The Street Fighter series has gone through several major arcs over its 20+ year history. Each new release has received heavy tournament play all over the world for many years at a time. In order for a competitive game to survive under such harsh conditions, it must be elegantly designed, meticulously balanced, and of course somewhat lucky. After all, if a team of fifty designers and testers spend two years working on a game, a community of a fifty thousand players will surpass their combined man-hours within the first week of public availability. Here’s the widely accepted list of Capcom fighting games to have passed the test of time.

Street Fighter II Series

SF2: Hyper Fighting – Quite possibly the purest Street Fighter game ever made, HF demands incredibly sound fundamental skills without providing any super moves or custom combos to bail players out of tough spots. Its quick pace builds reaction time and helps improve concentration. Almost every character on the roster is competitively viable and the top tier contains a broad variety of styles. It may seem a little intimidating at first, but HF is easily one of the most accessible Street Fighter games ever produced in terms of how long it takes to reach “the good part” of competitive play.

Super SF2 Turbo – Even after fifteen years, ST remains widely supported in the tournament scene. It introduced super moves and throw softening to Street Fighter, along with countless new bells and whistles such as overheads and juggle combos. No advantages transfer from round to round because super meter levels do not carry over. The established top tier contains at least five characters: Dhalsim, O.Sagat, Vega, Balrog, and Ryu – with Bison, Chun Li, and Dee Jay also making strong showings.

The Rest – World Warrior is always fun to play for nostalgia’s sake, just to see how many things have changed since the beginning. However, WW is inherently flawed due to the inability to choose the same character as well as the lack of reversals to escape throw setups. Champion Edition solves the reversal problem, but doesn’t properly balance the boss characters – especially Bison, whose insane Scissor Kick frame advantage actually leads to lockdown strings. Super Street Fighter 2 managed to hurt the entire Capcom fighting game scene with its painfully slow gameplay after Hyper Fighting raised the bar across the board. Many years later, Hyper Street Fighter 2 mixed together all these versions to create an entertaining but ultimately unbalanced mashup, with several unpleasant control bugs to boot.

Street Fighter Alpha Series

SFA2/SFA3 – Depending on who you ask, either Alpha 2 or Alpha 3 (but usually not both) will be listed as a classic title. In a lot of ways, SFA2 revitalized the Street Fighter community after SSF2 drove so many people away. SFA2 is fast and chaotic fun, yet still fundamentally sound in terms of what it takes to win. By contrast, SFA3 is one of the most technical Street Fighter games ever created, with a wonderfully unique combo engine to explore. Most importantly, A2 and A3 changed the fighting game genre forever by introducing two different kinds of Custom Combos. It’s impossible to discuss either game without delving into the merits and downfalls of the Custom Combo feature. Therefore it’s not surprising that most of the disagreement between A2 fans and A3 fans comes down to CC preferences. A2 Customs generate insane amounts of damage for relatively little work, but thankfully they’re over very quickly. A3 Customs manifest with much greater diversity and require way more technical skill, but they can drag on forever.

The Rest – As with many of Capcom’s first attempts, SFA1 is relatively slow, somewhat bland, contains some new poorly designed or implemented feature (in this case cast-wide chain combos), and contains one or two massively overpowered characters (in this case Ken and Guy). Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold (or Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha in Japan) were both slight upgrades over SFA2, with slight changes made in the interest of balance – Alpha Counters costing an extra half level of meter and weakening Custom Combos in every way. However, these upgrades have never been well-received by the Capcom fighting game community because nerfing everything usually comes off as a lazy shortcut and makes the game less fun. Hyper Street Fighter Alpha is a mashup of the entire Alpha series similar to HSF2, but HSFA received too little tournament play to accurately determine its status, despite being obviously more polished than HSF2.

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