, there, there is a, a weight to everything, like, rethrowing a fierce bunch, somebody getting popped with a DP, um, whatever. Like, there, there is a, like a tactile feeling of contact with every, especially to heavy moves in this game. And, you know, in, and in certain instances, too, like some, some moves will turn the, the opponent around. They'll make them spin in their place a little bit. Um, and that's just, um, and in, and in certain instances, too, like, um, and that's just, um, um, sort of adds to the feeling of just, you know, somebody is getting,

somebody's getting, like, hit with a truck right now. Like, there is a weight to this game that I think a lot of people, you know, it's hard to sort of articulate it sometimes unless you, like, you're really paying attention to somebody really just getting smacked in the jaw, and it just looks like straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? Where, like, somebody gets hit and you hear that sound like a fist hitting leather

or something that they make the sound effect and that, like some dumb mooks, spins around like that that is this game that's just what happens to everybody do you remember in third strike hugo hugo's walking animation and his idle animation where he's walking and like every most muscle in his body is moving he stops and his hair just kind of wiggles yeah got the weird twitchiness going on and it's like holy crap this walk animation has more cycles in it than like the entirety of super mario brothers did right i i don't want to sound like weird and icky and i don't mean it to be this way. But like, when I first started playing third strike,

Makoto's walking animation was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Like, just the slow movements of her arms, like how she would cross her legs when she would walk forward. And Makoto has one of the slowest raw walks, walk speeds in the game. So you can just like, I mean, it's sumptuous. You can just get like feast on every frame of that as it happens. John, do you need you need me alone for a few minutes, John? I, you know, I'm a little for kill-up right now, but

I'm just looking, because I while you guys are talking, I just Googled like animated Gifts from Street Fighter 3 and you're just watching like Raius belt moving and his hair moving and the fact that everything gave them weight, it gave them life and like in Street Fighter 2

when you punch, yeah, there's like they make a standing move and then they make the punch animation and kind of like you your mind fills in the rest in this one it feels like they did not leave any space for your mind to fill in the entire fluid animation is there and i don't think we've ever seen anything like i think this is this in like psychotend2 or like the peak of sprite animation to me yeah i on my one-up blog way way back when um i used to do those i used to describe this game as like if ralph bachshy made loony anime

this is what it would look like if you guys know who that is. If you don't know who Ralph Bacch is, go watch the Hobbit. Yeah, go watch the first animated Weirdo Lord of the Rings movie from the 70s, but it's just

an interesting looking beautifully animated game and it's, we could be talking about this specifically for an hour and a half. I mean, we could talk about freaking, yeah, like punch animations of this game forever.

But yeah, the CPS3 board, man. Yes. That was one of the big reasons why Street Fighter 3 didn't get a lot of pickup. It was a very expensive board compared to the CPS2, which everything else ran on. And that coupled with like the lack of popularity for this game made arcade owners want to be like, I'll just take another alpha two. Thank you. Okay. But you mentioned CPS3. Yes. So that's, you know, kind of in the animation, all these things come together. Because Capcom really, they knew they had to go big. You know, they weren't ready for, they weren't ready for 3D. I think at least one of these oral histories had someone say, we didn't, we didn't even know how to do 3D yet. So they just, they couldn't. You know, Tekken was, Tekin was already big. Virtua Fighter was big, but they couldn't go that route. They flat out could not do it. It's like, okay, well, we're going to stick with 2D.

We're sticking with 2D, but we're going to go the most 2D, the biggest 2D. And they went there. In 1996, they did ask Akira to do, I mean, not Akira, Arika. Yes. Arrika did do Street Fighter EX, which is technically 3D. But really, it's a 2D game that just happens to have really hideous sprites. Yeah, and it's its own thing. It's its own thing.

It's definitely like, if you release that and called that Street Fighter 3, I think that would have been even silly. Oh, my God. That would be the end of the series. Yeah, I think there would have been blood in the streets. I think there might have been riots from the nerds around the world. I would have been right at the front, man. Yeah, I would.

Absolutely. It's got its charm. I know people that are into it, but it's. Okay, I played a lot of EX. It was fine. Yeah, that's fine is, that's the way to put it. Yeah, I definitely, I played it on PlayStation. I definitely, I had fun with it.

You know, I was young. I played it. Street Fighter. It was fine. But Street Fighter 3 Third Strike 1997, baby. That's the game of choice here. This thing, first off, like, I guess we should also mention that, like, aside from the fact that it looked so stunningly different, the fact that it aged Raiu another like 20 or 30 years, he's got like scruff on his chin, he looks beaten old, the music was 100% different from any other video game I'd ever heard. It was this jazzy, vibrant, lively, poppy kind of sound. And it was wild. It didn't feel like a fighting game, right?

Like, it was cool. I mean, nowadays, we're, like, spoiled with Guilty Gears and all of these other games have just these amazingly incongruous soundtracks to go with it. But Street Fighter 3, when you're in the arcade and you're hearing Mortal Kombat's, like, super hard, edgy rock. And you're hearing Street Fighter 2's weird, like, you know, 8-bit kind of jangle sounds. And then, like, the various other things. And then suddenly this trumpet starts.

pouring out of this machine. It's so wild. It was so cool. Yeah, Capcom really had an aesthetic with all three of these games. Like they're very, like the UI is very distinct. The character selects are very distinct. But like this is, to your point, Shilom, I think this is a really interesting phase in their, in how they treated music in their games in that they were done sort of making like, you know, sort of not hard rock, but the more driving sounds that went behind Street Fighter 2 and even some of the Alpha games, those were gone. I mean, they were sort of moving on to different musical, you know, different genres. And, you know, it sort of culminated in basically making all of Marvel versus Capcom 2, an acid jazz soundtrack, right? Yeah.

So it's such a, again, like, just like the cast, just like the cast, this was kind of a weird big swing for them. Like, all right, we're going away from the stuff that we had been doing. But it's going to work. We'll convince people. It's going to work. And then, you know, they weren't really that convinced. I mean, the Street Fighter 3 soundtrack, I still listen to. Oh, the third strike soundtrack?

Yeah. Oh, God. It's so good. But yeah, so we should, should we talk about the actual game for a sense? smidge. Yeah, I think, I think we should. But just before we get back there, I just want to mention the music, you know, to go on what you were saying, if you look at, so this is 90, Street Fighter 3 is 97, Third Strike

is 99. So in that period, you also have Alpha 3, and you've got Vampire Savior, I think, is 97, and you look at the sounds, like those three different games couldn't sound more different, you know, like, totally. I mean, all the Dark Struckers games have a certain sound to them, but they, it's always a different direction than the street fighters sound but then street fighter alpha three sort of reinvented his soundtrack altogether you know like street fighter alpha three sounds nothing like one or two and then third strike even though there's some melodies that retain retain throughout the series third strike

sounds totally different than street fighter three vanilla version you know what i mean so it's like they kept on you know if we're doing baseball they just kept on swinging swing and swing and and just they were knocking it all over the place i feel like all these games are sort of different home runs. You know, they're breaking different windows in the stadium is what I'm saying. I mean, I'll be honest, Capcom felt, Capcom between like 1990 and 2000 could do no wrong. They were just like ham. I mean, they brought us with them kicking and streaming, even though people were like Street Fighter. I mean, look, three was not regarded. Let's be honest, before we sugar cut more, because obviously we're fan of this saga. But Street Fighter 3 did so well that when Street Fighter 4 came

out, it was basically Street Fighter 2, too, right? And Street Fighter 4 is my favorite in the series, but I'm not going to pretend like they didn't look at three and say, like, anything that's doing, we need to go the other direction of. Yeah, Seth Killian, who was working for Capcom. He's such a good guy. He's a very cool guy. If anybody has a chance to talk to Seth Killian, shake his hand.

He's a super nice guy, but he's pretty, he was on record when he was producing for Capcom that, like, third strike put Capcom out of the street. Street Fighter business. That's why it went a solid eight, ten years before they made another real Street Fighter game, a numbered Street Fighter game. So yeah, the art books, the various art books and stuff and histories that they put out in the intervening years, like all the producers that whoever was making the art book would interview, they'd all say, yeah, if we make a four, I don't know, it's probably not going to happen. And I mean, that went on for a long time. So street fighter three is quite the flop especially new generation it did very badly and if it did

badly even in japan you know we're basically in its home it it was not going to be you cannot call it a success yeah no the game was too different too wild and just too so far away from street fighter from what made street fighter too cool that it was just hard for people so i mean in we can sit there and look objectively at this game is a piece of artwork. But when you want your Blancas and Zangiefs and you come in and you get Alex and it's like, what the hell is

this crap? It is really, really hard to justify Street Fighter 3 versus what came out of 2 and alpha. Well, let's stick into some of those differences. Yeah. Like what made Street Fighter 3 different besides of the way it looked is how basically, you know, how it played. It played very different.

And a couple of things that I remember, you know, jumping out to me at the time. First of all, Super Moves only got to Street Fighter 2 very late. Basically, the end of Street Fighter 2, they introduced Super Moves. But they were a big part of Alpha. And they were a big part of Marvel Capcom games. So, you know, it was no surprise that Street Fighter 3 started with them. but three lets you choose you basically you have a every character has two or sometimes three different moves but you have to pick one and that yes that one you choose at the start of the match it's very public

so it's because you're basically telling your opponent all right this is what i'm putting my pocket you know what have you got in your pocket it was a cool meta game decision i like that a lot actually because it allowed you when you're playing the game to sit there you look at your character you pick your character they can see that you picked your character but in the choice of character selection. It's like, all right, so now you pick a riot. Do you want the dungeon, Hadookin? Do you want the other one? And you have to choose, and it gives them a second to sit there and say, okay, if they're doing this, how can I meta against that? And I thought, it's like, it felt like a card game. It had this very back and forthiness to it. It gave it a little bit more

play. Like, Alpha also did that. I mean, kind of, well, no, I guess not until like Alpha 3 or something. The isms and Alpha 3 did. But not Alpha 1 and 2. But I really thought that this was one of the cool innovations of three to let you have that kind of choice. Not that anybody ever picked more than like the one good one for each character. Not all supers were created equal. Well, they're not. Yeah. And Sadamoto has said when talking about new generation, like the point of doing three different supers or giving people that choice was to give them some individualism. Like in his words, in one of the interviews, he was like, I think of Ryu as the dragon punch guy. And I think, and the world thinks of him is the big fireball guy, you know, especially after the animated movie and the alpha games kind of doubled down on the Shinku Fireball.

Ken is the Dragon Plus guy, right? Ken is the Dragon Prize guy, yeah. And of course, the fact that I make Ken the lightning leg guy is like, what? Come on. But okay. These games made that out of Ken. But anyway, so like this was Sotomoto's way of basically having the best of both worlds. So, like, they gave him the Shinsha Ryukin, which is one of the strongest moves in the game.

but they also gave him two powerful fireballs. One of them, the other point of the Supers, too, was to sort of balance the game toward new players, like basically give returning players handicaps. So this is totally bizarre to me to say this. You think that there's going to be new players in Trip by the 3. Exactly, right. Well, that was a problem.

And that was something that, you know, as these games in arcades were going on, like the only people that were playing Street Fighter games or mainly fighting games in arcades in 97 were the hardcore, right? And that was hard to attract new players to go in and drop money into machines if they know they're just going to get stomped on by somebody that's been playing for five years. So Sodomoto has been pretty open about like, all right, we put some handicaps in these games. Like the Dengen is supposed to be reused handicap super, which is hilarious because it's one of the most terrifying moves in Third Strike.

But the thing is, it, so the Dengen Hadduken, for those of you who aren't just like savants of this, is the stun Hadookin, basically. Like, you can charge it up and then hit it and it'll guarantee it stun them. And in Street Fighter 3, getting stunned is basically dying. But it is so hard to use when you're a new player looking at it and you're like, I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. Yeah, why would I ever use that? Yeah.

Because when you think his other supers were like, you know, the Shinku Haduken, which is just a very solid, simple, Super Street Fighter 2, Super Fireball, and then the Shinsho Yucan, which is just like the, you know. Yeah, I talk about gut punches. Wow. And the animation is so good on that thing. Yeah, it's gorgeous.

But now they pick Dengen and you die. And it's just like, all right, well, here we go. But it is, yeah, bidding back to one of your point, though, like, there is generally, as the games have gone on, this is more true for third straight than anything, but like, as the games have

have lived for so long, there have tended to be like, this is the accepted super that you use in tournament play, but not always. Certain characters, reuse a very good example. Like, he is probably one of the few characters in the game where all three supers can be viable. It's just most people pick Dengen. But when you're, so tell me the last time you saw somebody play Yon and not pick an agent. Exactly. Well, we'll talk about that. So, like, if you're, If you're on a character select screen, and this is a game that doesn't have, it's not really good about what we call counterpicking. So, like, if you pick, I don't know, Ballrog against Street Fighter 2, I'm going to pick Ken because Ken is good against Ballrog. Like with the way that Street Fighter 3 is sort of designed, that happens, but it's not as pronounced with the Perry system.

But at least you know if I'm going against the Denjin Ryu, maybe I pick Akuma because he can teleport out of the dungeon if I get trapped. You know, things like that. You start thinking of that meta game in a different way. Well, John, you said, you said, are we talking about Perry the Platypus? What was that word, you said? Yes, the platypus. The worst, like the best worst mechanic ever. I love watching people play Street Fighter 3.

I love watching people Perry. I hate parrying. I can't do it. I really can't. It is so hard. I've been playing Street Fighter 3 for over 20 years. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

For 20 years. and it is goddamn hard. So do you want to explain the Perry? I mean, I think maybe John could explain it best because I'm terrible at it. Okay. The Perry, we'll get this out of the way now.

The Perry fundamentally changes the psychology of playing a fighting game. So it is the greatest and worst thing to ever hit fighting games, depending on where you land on this. Shivam is absolutely correct. I personally love it, but like there's a reason. these games are still sort of controversial, even amongst the streetfighter crowd, it's because

of the Perry system. Street Fighter 3 has its reputation as one of the most skill testing games of all time, and as being one of the games that if you're a top tier player, you master because it's so challenging and skill testing, and that is entirely because of the timing and usage of the Perry. And the Perry move itself, basically, like, my way of playing Street Fighter is I'm a fireball guy. I love standing back and throwing fireball zoning, doing all these things. The Perry, basically what it is, is when somebody is attacking you, you tap the joystick in that direction. And if you hit it in the right frame, your character will do a thing called a Perry,

which basically they stick their hand out and nullify whatever that move that's coming at you is. We've all seen the great, you know, Avo Movement 37, where Justin Wong and Daigo put on the Perry Clinic. But in essence, what you're doing here is you're just tapping the joystick gently enough to be able to make it register a move enough to be able to make it cancel a fireball. And what that did in practice is that if you're standing far away and trying to play a Ryu game and trying to zone them and trying to just fireball all day long, they'll just sit and parry all day forever and you will never get in. So it makes Street Fighter into a much more close combat, much more normals-based game, a much more like melee game. Because when you're mixing it up in their face, it is much harder to parry, as opposed to if you're standing three miles away and they can just go, like, tap and vaporize whatever's going to happen. Right. So the parry is a very elaborate risk-reward system, essentially.

So, yeah, if an opponent is standing or jumping at you and attacking, you tap toward them on the stick, a few frames before it lands. It's not exactly like when the attack is supposed to get in a little window, but it's a very small window. Right. And it's been adjusted over the course of the three games too. And if someone's trying to like sweep you, you hit down on the stick before that happens, same as walking forward. But you can't just stand there and keep tapping forward on the stick, expecting you to swat away every move in the game because unlike other street fighter games, you dash forward and dash back with double taps on the stick. So you have to time the movement of your hand just so that you're not. really, you know, getting yourself into worse situations. But essentially what you're doing is walking into danger and bestowing upon yourself an opportunity to counterattack. So it's not the thing about Evil Moment 37 and the Dygo Perry and stuff like that, it's not just that he parried all of those attacks. It's that the Perry is a tool to give you an opportunity to either get out of a sticky situation or to basically counterattack a now open opponent, right?

So Sotomoto is the guy that created the Perry system, evidently. He and the small team in the early phases of the game because they were all apparently big fans of combat sports like the K-1 and pro wrestling and stuff. I mean, these are the slam masters guys. So according to them, they wanted to make something that was sort of authentic to real martial arts. Some guys aren't just going to sit there and block until it's their turn to to punch back, they're going to start like paring moves, swatting things away, trying to counterattack. And ironically, again, this was another one of those mechanics

that he thought when it was, when they were working on it, like, this will help new players. Like, if you get knocked down, you've only got like a tick-tack worth a life left and someone chucks a fireball at you, you can stand up and parry it out of the way. Hell no, you can't. Are you kidding? What you mentioned there about the I cannot tell you how many times, instead of swatting that fireball away, I have run gleefully into it. Yeah, you just like run head first into something like that, right? So the parry is, like I said, I mean, it totally changes the psychology of how these games are supposed to play. So like, that's why you see at high level play a lot of empty jumps, like people jumping at each other and not attacking because they're afraid of getting paried from their jumping.

attack and then get encountered. Oh, God. It is so tilting when you get parried into like the follow up that just chunks you. Right. And then there's a third of your life is just bled away. Oh, my God. But at the same time, like, you know, it's, it's very, very, very dangerous. If you're Reeves specifically, if somebody jumps at you to do a dragon punch because

reused dragon punch is only a one hit move. If you get parried, you're going to hit, you're going to take a pounding. Yeah. That's, I think, a big part of why, like, Street Fighter 3 had such a hard time getting into the audience. Because Riyu, in the old day, I mean, look, I'm an American. I'm sorry. I know how to say if you, I'm going to say Raiu, something's hard to break. But the fact that he, the most popular character, the mainstay of the franchise, was put into a game where he's objectively one of the bottom tier characters is just rough for people to swallow.

They're like, I want to play my favorite dude. He sucks. He sucks out. loud. And that's why Street Fighter 3 is a game that turned me into a Ken main, because Ken was amazing in this game. Yeah, Ken's a gorilla in all

of these games. He's a monster. His tattoo is super kicky thing. It's so much fun. And he's just insanely fast. Rai was this old slow, like I almost felt like the designers just angrily hated Raiu in Street Fighter 3 because they were just like, we're setting him up to die

over and over again. He gets his come up. in the later games, but you're right. In New Generation, he wasn't that good. And he had a two-hit DP in second impact. But, I mean, that's a good thing to sort of discuss here, not to totally take this over. But like, Ken and Ryu in these games, Ken is a character that as the Street Fighter 2 games went on, all of his moves basically did extra hits. Like the Dragon Punch hit three times with the fierce punch. His hurricane kick, the Tatsu, it wasn't a one-hit knockdown like reuse. It hits many, many times, that kind of thing. So when you're facing off, this is one of the

reasons Ken is so good in these games, is that when you're facing off at somebody that is adept at parrying, you're making them work harder. So if somebody jumps at you, a three hit Dragon Punch is three paris. That's pretty easy to screw up. But that's also like one of the things that makes like the parry system so beautiful when you watch a pro. And they sit and do something like parry the entire super. Because you did. You have to parry every hit. And that was one of the big problem with Raius, all of his things are just like, you hit me once, and you parried it, and I'm stuck in this animation, I'm not doing any more hits. And that was so miserable. And then you're just going to get beat on. Yeah.

Oh, God, it made me so mad. But at the same time, Ken, this game, and, like, this game in Alpha really just turned Ken from a palatwop into, like, one of the cleanest, coolest characters ever. I freaking love it. You know, the money quote about parrying, I tried to Google this, and I can't remember where I found it. It was either Tumblr or Reddit, but you know someone complaining about street fighter three they're like well the parry system is too hard like what's the point of attacking if my opponent's just going to parry it and you know the the immediate comment is what's the point of living if you're just going to die and i mean i that's the thing street fighter three if street fighter two is like playing dodgeball street fighter three is like playing chess

right like you are definitely going up there you are definitely trying to edge out i mean like i play a lot of magic right i play a lot of magic gathering that's my game of choice and when you see high-level play. It's not about I'm doing big chunks of damage. It's how am I getting the incremental advantage, incremental card advantage, incremental, like, just edging you one life at a time.

And Street Fighter 3 was all about that deep incremental advantage. If you mastered the system, if you mastered parrying, if you mastered, like, later on the rolls, the dashes, how to do these movements, and then learn to maximize your normals. And you're just like,

when you watch a game of like alpha or a game of four or five or something you can see like huge chunks of the life bar just disappearing in three it is much more slug fest is much more just like skin of your teeth type of level of just very close fighting and they if they were aiming for that they hit a masterwork but if i was coming off of street fighter two where i'm like you know fireballs do something this is a very different game We're going to be able to be. Do you love Japan and video games?

Well, so do we. We're Kinsey and Mark from Kyoto Indie Dev's Chewai Labs. Join us twice monthly for games, silly Japan news, and all-around nonsense. Nasty Labs. We stink at making commercials. We fucking got this one, bro. Be sure to stop by the Chewai Labs Discord to chat about our games or ask us questions. Two-high Labs and the Nasty Labs podcast.

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and the Pulsefire Haste wireless mouse. The Alley Origin 65 has a functionally compact form factor, keeping the arrow keys while ditching the numpad and the F keys. The Pulse Fire Haste is the lightest wireless mouse from HyperX. featuring a robust connection and the precision you need to click heads. The Aller Origin 65 and Pulse Fire Haste Wireless, a terrific twosome to keep your setup clean and clutter-free. Well, it's a very different game, so let's talk about some of these different faces.

We've established that of these 10, and that's a Street Fighter 3 launched with 10 characters, two of them are you can. The rest of them are just these new folks. Random Joe. Yeah. We've got Alex, who is basically a wrestler guy, and he is ostensibly the hero of the game. He's the one who's the main focus of the attract mode. He's your hero.

But he is like, he's a grappler. He hate shirts. and he loves grappling. He's not even really a grappler. No? He's like a close contact. I mean, I guess he's got some grabs, but like he never played like it.

I don't know. I mean, if he was going to be the main face of the game, I don't know why they didn't make him better. Like, he just kind of sucked. Oh, he sucked through all three of them. Yeah. Like, it wasn't until like late Street Fighter 4 that Alex actually became an interesting and fun character to play.

But like, he's got some grabs that are kind of vaguely Zengifie. but really what he felt more like was a much slower, meteor phaelong, if that makes sense from Super Turbo, like where he's rushing in, he's doing kind of these like multi-attack chains, he's got some grabs and some setups, but God damn, he sucked. He was, you played him once and we're like, well, that was a quarter I don't have anymore. Yeah, he, um, so he's supposedly based after Hulk Hogan, so that's where the shirt rip comes off. Sure. And at least 30% of Japanese video game characters are all cooking. What really baffles me about him in this game is that they made an American character the protagonist of this game.

This was a Japanese joint at a time where Japanese game development was still very, very strong. And it was still very common to have Japanese characters as the protagonists. Why, I mean, I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's just I'm very surprised that they decided to make an American. the protagonist of this game. I think they just, I mean, that's a good question, actually.

Like, Ryu and can kind of share top billing, but it's weird to have Alex. If you've got a buff, blonde man, it might be a little, it might read as a little bit more exotic to a Japanese.

Yeah, that's true. You know, I mean, the dragon ball factor. There is a big thing here where it's like blonde equals foreign and blonde equals international and blonde equals,

you know, world, like we are, you know, we are Japanese and our hair is dark, but these blonde-haired people, they're, they're out there, you know, so I think that might have been a factor, but, um, but overall, I mean, it's, it's kind of, I think if you look at the lineup as a whole, it's actually, it's a lot less white guy, you know, they, they actually

did. Yeah, no, they actually went around. Yeah. Like, that's one thing I'd got to give credit to Capcom for. Like, Street Fighter 2 was caricature city. Street Fighter 3 actually had, like, I think, honestly, aside from Ken, Alex is the only white. guy in the cast. Well, there's a literal, there's a literal white man. Yeah, like Necro is kind of like zombie dude. But like you've got Dudley,

well, I guess we can go next down the line to Sean. Sean, of course, the fanboy who is like fully in love with Ryhu and Ken, he's got Raius Gion. He's got like all of the move system that kind of looks pseudo Ryu, I should Sudo Shodokon. But he's a Brazilian. He is a pure on dark skin Brazilian. And I was like, damn, this is rad.

Right, with the Japanese last name. Yeah, Matsuda. Well, we need to... The lot of Japanese folks in Brazil. Exactly, right. We need to camp out on Sean for a second. So, he... Getting back to sort of the development woes of the game,

this is the street fighter equivalent of what people talk about with Final Fantasy 13. It's like, we made something beautiful. We need to get this out the door today. Like, you need to finish this. So that's why Ryu was in the game kind of from an earlier stage, but they were like, oh, my God, we need to finish a few new characters right now. that's how we got Ken and that's how we got Sean. So they're basically, they're not total head swaps of each other, pallet swaps

of each other. But with Sean, Sean is basically just an amalgamation of reused normals and Ken's normals with different special moves, right? And Sodomoto himself has come out and said, Sean was made to be a chump. Like, he was another way to handicap the game because... He's Dan, too. He is Dan, too, right. So, like, he has one projectile to one hit super that does very low damage.

It sucks, right. And it's, it's very easy to parry from a distance. But it was, Sean was basically made for, like, pro players to either style on on other pro players just to mess with them or to be like, all right, I'm good at this game. You're not. Let me pick Sean so we can sort of even the playing field a little bit. So Sean was made to be sort of a chump. But in doing so, it's really interesting. interesting to think this is going to get a little spacey, but, like, um, Riu and Ken are very

specific, right, both they've, they've got a fireball. They've got a dragon punch. They've got the tattoo. But Sean has no fireball of his own. So, um, the street fighter two games are very, very big on fireball play. But Sean is kind of like a short range showto. He's, he's got a DP. He's got something of a hurricane kick. But I think they really, they, they had a thought experiment? Like, what if we took a fireball away from Ken? How would he play? And that's kind of sort of Sean. And I think that's really interesting. Yes, it's interesting. It's interesting in like a, you're exactly right. Thought experiment is the right word. And it should have stayed thought experiment because this guy is just so, like he's interesting. He's got speed. He's got some really

cool normals. And like later on he gets that weird basketball he can throw. But in terms of actual in the game I want to play this character? Are you kidding me? This is like this game does not I mean one of the big problems is for as stylish as these dudes were the game doesn't respect the player in the sense of like

and I mean this for New Generation third track is obviously different but in New Generation the game does not respect that I am putting in 50 cents to whatever a dollar's worth of tokens to play this game and I have you know I want to give it a shot and I want to learn to do this and they're putting

thought experiments into the game that are just not well-formed characters that end up just sucking out loud. And it ends up being a really miserable experience. Why would I come back if Sean, if I pick Sean, if he's like the sweetest looking character I've seen and he was, he was awesome.

But I sit there and I'm like, this dude doesn't have a, he looks like a guy who should have a fireball and he's got nothing. He's got no like moves to speak of. Where do you go with this? Like, why would I come back? If I could just go play Alpha 3. You know, we'll come back to Sean

And we'll answer some of these questions Just if you do the math right now You know, this game is 10 characters Two of them are the returning Duke Ken We've mentioned two new guys And we've kind of already diffed both of them Like that's a fifth of the cast Yeah

My view, the next one we're going to talk Is one of my favorite characters of all time So I will give you I will give you some goodness here Ibuki I mean literal she's a literal ninja She is awesome Ibuki is hell of fun to play

She's got aerials. She's got air fireballed with her koon eyes that can be thrown out. She's got a lot of like maneuverability and dashing. And her character design is just sweet. I mean, Ibukey was hell of fun. Like one of my favorite characters, I think in the saga, really, not just in this game. But she plays so well and is so much fun. It can dash around and jump around in a game that's decided by mobility.

and the fact that she can jump in, hit you a bunch, and then, like, zap right back out again is incredibly tactical. It's super fun. Yeah, Boogie's great. I find her really hard to play, personally, kind of avoid her. Oh, she's way hard to play. I mean, she's not easy at all.

It's a hard game to play, period. It really is. Her and Dudley, I think, are a little over-engineered for this game compared to the other character. I mean, but, like, you can see where the love went into. But, yeah, Buki is one of the reasons another reason

that the cast is small because her hair apparently was very, very difficult to animate and Sadamoto was doing it himself with her hair and it was like piece by piece but yeah,

she's, and she's really kind of, I mean, she hit a good fan base pretty early on. And I'm glad they've sort of circled back around to her

in the later games a few times. Yeah. She's rad. She's such a well-designed and cool character. She's super fun. I don't know, man. I, Ibuki was probably the character that I play the most in three vanilla version.

Her and, like, Elena, who was just hell of fun to play as well. Do you guys remember when, like, the magazines at the time were like, wait a minute, is it Buki, like the daughter of Gecki that lost Street Fighter One character? And I was reading stuff like that. I'm like, that is badass. That's the coolest thing I've ever seen. And Capcom came out there like, no, no. No. That's, yeah, no.

Different people. Fart sound. So next we have like Dudley, right? Dudley, the British boxer, who's got sweet suspenders, this amazing mustache, and throws a rose when he taunts, super sweet. One of the funest ways to kill somebody in Street Fighter, by the way, is to kill them by doing, throwing a rose at them, which is one point of damage. Yeah, super good. The thing is, though, you write here that he's like Barrag but British,

but the thing is he doesn't play like Barrog at all. He's got no charges. Like, that was one of the things about this game is that they didn't have anybody with charge moves, as far as I can recall. And Dudley felt a lot more like DJ to me than like Ballrog or any of the other boxers. Because, like, if you look at his machine gun blow

and some of his other kind of moves, they have that same kind of tempo that DJs, moves do. But he was elegant. He was cool. He was very suave. Dudley was really, really fun to play. He's really the anti-Balrog, right? Yeah, he's way more elegant, way more, you know, cultured. Yeah. Yeah. And that's also by design. Like, they've, Capcom has said a couple of times that, like, they made Dudley to be, to be counter to ballrog because they all thought that, this is a problem that they help perpetuate, I might add. But like, they, they always thought that like boxing characters and video games

are all big bad guys. I'm like, well, you made Balrog. You made the biggest, baddest guy. Exactly. Right. I fight money. So yeah, Dudley's kind of a make good there. But yeah, he's an interesting character too in that like he's very strong. He's very

strong. But in this game they, so these games sort of cherry pick a lot of, we'll get into this I think in Third Strike a little bit more, but these games sort of cherry pick a lot of mechanics from a bunch of different other fighting games. And if you think about like a small team kind of tinkering around that's never made a fighting game before, you can kind of see where that came from.

But like, what I'm getting at is that every character can super jump, like in a K-O-F game. You can jump higher if you kind of tap down on the stick and then up before you do anything. But Dudley has a very unique jumping arc in this game and that it's very low. So he is made to sort of get around fireballs and things like that because he's not floating over them to give somebody the opportunity to dragon punch them. him. He's like immediately over a fireball and then in your face kind of thing. He's, Dudley's a very cool character. And his links are very, very cool. Like, he's got a very fluid, like his animation, obviously is animation fluid, but they also, in terms of the fighting,

like the way his normals work and chain into each other, it's just, it feels like this dude is just coming at you and just throwing a boxing combination into your face and you're just getting beat on. You're going to take it. Yeah, it's really, really cool actually. I mean, that love jump of his is incredibly stylish and incredibly clever, right? He can just jump in there and then if you do like his ducking roundhouse into the sweep kind of thing,

oh, it's gross. And all of his moves were kind of just named after characters from, I mean, after moves from like Ashtena Joe and Hajiman Oipo you know, classic boxing moves. Because like his corkschool blow is basically the one from Jose Mendoza, Mendoza in Ashtana Joe. And it's just like, you can tell these guys

we're like, I want to get my favorite boxing manga that you can't do with a ballrog and we're going to do all the cool shots because because Dudley is more thin and more like delicate looking than say ballrog was, it means that in his animation they can do much more of the classic

like 1920s boxer style whereas like, you know, Barrog is just walk forward and punch you. Yeah, he's got a really cool idol animation in that if you watch most of the cast and they just stand there for a while, occasionally they'll do something

kind of interesting like Remy will shake his hands out or something but Balrog or Dudley is he's not just sort of sitting there with his shoulders kind of bouncing back and forth and his hands up occasionally he'll dance his feet back and forth kind of like how Ali would do his little shuffle around the ring

it's very very cool a lot of love win and I'm making that guy and he's a real I mean I said this before but he is a really fun character it's a shame that you started off with two of the worst ones Alex and Sean suck. The rest of them are actually not awful. I think we got the chaff out of the way, maybe.

Yeah. But speaking of weirdos. Yeah. Oro, the one-handed crazy hermit who comes in a cocoon and throws his boogers at you as a fireball. Okay. I didn't know what to make. I did not know what to make of this character when I first saw him. I didn't know what to make of him now.

I didn't realize it was tied up. I thought he literally only had one arm. That's what the animation made it look like. Yeah, right. I'll be honest. Oro grossed me out and I never played as him. I played as him like once or thrice just to be like, okay, well, I guess I've done this.

Yeah, Oro was, I think, not a big hit with even the Japanese crowd early on. He is a very odd character to play. He has projectiles. He's one of the characters in the game that can throw projectiles in three different angles, which is kind of cool. And Oro became a real monster by the time Third Strike rolled around. But, like, everything that makes Oro good was not in New General. a recent or even second impact.

A lot of people passed on him. But he, I mean, what can you say? We have to bring this up. Oro has an exposed piece of his anatomy in the animations of these games. And that actually did turn some folks off when they figured it out. Yeah,

it turns out people don't want to see hanging dung in their street. Okay, I lied. He does have a charge attack. I just never used him enough to remember that. I'm just looking at his moves list right now. He had a really cool throw. though, where he would grab you and just kind of thwap you on both

sides. Yeah. He's kind of that like old hermit, Master Roshi, sort of like old Letch character. Yeah. Capcom is very I mean, for all of their video games, they're very, very clearly riffing on the comics and stuff

in anime that they're watching at the time. So like there's, you know, the Ryu and Ken relationship is, you know, shin and Ken and hook to no Ken and, you know, that kind of thing, right? So Oros is probably just a riff on on Dragon Ball Z characters, but...

Oh, you can, I mean, you can 100% tell that. Just look at his animation. His face is old, wrinkled Master Roshi or you know, happy Hopasai from friggin Ronma one half. You can make an old man character who doesn't look like a goddamn alien as though, is the thing.

But would you be Capcom if you did? Yes. Supposedly modeled originally after Helio Gracie. That's why he's in Brazil. supposedly. Sure,

why not? Next is the less alien-looking character. Necro. Necro, the Russian pseudo-Dolson, who's kind of like a fusion between Dalsam and Blanca. He's got like long limbs.

He's got this weird, like electricity kind of move. Really trippy animation. Looks very, very cool, but just played weird. It was in a game like this where you could just parry encounter,

he ended up eating a whole lot of hits, a whole lot of time. Yeah, I think the stretching doesn't help if it's, if, you know, a defensive game like this. Yeah, no, it's just, it's more like just asking you to get your face clobbered. And he had some good, like moves that would get him across the screen, like his tornado spinning thing. But overall, it felt like this is an amalgamation of random moves that they needed to put a skin on. And he just plays really badly. It's weird. It's like, you don't feel good when you.

lose to a neuro, you're like, when you lose to some other characters, you're like, okay, you know, maybe I could have done better. When you lose to a necro, you're like, was I just asleep? What happened? Yeah, I think when people really look at these games and wonder why, like, all right, even though there's a bunch of new characters, it's still a street fighter game. There's got to be somebody cool in there. And then they see somebody like Necro. I can see how they would be turned off by this. I mean, I like Necro. I think he's a cool, odd design. But like, the theme of this game really went hard into sci-fi and the metaphysical

and necro is like really the poster child for that and I think that kind of yeah that didn't do them any favors I think yeah but we're going to move on to the actual anime related characters from this who are the

Wonder Twins Yunnan Yang who if you looked like I remember when I was playing this on Dreamcast and my wife with my girlfriend at the time who came in the door and he was like he's like are you playing a gun game? And I'm like, what do you mean? I'm gunned game? This is Street Fighter 3. And she's like, yeah, but then why are you using Troa in your game and, like, you know, Hero Yue and things? I'm like, what? And what I realized is that Yan and Yang are 100% Gundwing characters

who were just transposed into Street Fighter. Yep. Like, if you look at the animation, not the animation, but if you look at the art of Troa Barton, who's got this long swath of hair coming over his front of his face, it is Yang. If you look at Duo Maxwell, and stick a baseball hat on him, you've got Yon. So you've got literally Gundem characters walking around here. Like, it is unmistakably undeniable. Also, I love

these guys. They were two of my favorite characters in the game. They played exactly like Fé Long did. They were super mobile, super fast. Had a really, really good animation. I was a Yon guy, but I was a yang guy, but Yon was obviously the better one for reasons I still don't really understand.

And they had one super, even though mentioned that they have three supers. They only have one. The Ginejin, which Yon had, which doubled him and then does a cabillion point of damage. The Gnajian, I think, deserves a moment of talking about. So, first of all, these guys are basically melee characters. They play like Falun. They dash in. They do chains of attacks. They've got Rekakkan style attacks. They've got, like, it feels a lot like custom combos from Alpha Tuted. But there was this, I remember when you're like, when you play this game, you see the list of supers and they've got weird Japanese names and you're Like, I don't speak Japanese.

I'm going to pick one at random, right? And when you pick it, most of the, like the first one, he's got the Yu-hoo is this thing where, you know, he dashes forward and puts his upward punch, which is kind of like an anti-air super. It's hard to use, but you get what it's supposed to be doing. Then you've got the Sorai Rengeki, which is the one where he runs up forward and if you get to hit, then he does this kind of chain that does a mega amount of damage. Again, it's hard to hit, but you get what it's doing. the first time you put a Ghen suddenly this weird he does this weird little mystical thing

and he gets shadows and you're like what did I do what did I get out of this and it turns out what you get out of it is basically hey I'm now playing alpha instead of playing three

that's exactly it yeah he jumps forward and it's like the Ninja Guideon shadows from Ninja Guardian 2 if you want to go use 1987 references it's so yeah the Geneijin is

definitely that is it's custom combos from the alpha games brought into a different game and it's not so much a move as it is a tool so it's essentially it makes all of all of their moves have the same properties

as a normal super move which means you can juggle with everything the attack data or the frame data is better so usually they're faster normals you can chain combo into everything so it takes a lot of work to do again a gin well to really maximize the damage or do interesting things with it. But as a tool in

these games, it essentially shatters the fabric of it. And which is why Yon and the, so one thing we should say in that new generation is that Yon and Yang take up the same slot on the character roster. And if you pick punches, your Yang or one of the other, you pick kicks, it's the opposite character. And that's actually a holdover from the original plans for Super Street Fighter 2. Fay Long was supposed to be two characters that you would pick with either punches or kicks. And it also goes back to the original Street Fighter 2 of Ken and Ryu, basically pallet swaps of each other. Yeah, basically.

Right, right. So you pick one side or the other, right? So, like, I will say if you look at the strategy guys, the frame data on Yon has always been better in very subtle, weird, dumb ways. But anyway, it makes me so mad. I hate Jan. I hate him. I hate him. I hate his guts. Yes, anyways. I will, yeah. Anyway, so the Genie Jin, and we'll talk about this when we end up into Third Strike a little bit later too, is that like the Genie Jim, because it's such a difficult thing to use, even in the early life of these games in America, Americans didn't use it. They didn't know how freakishly powerful. It didn't make any sense at all. Well, if you play the alpha games, I see how you can sort of wrap your head.

around it. Like, all right, I see how this works. But, you know, the other two moves were just much more straightforward. And yeah, the raw damage was high, right? Yes. So, yeah, Yon and Yang are... In a skill testing game, this is the most skill testing move in the game. But it's a devastating tool. God, it's busted now. It's straight up unfair. And we'll talk about this in much more detail when we talk about Third Strike. Yeah, like, I mean, basically, what this allows you to do is you make a bunch of shadows behind Yon, everything you do ends up like if you punch, then the little shadows will punch like a frame behind you. So you can basically sit there and like in Alpha 2 when you go into your custom combo mode and you can sit there and you get a bunch of shadows and just punch

and kick and throw fireballs. This, if you know how to use Yon or Yang well, will allow you to basically create a setup that will triple all of your moves in terms of damage and combo ability. and if you learn to use like the juggles and the OTGs and everything in this game, it basically becomes like a one hit kill almost. If you're doing it right, it's just kind of like you can just go into this chain and it becomes almost tech and like in the artistry of how quickly you win. Right.

And in the game that is so defensive and, you know, doesn't usually have such big hitting moves. The fact that, you know, with that super, you can create a gigantic chain of moves. That's why that's what makes it feel almost broken because it's like it's, it upends the entire, the entire nature of it.

Oh, yeah, he's king tier in this game. And it's, so all three of the supers, right? Like, there's one that's a pretty straightforward option. So for thinking about Ryu, it's the Shinku Fireball. Everybody kind of knows what that's supposed to be. It's a fireball that hits a bunch of times. And then there's usually like a nuclear option, right? So like the Shinsho Ryukin is one of the strongest moves, if not the strongest in

new generation. And then there's the Dengen, which is kind of what like people think of as the technically interesting like odd man out sort of move and that is why people sort of strayed away from the genn early on because i mean they weren't living in japan they didn't have all the resources that the japanese players did over here is that i mean unless you're really sinking a lot of time and learning how to use yon and yang the geniegen is not going to be an attractive choice and it's just it's such a freakishly powerful tool that yeah if that's why you watch tournaments of third strike And nine times out of ten, it's a young player or a Chunle player finishing the tournament out.

It's just too good. And I hate his guts. It's busted in half. Why don't we move on to Elena, the tribal warrior woman from Africa? So Elena, I love Elena. Her animation is stunning. It is one of like the most fluid, beautiful things in an already fluid and beautiful game. However, however, they gave her a Brazilian martial art instead of her random pan-African, where is she from?

I don't really know. Sudo-Kenia, I guess. But she's studying abroad. And she's this tall, lanky chick in this amazing, like, bikini thing kicks the crap out of you. She's got incredible, like, kick moves and also a healing super, which was wild and super, super, super annoying. Because the CPU could always manage to get it off at the right time, and you never could. She is hard to play, but cool, if that makes sense. Like, her timings are really weird.

because her frames like her moves take an odd number of kind of frames and they like chain together bizarrely and they have weird lengths that are kind of unorthodox for normal street fighter her spacing is all over the place like when you look at her animation her legs look like they're independently as tall as she is and it's like really really weird to try to figure out where things would actually land but at the same time she's halifond to play. She's super, super cool. And, like, you smile when you see you're just floating around that screen. Yeah. Elena's got our fans. You know, I've, I've always kind of contended that, like, in a game that finally did away with a lot of the stereotypes that the earlier Street Fighter games

are kind of known for, that Elena really doubles down on bad stereotypes. Like, oh, it's not, it's not great. It's not great. It's real bad with Elena. But, I mean, past that, we have to I have to talk about David Lee Roth for a second. Yes. So. Okay. So the animation in this game, beautiful and fluid as it is, right? Like, there has been a lot of debate amongst the super fans is that is this game rotoscoped or not.

And it's been like this for years. And rotoscoping is getting back to Ralph Bakshi. Right. It's Prince of Persia. It's like you basically, you videotape somebody and then you take all the frames of what you taped or filmed, then you draw cells over top of those. So you're basically just animating something that you've previously filmed. So a big contingent of people out there are like, no, look at Elena, look at the way she moves.

It's fluid, but that cannot possibly be rotoscoped. There's traditional animation technique in there, like smearing and bouncing and whatever the other terms are until some guy on the internet, I can't remember who this hero is, but. he was watching David Lee Roth's video to his cover of Just a Gigolo and found that there's a woman in a scene that does like, Elena has a winning pose where she's sort of like, you know, does this sultry, like puts her hands on her knees and sort of squats down. Like my wife came in watching me play that one day.

She's like, what the fuck is this? But it turns out that that animation is taken directly from a backup dancer in this David Lee Roth video. So parts of this game clearly are rotoscoped. And I just love the idea of these... And she sticks her ass like three miles out. Right. These filthy guys in Japan just watching this video 10,000 times over so they can get the animation of that right. Like, if you want to talk about the amount of time that they put into frames, just consider the amount of jiggle that they hand through to Elena.

Like, because I'm looking at her sprite page on the wiki and it's just like, Guys, I get it. You were bored. You had a lot of time. But, guys. Yeah, it's a little icky, right? It's a shower. And, you know, there's some of that in Ibuki, which is still kind of gross because they're both supposed to be teenagers, right?

But, like, they really went for it with Elena. They really went for it. Yeah. Ibuki, though, is, like, clothed, right? Like, yeah. She's wearing a full-on suit. Elena is not. Less so.

Less so. Less so. Well, let's move on to the most naked character, who is the boss, who you can't play as. And he's, he's really something. A pain in the ass. Gill, not Simpsons Gill. This is Street Fighter Gill. And he really looks, to me, he really looks like a S&K style, like King of Fighter's like weirdo.

Like, he doesn't, you know, he looks human, but he doesn't look like a person you'd ever meet. Like, what's, what is this guy, you know? He looks like. Broly, yeah, he's got the big, he's got, yeah, gigantic hair, half his body is red for fire, half his body's blue is ice, his fireball, his projectiles, depending which when you do, is either fireball or an ice ball. I thought that was actually really, really clever way to. I mean, it's very impressive, the fact that he's, you know, most characters, they just, you know, they're mirrors, you know, that is they just, they just flip around, but he's like, he's got to have, so he's got to see, you know. So, part of the street fighter wiki, Gil's asymmetrical color scheme was a device for Capcom to display. the graphical power of the CPS 3 board.

In previous 2D Street Fighter game, details such as Sagitt's iPatch would switch sides depending on which way the character was facing. Originally, Gill was to be colored black and white and utilized power to over light and darkness, but it was later decided to color him red and blue to show off the game's graphical power. And so that actually makes

a whole lot of sense because I remember one of the coolest things I ever saw when he first showed up, I was like, holy crap, this guy can do ice and fire? That's so crazy. Because, you know, like the fact that DJ has maximum written on his foot because that looks

the same both ways. We're going to tell you flip it instead of like mantis like they wanted. Or, and it's just like that's such an ingenious way to show off the detail in this game. I thought it was super sick. I thought it was super, super sick. I did not put that together until just now

the maximum thing. I never Oh yeah. It was today's year old when I figured that out. Yeah, that was one like when you look at it the way that they mirrored that Sprite so that M-A-X-I-E-M-MOM. Yeah, anyways, it's symmetrical. It's wild because originally it was supposed to say Mantis.

But that would flip over. The S wouldn't work, yeah. Or the end. It just didn't look good, but Maximum totally does. Oh, my God. But yeah, so Gil, Gil is a miserable boss. Yes. Miserable boss.

Yes. In that K-O-F lineage of total BS bosses that were, that are just designed to take money. Yeah, Gil is, he's on that list. Because if you beat him, you didn't beat him. Yeah, you have to, you have to kill him before he gets super because Gil and New Generation has one super. It's the resurrection. It's awful. And, uh, it is horse crap. But the AI is so mean by the time you get to Gil that there's, there's next to no way that you're going to, you're going to beat him on a normal or higher difficulty before he gets super. So it's, it's a hot mess. It's cheap.

It is cheap as a half, man. Is it even possible to hit him out of it? Or is it literally impossible? Yes, you can. But he's always- You have to kill him before he get to full stock, basically. He'll, he will get some life back every time. But if you time it right, you can maybe get him before he gets to half or more.

But Gil is kind of interesting in the context of where games are at that point. And that, like, a lot of RPGs around this time were starting to really, embrace the kill-your-god's kind of narrative hook, right? So, like, the Final Fantasy games got real deep into that by the time the PlayStation games came out. Brotho Fire, too, was already out for a few years at this point. So, like, you know, Gil is supposed to basically be like the Christian god on earth that you're supposed to beat on, right?

And that's another thing, I think, that American players, at least, were sort of not used to seeing in video games yet. And to me, we hadn't quite gotten to the Final Fenty 7 level of every, every other game, like Dragon Quest 7. Right. Like, yeah, Jesus here and you're going to kill him. That's the same year. So it's, it's, it's, FF7 is out in Japan by the time Street Fighter 3 hits, but it's not out in America yet. So it was not, we were not trained to kill Jesus yet.

Yeah, at that, at that point. And like, for me, as, um, as a 17 year old kid at the time who grew up in a very Catholic family, this was like weird. taboo to me. Like, I'm going to beat up on Jesus. Is that, are we for real right now? And I think that that sort of thing gave this game a sort of mystique, right, over time. And that like, because it was a financial flop and it went, it went hard into sci-fi and, you know, the metaphysical that I, I mean, especially for me, maybe I'm just sort of projecting here that like, it gave the game sort of a dangerous feeling to it that because people were just not used to seeing this kind of shit yet. didn't have Evangelian in America at this point. And if we did, it was people bootlegged

tapes, right? So, it gill is a weird, terrible boss to fight, but he's an interesting guy, I think. He was, I mean, like, all that was lost on me, because all I saw was this idiot that just would not die. And he was so stupid and so frustrating that it was like this, it really took a lot of the fun out of the game. Because, like, the bosses, I don't mind bosses being hard. I mean, it's fine for them to be hard, but it's not fine for them to be like obviously cheating. Like, resurrecting in a game

where none of the rest of us get to is cheating. And that felt just like, it felt like in a game that's testing your skill in a game that's about how good are you as a person able to react and respond, learn and grow in this play, for the game to just outright, out and out, cheat just felt like

a betrayal of the agreement that we had. Right? Like, we're in this game. I'm going to, you're going to give me a challenge. and I'm going to try to overcome it. You just being able to say, like, by the way, I had my fingers crossed. That's horseshit, sorry. It's a complete, total horseshit. And I agree.

And I really think that that's probably why they never made a playable arcade version of Gil. He was playable when the home versions came out. But at that point, you paid your money, right? You're getting a console experience now. But, yeah, I definitely agree. You're really getting robbed of something when you play against Gil, I think. Yeah. So, yeah, the Street Fighter 3. It came out. It was a colossal flop.

Yeah. And also, just in terms of once we all got over, kind of the floppiness of it, the game itself just does not hold up. it is not nearly as good as its successors. And everybody from Street Fighter and from Capcom to the player base just acknowledges it and nobody ever plays it. Like I've never seen a tournament level Street Fighter 3. We've got a quote from Obata again. He said, I personally felt that the game was incomplete.

You know, he describes the first version. Again, as we said before, I think, John, what do you compared it to KOF 12, was it, or 13? We're just like, Final Fantasy 13, yeah. You know, we got to get this done. We got to get this out. We've got to get something on the market. Yeah. It's, um, so here's a really good example.

By the time Street Fighter Turbo, Street Fighter 2 Turbo came out, Ken and Ryu had air hurricane kicks. They jump in the air and you could, you can perform it. And it's different in the later Street Fighter 2 games to sort of diverge on what they do, but they're there, right? Those don't exist in, in new generation. They exist in the other two games too. But like, I think that's a pretty good example of like, you know, Ken and Ryu play like this. And even if you're going to adjust them,

they still have to have these certain things that make them work. And, yeah, New Generation was a game that clearly, like, they ran out of time. There was probably some higher up reading down their necks at that point. They're like, you need to get this to the market now. You've spent so much time and money on this. It needs to get out now. And you can certainly feel that. And if you play it, especially if you're trying to, like, learn a game like that

competitively, It just, it didn't work. Yeah. Which is why only six months later, we get the giant attack. Yeah. Second impact comes into play. You know, somebody's obviously been watching Evangelion when they're naming these games. But second impact was, I mean, okay, I'm not, I shouldn't take the lead on this because

that's the one I played like the least of. But it did add extra characters, which was much needed. It added a bigger roster. It changed the timing of Perry's. smidge. It brought in bonus rounds again, which we totally I mean, bonus rounds were just such an iconic part of the streetfighter experience. And

it was cute to bring them back. And my favorite one, the basketball one, where you actually learn how to parry. Because here's the thing. And I should have mentioned this at the beginning. One of the things about fighting games and in arcades is that aside from maybe on the marquee,

there might have been a little list of like moves like do the Hadoon down to forward plus punch or whatever, right? Generally speaking, they didn't even have that much. So you would put your coins in and you would be playing blind, right? Like, we would learn, find, through osmosis, watching our friends and stuff, being like,

oh, he wiggled the controller this way. Something happened. Rad. Perrys are not something you can learn by osmotically wiggling the controller and hoping something happens. Right? No, you have to learn by doing with something like that. When you introduce a fundamental gameplay system like that is

absolutely fundamental learning how to play and win the game, And the first time you see it is because a boss just screwed you out of your fireball and you don't know what the hell he did or how. It's impossible. So in Second Impact, they introduced this thing because Sean's a basketball player. So they have this little area where a bunch of basketballs get thrown at you and you have to learn how to parry them.

And being able to do that where you get to just sit there and practice tapping forward and figuring out how to do low parries and air parries and stuff is it's a little bit of a bone to be thrown. and I welcomed it. I was like, thank you for at least giving me this. Yeah, this is an arcade game, right? So, like, the consoles at the time did not have the muscle to play New Generation or second impact on that. I mean, it's not until the Dreamcast came out.

So even though your PlayStation could play Tekken and your Saturn could play Virtual Fighter, they couldn't play the Street Fighter three games. So I paid a dollar a game when I first found New Generation. generation. I was at an amusement park the first time I saw the game. I don't think I told this story, but like the first time I saw Street Fighter 3. And it only said three on the marquee, by the way. That was Capcom's dumb way of marketing the game. But like, even me, I was like, oh my God, there it is. There's Street Fighter 3. Oh, my God. It's a dollar to play this. That's kind of bullshit. So I spent the money I brought with me to eat lunch to play

Street Fighter 3. But like, the computer's not going to sit on one side of the screen and chuck fireballs at you so you have an opportunity to learn how to parry. That's not how it works. So having something like the basketball mini game is a bone to throw at you. It's a good way of kind of giving the player an opportunity to sort of come to terms with what is an essential part of the game that if you don't have somebody else physically they're helping you out at an arcade, also spending a dollar a game, that's a pretty big, I mean, that's a big ask, right?

That's a big way, that's a big ask from Capcom to throw extra money at the game. John, I just really, Street Fighter 3 literally took your lunch money. Zing. Yes, I'll never live it down. Second impact fixed a lot of the game, a lot of it. So it introduced a lot of things that are sort of under the hood. It did adjust Perry's a little bit. But a lot of what happened was that the team

certainly saw what they had put out with New Generation. They're like, we're not done yet. We have to go back to the drawing board right now. So they brought in Hugo, which and or from the final fight games is a classic sort of Street Fighter's sister series as we think of them now, who was supposed to be a new generation but was like half finished before they had to scrap them to get the game shipped. They put in Akuma and a Shin Akuma super boss, and Akuma was playable. and he's a goddamn monster in that game, too.

In every, yeah, this is before they were like, oh, what if we made him a balanced character? Yeah, they did sort of crank him down a little bit. So Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 sort of did a lot to make Akuma a more palatable character, like for, you know, for balanced purposes. Street Fighter, or New Generation did that a little bit too, but he's still just a gorilla in this game. But they, and then they put in a head swap,

of Gil called Urien, Gil's brother, who is a fascinating character. Urien is awesome. He is awesome. Sort of this, this Greco-Roman god type, like if Gil is the Christian god, you can sort of look at Urian, like part of the Greek pantheon. And they introduced gameplay mechanics with Urian that I don't think we're intentional that totally changed how we sort of look at Street Fighter now with the Aegis Reflector move.

God, that move. So the Aege's Reflector is maybe one of the most iconic moves in modern, like in Street Fighter 3 at least, basically he puts his hands out there and shoots this kind of mirror. It's a super art that makes his mirror appear in front of him that effectively creates a wall that moves with him. So he can sit there and then just, basically beat you into this

phantom wall, bounce you off at a whole bunch of times, which then uses the damage mechanic of Street Fighter to reset kind of the way the commos does so your damage doesn't keep getting reduced by the attacks that you're doing. And it's just brutal. It's brutal. It's hard to get out of.

Yeah, but Urien could reliably put people in unblockable states, meaning that like, no matter what you do, unless you were good at parrying, it kind of comes back to that, unless you were good at parrying, Urien can put you in a no-in scenario. Other characters could, and these things are not brand new to fighting games as of

second impact, but yeah, a lot of really interesting thought went in the gameplay of, you know, the gameplay design of these characters, but it's still the second part of a game that did real, real bad, and it did really move the needle too much as far as sales, because, again, I don't think I've ever seen a second, second impact cabinet in my life. I've never seen one. I've only ever played this game when it was put out with the Street Fighter one with the, there was the double, what the hell did they call it? Double impact. Double impact. Yeah. The double impact that came out for Dreamcast where it was Street Fighter 3 and then Three Fighter 3 second impact, the only time I've ever seen or played this game. And it was

weird. It's weird. But I love it. It's, okay, so here's a really, this is, again, this is my perspective but second impact is basically a lost video game right so new generation came out it came with some fanfare you know the magazines were all about it people were like oh my god finally they learned a count to three and all that but like second impact came out is basically a make good on new generation but when new generation came out especially in japan like in japan the media the print media over there really embraced fighting games a big big way like we did here in the u.s too but like if you think of game pro putting out their own like strategy guide supplements that they would like throw into magazines and eGM would do something like that like there are magazines called arcadia

and gamest in japan that would put out these elaborate gorgeous strategy guides that the capcom staff would help them right so it's basically here are all the moves here's all the ways to fight against the computer here are the ways to fight in tournaments if you're using this person in a tournament and then here are pages and pages of frame data if you really want to pour over kind of thing, right? So clearly Capcom wanted New Generation to be a big hit because the gameist strategy guide they put out for this thing is just hilariously gorgeous. It's beautiful. New Generation did not get that because the game came out so quickly after New Generation. Second Impact was... New Generation hadn't worn out Utlopham yet. Right. And Second Impact came out so quickly.

that like all the really good players could still do the stuff that they did in New Generation effectively, but they're still like you and I just sort of learning on the fly. And then Third Strike wasn't that far behind. I mean, they had a lot more development time compared to New Generation to Second Impact. But within a year, the game was dead because they had another update at that point. And there is almost no documentation about Second Impact online. There are very, very, very few people who know the real ins and outs of the game because no one, no one played it

and everybody stopped playing it almost immediately. It's a really strange artifact, I think, in like the overall Capcom over. Now what's wild is, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Oh, go ahead. But what's wild is that this is the same amount of time that was between

Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition and Street Fighter 2 Hyperfighting, but Hyperfighting and Champion Edition both made gigantic splashes. recognize them like understood them and played them second impact

which incidentally had a whole bunch of really interesting changes that happened of the game literally didn't even exist nobody knew what happened like when third strike

came out I remember being like how is this is a third maybe they're just calling third strike as a riff on three I don't understand but like for instance one of the things

that second impact introduced that was like kind of new to Street Fighter even or the Street Fighter 3 series is it introduced X moves right where if you do like a move if you do a fireball where it's like you know

quarter circle and punch it's a fireball if you do quarter circle and two punches it's an X fireball that does more damage and flashier and stuff and burns a little super meter yeah burned a little bit of your super meter but it also changes kind of the way you can combo it adds a lot of tactical maneuverability

and a lot of like interesting strategic it opens up a lot more doors yeah and this game also introduced the ability to like escape from throws to do the character taunts. So there's like a whole bunch of cool things that came out in this that literally vanished because it just never happened.

Yeah, the tournament life in Japan for this game was minimal in fixing a lot of kind of the overall structure of the game by adding things to it. And I will say that like one of the coolest things about the Street Fighter three games past new generation is that taunts boosts stats for characters. So like not only does,

like Dudley throw a rose, but it also boosts his attack for his next attack. I always thought that was cool, and I wish that they would bring that back. But like, um, they accidentally busted a couple of characters. Like, Sean, ironically, became the monster of this game because he, there was a bug in the code that made him build super

faster than other characters if he, if he, if he lived, um, his, his normals were really good. His special moves were, were fine. So like, he became an awesome character. And they, they totally, like, 360ed on that by the time, or 180 on it for Third Strike. But

yeah, so New Generation is, I it's a sadly weird footnote that I wish more people kind of put some time into, but it's hard to, that's a big ask for me because we have Third Strike next, which is one of the best video games ever made. Yeah, like

it's hard to say, go back to the missing link when literally Third Strike is one of the greatest fighting game for all time. Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, my friend. Yeah, it's all the academic at this point to go back to Second Impact. It's like, okay, well, that's clever and nice. I'm glad Second Impact exists so that we could have Third Strike.

But second impact came out in September 30th, 97. So like October 97, November 97, something like that. And then in 99 is when we actually got third strike, which is wild to think about that. It took two years for them to put out an iteration of a game that was essentially dead in the water. And I'm impressed that Capcom bothered to fund it even. Like, why would they do that? That is a good point. It doesn't make sense to me.

Like, if you've got two failing games, maybe they were, I mean, and like Alpha 3 had come out and is already like, you know, one of the great, great games of all time. And it's doing well. All the other kind of pseudo spinoffs of Street Fighter were doing great. Maybe they just wanted to go back to the well and just see if the system had something. But, but like, it's weird because, you know, the design team left. So I don't understand. How did, where do we get? Like, who decided that, hey, you know what?

We need to do one more. And let's make it a good one. because it ended up being literally the best one. They got so much time to really tinker with second impact. It's a lot. And especially since like if we're thinking in terms of the alpha games, like the home versions of those out of the alpha games are phenomenal. Like the PlayStation 1 version of Alpha 3, it adds the world tour mode.

It's one of my favorite games of all times. Tons of extra characters. Like they were clearly adding more stuff to games that were already pretty successful. not Street Fighter 2 level successful, but pretty good, right? And I mean, somebody higher up at Capcom must have really believed in Street Fighter 3 and they're like, we need to fix this. Like, this was a flop. We can fix this. And I think some things got jettisoned.

Other things were really given to this. But holy cats, I'm glad they did because, yeah, you know, sometimes third strikes the reason to get up in the morning. I feel like there must have been a sunk. loss fallacy at work here, right? Because, you know, they've already, they've invested so much money. I mean, we had a quote here from saying, like, they estimated that they spent a billion yen, which is about $8 million to get the first game even out there. And yet, at least the numbers that we've, people have remembered over time, they estimated that they only sold a thousand units of Street Fighter 3, like the original Street Fighter 3. And a Capcom, the Capcom manager estimated that in the U.S.

they maybe only sold 300 units. That is so mind-boggling. Compared to 3,000, just like for comparison's sake, compared to 3,000 of Marvel versus Capcom, which is a game I definitely saw in a lot of places, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously those numbers are much smaller than early 90s anyway, because late 90s, early 90s are two different environments for the arcades.

But I'm thinking this because they had already invested so much and because Tree Fighter had been so big, I think they just said, well, look, we can't let it end like this, It's like when, you know, you mentioned magic. Like, if I, if I play magic and I get my ass beat, I don't stop playing until I at least win one. That's how I do. Yeah. No, I'm winning one with this deck. This deck is good.

I'm going to win one game. So I think, like, no, this street fighter, it's a good street fight. It's a good street fighter. We got to get one win here. It might also be like the sunk cost of the fact that the CPS3 board costs so much to develop that they're like. Probably also a factor, yeah. Did you know there are only six games that were put out on CPS3? I believe it because that's, three of them were.

Street Fighter 3. Two Jojo's and then some game called Red Earth, which I don't even... We're finally getting a home port of Red Earth Yeah, it's Warzone, right? Red Earth's Warzor? Right. That's exciting to me.

I've never even seen this game. Wow, that looks hella cool. Oh my God, the art is nutty, man. It is nutty. Marvel Capcom 2 was Naomi, right? That's the movie with Naomi. Yes. Because the Naomi platform was just the

being able to port to Dreamcast was just such a winning move. Dreamcast becoming like the fighting game system of choice. Totally. Yeah. But so it's Third Strike. Third Strike. Let's talk about the most elegant and beautiful game ever designed. First off, the soundtrack changed. They added lyrics. And they're awesome. I love the songs in this game. Yeah. Credit to Canadian hip-hop artist Infinite.

They're so good. And then there's like a big SUV that you destroy in the bonus page, whatever. But one of the things that was really, really cool about this game. And the game that, the thing that I think actually made Third Strike playable and actually approachable and suddenly into one of the most elegant games of all time is that they realize that parrying in one and two blue and that what they needed to do was actually increase the wide like increase the frame window wherein you could parry

and being able to do that means that you would be able to more humanly be able to actually parry you could actually do it and it was just like holy crap suddenly this works and it's cool and once parrying becomes easier and people can start to explore and understand the system and they understand the elegance

of the system then it's like oh this is suddenly a really cool and neat game and there's a lot of like just nuance here that we missed entirely because we couldn't figure out how to play the goddamn thing and so Three Fighter 30 and the other thing they introduced was the guard parry or the red parry

red parry yeah which basically means that if you're in a block and then you do a parry move right after that, then it would do this red kind of outline around your dude and it will give you much more frame advantage after you parry their move, which allows you

to then reversal or do a combo which suddenly opened the entire game up. And it made it much more of a back and forth instead of just a like you attack, I parry and then I attack back. So they made paris basically easier and harder.

at the same time. So they did adjust the frame windows for parrying, but they also took out new generation and second impact at two jumping parries. So if you hit forward on the stick or down on the stick when you parry something in a jump, you land in a different way. Like they eliminated that. So like you only parry forward, you land in this kind of manner. But red parries were basically made to give you an opportunity to parry out of a blocked state.

So, like, if Chenley hits you with her super and you're about to get chipped out because you're blocking it and you're about to die because you're blocking all of these hits of a super move, the red perry could get you out of that. It helps. It's the no-win scenario reversed. So it gets you out of, like, the worst possible situation. But the timing of a red parry is freakish, right? It is impossible. Yeah, you only see red parries in ultra-high-level play with people that know exactly what, that something is, going to hit multiple times, and they can turn that to their advantage.

So one of the cool things about the Red Perry, and is that for the average scrubbed-year player, what it gave you this feeling of is like, you're in a block, you're getting, you know, chipped out, you're about to die, and you're just flailing, and suddenly your character gets this, like, last store of energy shoves the dude out of the way and you can get free. And it's got this amazing kind of like reversal catch-up dragon ball feel. and it's like you're like I'm never going to be able to do that again but holy crap I got out of it

it's like it's a story mechanism even today if you were to like watch a third strike tournament and you would see you never ever see a Red Perry well no but if you do you can hear the crowd kind of murmur

like oh all right yeah what's up crap yeah like oh now shit's going to go down yeah because like you're like oh that that dude's real that dude is real god damn I love this game so much Getting back to sort of what you said about the music, and I, look, I'm a, I'm a 42-year-old white dude from Ohio, so I can't really speak to this very much.

Well, it's a 41-year-old from San Francisco. Let me tell you about the young people. Well, it's, third strike was Capcom's real attempt to start embracing their audience because the third strike soundtrack is, is all hip-hop and trip-hop beats. Hell yeah. And it's all badass sampled trip-hop music. and like I really do think that they were seeing that trip hop is more like ambient chill this is definitely more hip hop flavored and it was definitely more like jazzy but yeah okugawa's was really into like jungle and really in trip hop and really especially in like the earlier games but he he really did a pivot into sampled hip hop with this game and that's yeah i think that

that is a really clear kind of embrace of of their who they saw in america was playing these games, right? I think there's a, you're actually exactly right. You're 100% right. And I think that there's this story that doesn't get told in fighting games as often as it should, which is how outside of Japan, in America, for instance, and in, like, Mexico and in, like, the Arabian countries and in Brazil and stuff, fighting games and Street Fighter were, like, deeply, deeply played by people of color.

Like, if you go to, like, the arcade to San Francisco in the late 90s, they're all Asian kids who were playing Street Fighter or like, you know, other ambient brown kids from the Bay Area. In New York, it was very much an Asian scene and a black scene. And these games were absolutely embraced by the African-American, the Asian-American communities, the Latino communities. And Capcom, like, when you look at the characters that they introduced later in four and five and stuff, and you're like, oh, these guys understand that the people who play this are like Arabs or Brazilians or, you know, Mexicans or Filipians or, like.

Or black kids from New York. York, right? Black kids from New York. And like, they got that. And they're like, and I'm so, for a game that gave us dulcim and like, you know, all of these other horrific caricatures, I have to give them credit for learning and embracing and like accepting that there's this audience of people who want to play it. Let's give them something to feel good and make them feel like this is for them. Yeah, right. Let's include them in the culture.

Yeah, exactly. they started with Marvel's Capcom too as well with like the kind of hip hop jazziness but Street Fighter 3 man they straight up said look the black kids are the ones playing the game we're going to give it to them and it was fantastic I just can I give a quick shout out

there's a YouTube channel called J Music Ensemble and it's a New York troop of they call themselves the New York NYC's J-pop jazz band and they do a lot of covers of game music and they just they have a phenomenal cover of the the jazzy NYC track

on their YouTube channel. And I really recommend people to check out their stuff because, yeah, it's just, it's a bunch of real, you know, real folks getting together and they're playing these music. They play it live. And it's really, I mean,

I didn't see live. I'm seeing it recording of it. But it's very, it's really exciting to sort of, you know, get caught up on. It's almost like, it's like the small venue version of like the symphonic Zelda concerts,

you know? Like, it just, it's got, it really connects. I think it's perfect for the, for the material. That's a better vibe, I think, than like, I wouldn't want to see a large symphonic

version of this soundtrack in an amphitheater or whatever. I want to go to a club, man. I want to be... Definitely. It's like when I saw the Res soundtrack in downtown Tokyo in a club where that's like, okay, I have

discovered Nirvana. This is a way of the world. But like, I want to be in a grimy club in New York listening to these beats. This is sweet. But the game is a beautiful. The game is a beautiful game. Third strike is chess.

It is. And I've said this on Twitter a couple of times. Other people have two. It's when we think of chess in video game terms, right? Like when the Queen's Gambit came out, this came up a lot in Twitter conversation. So, like, if there was a video game version of chess, which is this very old game that only incrementally changes rules over hundreds of years, what do we have? Third strike might be that for us. I know that that is a very pretentious thing to say.

I understand that. But, like, it is a game that is basically encased in Amber because Capcom has not touched it and seems to refuse to do so. It's still being played by a large group of people that has sort of fluctuated, it's expanded and contracted. and it's back to an expanding phase of its life. And even though the tools of the game have always been there since it's been released, people are still finding new, I mean, not only new combos to do in the game,

but like new ways to break the game in tournaments. They're like the tier lists of this game have shifted over time, even though Yon is still bullshit and he's still going to be on the top. Like, Makoto, who we're going to talk about in a second, Makoto went from like a cool popular character that was difficult to use to being like maybe S tier in this game because we figured out that Makoto can can touch of death people. She gets one hit off and that's the match.

So it's third strike is is a very difficult game to learn like chess. The stuff that's running under the hood of third strike are crazy complex, sort of like chess too. But like when you look at something like the queen's gambit and basically throughout that entire show. They're like, oh, did you see so and so and so and so when they played in 65 or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Third strike is, is that kind of game. Did you see Deschikin play Sugiyama at this tournament and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because they do something that's absolutely bonkers. People talk like this. It's not just me. I'm not crazy.

But, I mean, it's all because of Avo, the greatest tournament of all time. So I was lucky enough to be at the Battle by the Bay is one and two because they were up the street from my college because I went to school in UC Davis and they were both in Folsom, California where I used to go to play DDR a lot. So I got to go see those and that was before I really knew

who the faces and stuff were. But when you're at a real street fighter tournament watching people like Alex Valle play, you're like, this is sacred. I'm watching people play this game at a level that is muscle memory that is beyond anything that I can comprehend. You are watching concert pianists, like, play at a hall at the moon, basically.

It's like watching Bella Fleck, you know, you're like, or like watching one of these guys just masters. Like, if you go online and you put in like Charles Bertode in YouTube and watch him play the guerrillas, like, you know, any random song, but on bass like playing with masterful, like classical bass skill. And you're like, this is insane. I don't understand how this is happening. But when you watch this, because of this game and because of Ava later in, you know, San Luis Obispo or whatever it was, and that video that went around and it was passed around on videotape and in real media clips. We sat and we watched Justin Wong, the greatest American player of that era, play against Daiga Umahara, who is the greatest fighting game player of all time. and they sit there in Street Fighter 3 in the quarterfinal matches going in

and they're going down they're playing the slug fast we've been talking about going down to one click of life and you sit there Wong does the Chun Li super which is like gonna chip Ken right out there's no way you can get out of this and Daigo just gets the soul

Perry and it just hits all like 13 or whatever of those goddamn hits and then comes back with the super and it's literally the greatest thing of all time But there's a reason that video has got like hundreds of millions of views. There's a reason why you can take that Ava Moment 37 clip, show it to anybody who has never seen a video game, never seen a fighting game. Has no conception of what is going on.

And they can sit there and they will immediately, immediately understand that they've just seen one of the greatest things of all time. My favorite thing, my favorite thing about the video is when you watch it, I don't know if it's all versions, but there's at least one version of it where it includes sort of the lead-up to that moment. And you can hear, you can see what's going to happen so people in the audience could tell. Let's go, Justin. Yeah. People could tell he was going to go for, you know, go for the Super to sort of just block him out. Yeah. You can see the bar.

And people, people in the crowd are saying, don't do it. Don't do it. They try to warn him. Like, don't do it. To his credit, to Justin's credit, especially the last year. So he started a YouTube channel. Oh, it's great. Yeah.

So much fun. It's awesome. He's really embraced that. He's like, this guy can't paring me. And he'll go in there and he'll let people try to, try to diego parium. Well, he knows what his legacy is. He is. I think that's great.

I think he's really sort of embraced that. But I think something that a lot of people don't know is that the Street Fighter 3 games were such a flop that especially to Americans, the American fighting game scene did not like these games. It did not at all. Because there's a mechanic that the Street Fighter 3 games borrows from Darkstalkers and that you can whiff medium or hard moves like a strong punch, medium kick, whatever. and it'll build super meter. So when Third Strike came out, it was basically just like, people picked Ken because the Super 3 was good.

People picked Chun because their Super 2 was good. And they would sit at corners and with normals. And they were just jockey for space until they got a super out. It was bullshit, right? So they essentially gave up on the game. And Justin was awesome at it because he knew what Chun could do. And there's, I will say that there's maybe an apocryful story of like,

while you were in college, Sheevam. They put a third-strike cabinet in one of those arcades like Golf Land or something like that and everybody knew that Chen Lee was busted but all the Chen Lee players are like, keep her mouth shut, don't tell Capcom because we want her to be good in this game. I fully believe that man, because that's

the vibe of the arcades at the time. So, Evo 2002 rules around and that's when the Japanese players were starting to come over. They were invited over because it was incentive for Japanese players to come and mop up these tournaments because in Japan at the time, there was a law against you winning money in video game tournaments.

So they would come to America and they would just like, you know, we'd lose our shirt to them. So there was this exhibition match in 2002. This is famous now, but for different reasons in that Tokito, who's a famous street fighter player. Oh, God, I love Tokito. Yeah, he's a big famous Street Fighter 5 guy even to this day. Look, I'll be honest with you, the four gods of Japanese fighting games are my heroes. I love them all. Yeah.

I go Takedo and all those guys. But, um, Fudo. So you can find videos of this online and it's mesmerizing. So like Justin picks Chunley, Takeda picks Yerian, who everybody thought was a chump. And, you know, the two of them are, or like, Justin backs up, starts whiff and hard punch to build meter. And Tocito sort of loses his, you know, he loses his cool. He's like, fine, whatever. So he backs up and he starts whiffin hard punch too to build meter.

And all the Americans in the crowd are laughing. They're laughing at this because they know that like, like basically Tokito's throw in the match, right? I mean, because Justin put himself in a corner, Tokito finally gets in with a tackle with Urien and performs what no one had ever saw before, which was like his famous corner unblockable. Urien can do a lot of unblockable moves.

But like he does a corner unblockable on Justin. No one in America has seen this stuff before because, again, they don't have the same sort of documentation that the Japanese had with their strategy guys and their videos and whatever, like the Japanese were playing on a different planet than the Americans at the time. And you can hear like audible gasps of like, what the fuck is happening? And then Justin just gets buried. And then essentially that's when the Americans started to think there was a whole lot more to this game than we haven't seen before. Like Seth Killians told me himself. Like the Japanese taught the U.S. how to play this game.

100%. 100%. Because after that tournament, America changed. America's fighting game team was like, oh, we've been treating this game just like a trash garbage game in the corner while we play like tech. And suddenly everybody turned back around. They went and looked at three and they were like, oh, there's an artistry here that we have just entirely. We've, exactly. And like, and that was, that was years after Third Strike came out. Third Strike was in 99. 2002 is clearly in 2002. This is a few years later. And so that's when sort of the legacy of this game that like it was secretly this masterpiece fighting game. It's that's where this and evil. It's sort of. And you know, the proliferation of the internet and YouTube and stuff like that over time. That that's where like sort of the legend of this game started to sort of to grow after the fact. God. God, this game is just like, it's so clean. It's so crisp. It's so balanced. Well, I mean, okay, it's not balanced.

It is not balanced. But it's just got such deep, like, even now, you can watch a Justin Wong stream of him playing Street Fighter 3. And you'll just, you'll just. just be like, there's stuff in here, their moves in here, their characters that are being played that I just cannot fathom how you were doing this. How did you, like, the moves have not changed. Nobody has updated the game. It is the same game it's always

been, but somebody has figured out a way to just tweak it here and here and here to make it just insanely different. And like, okay, I'll be honest, I got to play against Justin Wong once. I got to play Street Fighter against him. He was playing one-handed while talking to somebody

looking over his shoulder and still completely took me into pieces turned me to Ash and I was grateful for the opportunity like he's one of those guys who's like literally one of the greatest to ever do the thing that he does

and to lose to the literal greatest who has ever done the thing he does I think he gets a lot of flack but the truth is Justin Wong could dismantle any other player on the planet except for Daigo and that match even today even now

If I fire that stupid Iva 37 up right now, I'll still get hype as hell. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, my heart skips it be watching that even now. And the thing is, they went in later on in the 30th anniversary re-release of Street Fighter 3. They put it in as an achievement. They're like, oh, yeah, go ahead, try to do the Ava Movement 37. And then when you try it, because they just remake the entire exact scenario, and you're like, oh, this is impossible. How the hell did you do this?

It is so hard. And it's like, oh, my God. If Justin was like, you know, moving at the speed of light, then Daigo was moving at the speed of like quantum mechanics. He's moving at string theory speed. You know, he's like, he is like teleporting like a god. It is insane. And when you watch it, once you know the game, God, are you kidding me? Yeah, there's, there are reasons where like whole books were written about like this one moment in history.

You know, it's, it is really something to behold. But yeah, I mean, Third Strike, it did fix a lot of things. and it sort of altered some mechanics too to make it the game that it is because at that point Capcom had embraced also the fact that like we are making a game for the hardcore. We're not screwing around this anymore.

That's when they finally understood. They're like, look, only three people are going to play this but they're the best of all time. So let me make it for them. And you were going to want to watch them play it. So they altered how throws work. The Street Fighter 3 games have a mechanic that

in Japan it's called the leap attack. But in the West, we kind of call it the universal overhead, where every character can sort of do a little hop and hit an opponent. And if they're ducking, they're always going to get hit. They have to block it high. So in the other games, you would tap down on the stick a couple times and then hit a button, which would get in the way of your parry timing. So they adjusted it in third strike to just the medium and the two medium buttons,

medium punch, medium kick. Stuff like that, right? So they went in, they adjusted how juggles work. They fixed the universal overhead. They fixed parries. and then they added a few new characters and some of them are great and some of them are not great.

Some of them are also there. They exist. Yeah. So cast-wise, you know, the big herald of that Chun Li finally returns. Oh, God. And, first off, so Chunli is, of course,

one of the most popular true-fighted characters of all time. I don't need to tell you who Chunley is, but Chunley in Third Strike was amazing. Unbelievably powerful. Stupidly powerful. Broken in half, powerful.

Yeah, Chen sucks. I hate her. Yeah, she's not fun to play as or against. I mean, she's fun to play as because you win. But she's not fun to play against. They just busted her in half. Her normals are insanely strong. Yeah.

It's just, it's unbelievable how unbalanced she is in the game. So if Jan has, if Jan has the gennijun, which is a tool that you have to learn to use well, Chunli comes armed with basically a shotgun. Like her super two is awesome. And this is another maybe apocryphal story. but I believe it. One of the designers of third strike, because Sotomoto, I think, had moved on at this point,

and they had brought in other fighting game designers into the street fighter, into third strike to basically fix it. Ishizawa, I can't remember his first name off the top of my head. Neoji, he went to, Hitatoshi Ishizawa. He went to Cooperation Cup a couple years ago, which is this gigantic five-on-five third strike tournament in Japan every year.

It's like Third Strike Christmas. God, I love that. It's awesome. I, yes, I go to the gym, and I watch it on my phone because it's happening in Japanese time. And the other people in the gym look at me like I'm a goddamn crazy person. But he went he went to Cooperation Cup and came right out and said, we built Chun Li to not only attract older players,

but to break the meta. We wanted her to be good. And they succeeded. They absolutely did. I mean, dude, this thing hits 17 times. Having to parry 17 times unless you or diego is not going to happen. It is just such a stupid, powerful move.

More than one person in those interviews, they said that they spent the most time of all the new characters. They spent the most time working on Chun Li. So that was, it was definitely, it was a major, it was a major project. And like, they want it. So they, I don't know if that story is true or not, more than one person said that they spent a lot of time on Chun Lee. So I think it's, it's very plausible that they did indeed, like, okay, let's get her right. And she could tell. And her rights were sick.

Exactly. Like, she's really beautiful. animated. And I, Ackyman had moved on from the project at this point, too. So they had a lot of freedom now that, because Ackyman is Chunli's dad, right? Like, he's very sort of, you know, he's, he's kind of come off in interviews over the years as being sort of, now that he's not attached to Capcom as much, he's a freelancer. He's a little, he's not afraid to throw him people under the bus and claiming what's his and Chun Lee is his sort of thing. But once he sort of moved on, they had a lot of leeway to do like whatever they wanted with that character. And, It really shows if you compare her to, like, the alpha, how she plays in the alpha games and how she is in Street Fighter 2, Shun's a little weird. Her animations don't seem like they should match up with what those older characters are like. It doesn't feel like old Chun Li. Her jumps are very bizarre, that weird, skinny, twirley thing. But boy, boy, howdy, is she a good character.

And again, they needed to bring people back. And Chunley is exactly the way to do it. but you know who else they brought in though one of the probably the best new character ever Makoto who we've been talking about all night who is basically just a judica who comes in there moves incredibly slowly

incredibly like you know deliberately stepped up to you punches you once with this tiny little fist that then takes off like 37% of your life and you're like what the hell just happened and this chick like they built around this idea of iken

his satsu which is just like you know the notion of like to annihilate in one blow, right? It means you walk in forward, you do the one inch punch, and then they just like vaporize. And she's incredibly strong. Her moves are like, she's not a person that you're using a ton of her like specials. Though some of her specials, like the the choke or the anti-air one, I don't remember any of the names. They're all weird Japanese names. But like she's got this one called the Hayate where she walks up, she pulls her fist,

back and then just dashes forward and just stomach punches you and it is insanely strong she plays like Dragon Ball before they went super side agent which is incredibly powerful super strong normals and she's

nutty she is just nutty and she's basically like a high level tournament character from yeah you can't play otherwise because for like a new a new player right it's hard to sort of justify that she's the slowest walk speed in the game, but the fastest dash in the game. She moves around

like a nap, but only sort of in very practiced hands. And yeah, she's a round thief. Makoto, this game shows you what this. Round thief. That's a good way to say it. They show you the stun meter. Like in, you know, in fighting games, you can get dizzy if you take enough hits. Like, Third Strike clearly shows you when you are going to get stunned or how close you are to stunting somebody else, right? And Makoto does, just an outrageous just amount of stun with two of her supers. And yeah, that's what makes her such a threat is that you're very, you can be very easily stunned. And like you said, she had them at the beginning of this, that's the round. You get stunned once and that could be it. Yeah. And the thing that's wild

is she can dash up to you like, you know, just flying in and then do the grab the, uh, katakusa, where she grabs you, thrust you up by your neck. And if she's doing the X version, that is literally 50% of your life. Well, it's a free hit afterward too. So like you get caught with something like, it's a free combo so yeah and i've seen stuff before on the internet that says that she was originally made to be reused sister i have never found any corroboration of that if you have it out there person listening to this podcast put it in the comments cite your sources i like makoto just being makoto walking up throwing you and walking away and she's just like she's just here and she's here to ruin your life and then she's going home and i love her

Um, then they also had Remy, who was, like, my main for a very long time. Because Remy, who was, like, my main for a very long time. because Remy is basically like Bishon and Gile You know, he's got beautiful long blue hair And his gorgeous open shirt And these sweet pants And he has

Yeah, and he's this super cool like I mean, his moves suck But his animations are sweet Like he's got this great like Set of Sonic Boom's type of supers that he does Which are just really really fun And I don't know I like Remy a lot

And I like his stage a lot And I like his animation But the character like dies at a sneeze. Like, dude is pathetically bad. You know, me and my friends were huge NeoGeo fans. So we saw Remy as just sort of this weird Iori knockoff.

But I think it was because we didn't realize that, yeah, no, every game, almost every game is going to have a sort of, you know, in Japanese the term is BK, or Bishonan, right, sort of the beautiful man type. So, like, they clearly, they wanted to add a beautiful type man to this game and unfortunately, so it's like

it's not really Eori, it's like, it's just a style of character who Eiori is. kind of a style of, but yeah. And they probably, they debated. They had a, they tried a doctor, they tried a priest, they tried a prince. They had a monster at one point. Like, they, they went through a lot of very, he was the last of the new characters they created, apparently.

He feels like it. Like his moves are very pathetic. Yeah. He was a character that was not made for the, I mean, he was a character that I think they put in this game, the way he plays, I should say. They were put into this game that was, that this game is not built for, right? Like, throwing Sonic Booms, doing a flash kick. lots of charge moves.

With the Perry system, it doesn't eliminate that completely. There are a few really good Remy players out there, but the game is not built around that sort of skill set. He's the exact wrong person for this game, basically. Totally. And he's basically the lost character of this series, he has never been referenced since other than like card games and stuff like that. Like Q has had references, 12 has had references.

Necro and Reni Redmi is up there with like Street Fighter 1 characters Right He happened Okay, we get it You want actual guile We'll give you actual guile Exactly

We don't need off-brand guile But yeah, Remy I'm sorry I mean I liked him I thought he was stylish, he was fun But he's only good If you're playing against people Who don't understand how Perry's work

And these days if you're playing Street Fighter Third Strike You're not playing those people No, it takes a lot of stones To pick up Remy and really try to run a tournament with a Remy. It takes a lot of guts. Yeah.

You mentioned Q, John. You're talking about John Delancey? Yes, I am. You know, the omnipotent Street Fighter character, Q. Q is basically a slow-moving brick wall ballrog. So he's a guy in an iron mask. He doesn't have any lines. He just kind of mumbles.

But, like, he plays, he's the hidden character of the game. So now that they put Akuma on the roster, He was a hidden character in Second Impact, but it takes a certain wing conditions in the arcade mode to play against Q. But Q is, he's very tall. He and Hugo are the tallest characters in the game, which makes him a huge punching bag because he's got a very large hurt box. But he plays the exact same way Ballrog does in the earlier Street Fighter games and that he's got rushing punches of different sort of angles, right? He moves very fast for a guy that big. Actually, his walking speed is almost as slow or is as as as

Makoto, but like the rushing punches kind of give him a little bit of extra. Yeah, like I guess I just think of it. Like every time he moves, it's because he's doing a dashing straight or something like that, which does move much faster than his walk. His walk is definitely just like slow, lumbery. But if he does the charge attack, then he like dashes across. He's got this cool kind of echo behind him. Yeah, we have a really neat animation.

We have a quote here. his combination attack is supposed to look like someone who drunkenly stumbling down the street and singing in high spirits. That's fair. And his idol animation is kind of like that. It's like he's just kind of like bobbing back and forth on his heels. It looks like the guy just, you know, left the bar and he's waiting for his cab.

I also love that I think it's one of the endings, right, that sort of retcon's cue and suggesting that he's sitting in the background of Ken Stade and Street Fighter 2. He's on the boat. Yeah. Not that I suppose. can make that leap. People have, I suppose. But, like, yeah, there's a reference to Mulder and Scully in that ending, too. But he, uh, Q is also not a very big tournament get, but like,

people have sort of figured out how to, how to play with him. But, you know, he's, Q is an interesting concept that, um, I, I think just didn't really pan out. But I've also seen things on the internet that suggested that Q was originally supposed to be a training dummy for for the arcade mode. Like, you could, like, find a secret way to get. And for his height and size and stuff like that, again, I've never seen any citation of this. Again, I'd like to see that if you have it.

But, uh, yeah, but referenced again, sort of in Street Fighter 5 with the G character years later. Hmm. Yeah. And another one of those, like, you know, taken from random robot detective, like, Japanese live action shows and stuff like that. He's a weirdo. He's fine.

I mean, like, it was a. It felt like one of the just gimmick characters that they also just happened to need. I'm always drawn to the weirdos. So that was one guy I played a lot when I bought the Dreamcast version. Like, okay, I want to figure out this Q guy. I love him personally, but he's he's not for everybody. And then there's 12. And then there's 12.

12 sucks. He looks like Necro, but is just like, 12 is such a weird character. In a game of weirdos, he's the, he's the even weirder one. Yeah, he's like this just milky white kind of blob. and his moves are all just like inscrutable letter combinations. He's got this one move that makes him invisible. And it's like, That's his taunt.

Yeah. It's so weird and so hard to like, I mean, I don't know. This dude's just like bizarre. 12 is like T-1000, right? He, you know, his feet turned into axes and stuff like that. So he's like the Terminator kind of character. But 12 is interesting. This is something I sort of touched on earlier is that like if you imported

a character from like the Marvel versus games with like lots of air dashing you know things like that lots of like flying mobility and things like that 12 does that that kind of stuff in this game which I think is interesting but he still sucks he's often considered a very unfinished character maybe because of the amount of animation that they put into him and the odd things that he does but at least in the lore um so 12 is supposed to so necro was made to be a living weapon And he was an android made to be a super soldier, right? So 12 is supposed to be the next generation of that. And if you look at their normal moves, they're essentially the exact same normal move with slight variations, which I always thought was a very cool, clever twist to put in there. But yeah, he sucks. He does no damage. And he takes a lot of hits. But his interesting third super is that he can become the opposing player.

So if you pick Akuma, I pick 12, I can. Burns Super to become Akuma with some slight limitations for a set period. Yeah, those are actually really cool kind of like Sprite fakeouts when he does the clones of becoming the characters. It feels a lot like

Shang Sung in Mortal Kombat. Yeah, right. And it's a neat little, it's a cute effect. It's a fun way to play when you've been playing a lot of Street Fighter 3 and you're just like using it to clone your buddies. Oh, there's no better way to really screw with your opponent and be like,

oh, you're going to pick so-and-so? Well, I guess so am I now. And then you turn into them, like, mid-match. But Capcom really wanted to sort of use this as a way to throw in other reference characters. Like, if you were going to X copy Hugo, for example, you were supposed to turn into Abigail from the final fight games. And, I mean, I think they had other plans for stuff like that, but it never, I think they must have ran out of time. You mentioned the similarities to Necro. I think at one point, he was going to be, like, just a modification of Necro, like maybe like a head swap or something.

but they said that as time went on, he just became an everything swap. So he became more independent. It's funny, though, when you use Xcopy to have for 12 to copy Necro, then it's just like, what happened? Why? Yeah. Can 12 X copy 12? Yeah, there's a funny kind of like, what happened animation

where he just kind of shrugs his shoulders. It's kind of funny. And it's like, hey, bud. There's a really cool Easter egg in this game is if you beat an opponent with a light attack while they're on the ground, they sort of crumple. And 12s is that, like, he basically shrivels into a skeleton, and it's awesome. It's the only good thing about 12, in my opinion. He dies well.

He dies well, yes. Yeah, it's really, actually, it's like you watch him just kind of deflate. It's really gross, but really cool. It's really icky, yeah. So, yeah, that's kind of the third strike in a nutshell. Yeah. I mean, still playable to this day, still one of the greatest games of all time. It is gorgeous.

The soundtrack is stunning. The characters are deeply, deeply unbalanced. But at the same time, there's enough nuance that it's still fun to play. And I don't know. There's a reason it's been held up as a gold standard for so long. long. Even though fighting games have well and past where Third Strike was, like obviously we've innovated

this genre significantly since then, but this game still just stands out as a work of art. So if you follow any other fighting game, like the Tech and crazies or the Guilty Gear people, even they know, I shouldn't say no, but even they

sort of postulate that like, oh, people are in a street fighter, well, I heard that Third Strike is the best street fighter game. And that is a debatable thing. That's, that's semantics, right? But that's sort of part of the legacy that this game has grown over time is that, like, you know, people that are into the genre, but not into Street Fighter, they hold Third Strike in high regard. So it's so funny now. Yeah. But the thing is, the thing that makes me a little sad about that is that third strike is also the most unapproachable.

I mean, of all the Street Fighter games, Street Fighter 3 is the most impossible to play an unapproachable one. And so if you go in there and you're like, well, I heard Street Fighter 3. is the best one, so I'm going to give that a try. You're just going to get shellacked because you don't have any of the muscle memory or knowledge or like build up of understanding of what makes this good. You said it pretty well early in this podcast, you know, that like the stuff that you were doing in Three Fighter II was not working in Street Fighter 3, and that kind of turned you off. And like, if that is sort of what you're scaffolding your prior knowledge on or from, then even

you're not going to understand it at all. Other fighting games, right. I mean, other fighting games have Perry-like mechanics. Many of them have straight up parry mechanics, sort of like Third Strike. But yeah, it's a hard nut to crack. But the good thing is, because it's been such a cult for so long that it's finally kind of getting around to the point where, like, the cult is really welcoming people in. If you get on a fight game. Yeah, because they're old now, man.

We're in our 40s. We need new blood. We need new folks. Alex Valle is like 50 something, man. Come on. Yeah, you get on, if you were to get on Fightcade at any old time. your ass, by the way. You'll get your ass kicked, but like, if you stop and just start asking questions, people will stop what they're doing and they will, they will teach you all kinds of

shit. Just, I mean, I'll be honest, in my personal opinion, four is a better game than three just for the wider audience. Four is, in my opinion, the perfect street fighter game. Turn this podcast off right now. We're done here. It is like absolutely like much more approachable. It's very fun. The characters are all over the place and balance and interesting and different. but three three is like a magnum opus game three is like a Rothko painting or like it's like when you're

you need to appreciate art in order to understand why three is so good but once you do you realize that this is one of the greatest games of all time but if you're not at like that level of appreciation and you watch it and it's like a Swedish art movie that like somebody who's just used to watching blockbusters goes in season they're like I don't

it was very quiet and nothing happened for four hours how is this the best movie They're like, ah, but the nuance of the shadowing in that one scene. And you're like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm going to go back to watching Godzilla. Street Fighter 3, Third Strike, is that art house movie. It is, if you know what you're looking at, it is perfection. And if you don't know what you're looking at, it is definitely a thing that happened.

You heard it here first. Third Strike is a Fellini film. I mean, where's the lie? So, correct me if I'm wrong, but all three versions of Street, Fighter 3 are on the anniversary collection, right? Yes. But I think only Third Strike has online play. Yeah, because they understand the only one that you want to play online is Third Strike.

Basically, yeah. But if you have the anniversary collection, I'm pretty sure you can try out all the versions and see what's, you know, see how the work. And it's so much fun. The game is worth it. It's worth suffering to understand how to play because once you unlock that stage, there's, it's beauty. It is just beauty. And people are out there to help you.

They will help you with this game. Yeah, it's wild that the community is still alive. Yes, it's awesome. Like, Super Turbo, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbos is kind of in a similar boat. The game has been around so long and still played in tournaments. There are nuts out there that will help you figure this stuff out. It just takes a little bit of an inquisitive nature, I suppose. But yeah, all that the games are available on the anniversary edition.

The online is not very well liked by the community. Fightcade is questionable legal but it is sort of accepted as the way to play it online if you want to play the game online but it's good that like this game is sort of

found its renaissance after the fact because there's basically very little next to nothing in the English language about this game out there right so in Japan it's nuts compared to all the other streetfighter games. That's one of the reasons that I found it so attractive is that like no one talked about

it for so long. We never got any of the real strategy guides in the U.S. We never saw any of those interviews. There are still, I could, I could go to my bookshelf right now and get stacks of Japanese guides out with all of these very insightful interviews that I don't read enough Japanese. I'll never know. And they have to this day haven't been translated. Like there's just so much of this game that is lost or unknown to the Western world that, We'll be digging through it for another 20 years, right? Like, a lot of the art for this game, I think, has been lost, like the production art and stuff like that. Whatever is already published is just what must just be out there because nothing else is surfacing at this point.

But the Street Fighter 3 series is interesting in that, like, it has come back around in the public, you know, in the court of public opinion. But it's sad and that we still, there's so much we still don't know about this game. from the end song. Well, it's been a podcast. Let's be a podcast. Let me tell you. And I think it's time we tie this up. We, you know, we finish it. It's final round.

So why don't we start, Sheevim, can you tell people about yourself and where they might find you outside of this podcast? Well, so you can find me online at ElectroTal or GearPory Gears on Twitter, mainly. I have a podcast about Magic the Gathering called Casual Magic that comes out every Tuesday and on YouTube when I put it up there. And mainly I talk a lot about Magic the Gathering, but I like coming on Retronauts to talk about my actual favorite game.

So you could end. that's great i would like to talk to you about more magic sometimes because i've i've gotten fallen back hard into magic recently and i think i'm one of the legitimate world experts i help run the format called commander which is the most popular way to play magic so uh i'm happy to talk about it anytime you want very cool actually there's a recorant episode i did about magic so you should go and listen to that yes we did it was like a it's like a combo episode like half yeah it's a dual magic parish was like i want to hear sheevam talk for two hours so here Civilization and Magic, go.

I want to talk to you about Sweeney-N-N-I-N-I-N-I-L-E-N-O-M-O-M-A-V-O-M-A-R-T-E-N-E-D. Oh, my favorite game of all time. Yeah. John, why don't you tell people about yourself? You can find me on Twitter at John underscore Lernid. That's L-E-A-R-N-E-D. That's my name. Well, you can also find me on YouTube.

Just at YouTube.com slash John Lernid, or just search for the annotated symphony of the night or the annotated Third Strike. I've done other things on YouTube, too, some little videos. Diamond, you were on my sort of 25th anniversary Symphony of the Night live stream

and we archive that on YouTube too. That was a ton of fun, but you can also find me on Twitch at Twitch.tv slash Johnny Pants 7 where I streamed third strike every Friday at lunch. So during the pandemic, I was at home, working from home like

everybody else was and basically I would teach my kid while also working in the morning and then my kid would go downstairs and my wife would teach her in the afternoons and like after that that was over for me I would just fire up third strike on my lunch break on fightcade and I started streaming it every day. So now that I'm not working from home as much, I stream. There's a third strike lunch break on Fridays at noon Eastern and then we do a Dengen and Tonic third strike happy hour on Fridays a little bit in

the afternoon. So Eastern time. I see what you did there. See what I did there now. And John, didn't you make a single video of was it with a Demon Souls? You played Demon Souls for 10 hours? Right. So when Demon Souls hit its 10th anniversary, Demon Souls is in my top five. Right. So for its 10th anniversary, I basically live annotated it. And it took me nine hours and it should have taken me a whole lot less than that. So yeah, if you really got nothing to do for a weekend, there's that on YouTube as well. Who's your main? In Third Strike?

Yeah. I play the show. That was mostly Dengen Ryu, but I'll play Urien. I like playing Q. There's a couple. I hate the twins. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. I don't touch them.

But I don't really jump around the cast very much, but mostly, mostly Ryu. I love me at Ken or a yang. I'm just, they've been my boys for 20 years. And it's not going to change now. Ken is awesome in that game. I typically, I never got good at it. So I don't really have a main. But I definitely, I played a lot of Akuma.

I played a lot of Q. I played a lot of Urian. I thought Urien was pretty cool. Yeah, like, oh, man, I wish Street Fighter 3 had like a Zangif, because that's the guy I want to play, but there's no good crapplers in that game, which for a game that's all much about melee, you would think there would be, but there really just isn't. So it goes. They were planning on putting them in.

I mean, they were planning on making a fourth game, and it never, they never really got too far, but Zangif and Sagat were supposed to be in it. And they put in all of their development tools into the dreamcast version of the game, and that's what the system direction menu is. Ishizawa was talked about this in one of the art books. But sadly, no fourth strike. As for me, well, at first, as for Retronauts, this is Retronauts.

And if you're listening to us, thank you very much. If you'd like to support us, we welcome that. You can go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for $3 a month, you get episodes one week early in a higher audio quality. If you pay $5 a month, which is, that's only $2 more, it's nothing.

You get two bonus episodes every month. and you get a weekly column from me, and I read you the column, too, if you don't want to read it. It's really nice. I put music in there. In fact, I did a column about the 25th anniversary of Street Fighter 3 earlier this year, so you can go back and listen to that if you pay us. You have to pay us.

Outside of that, if you want to just look at me personally, I am on Twitter as Fight Club, F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B, the English word. And I twitch, I have not used Twitch in a while, but I do want to get back to Twitch streaming things because I like streaming things. I like it. It's fun. And I think that's it. So last words from anybody. According to the great judge system, what do you think? This podcast was very successful. But did we get S rank or MSF? MSF?

I don't know, man. I just put it in another quarter to hit start to get past it. Good night. making first move so us are going to be jabbing in the world street by the three the little jabber so what's going to be trapped in the world street by the three making verse moves so what's going to be and jacking in the world street by the three

the little jabber so must going to be jabbing in the world street by the three making verse move so what's going to be jabbing in the world street by the three the little jacking so what's going to be trapped in the world street by the three Thank you.