Street Fighter II Turbo introduces very subtle changes to the Champion Edition formula - at this point a little too subtle, only making the game harder to play and imbalancing the character list even further with nerfs and attempted move additions.

The biggest change, however, will be the speed. Players with faster reflexes looking to really get their fighting game on will find this a huge step up, but for someone who already struggled with the gameplay in previous editions it did less to improve my game so much as worsened it. At the least AI behaviors were a bit more fair (less spamming charge moves with instant speed) but I think I appreciated the more deliberate speed of the previous iterations.

There are slight move additions for some characters - Chun-Li gets a fireball to try to mitigate her punishable strategies, Blanka has an excellent vertical roll as well as a new splash for Honda, and Dhalsim can teleport. The inputs on these and their effectiveness varies, with Honda's vertical splash being less effective in practice than Blanka's vertical roll and the required inputs (Dhalsim's dragon punch + triple input being the most egregious) being a little too unreliable to be a welcome addition. Worse still was characters that received no new interesting changes and in some cases (Vega), a move becomes more difficult to pull off for no particularly good reason. Instead of balancing the cast, this throws some high tier characters into ineffective playstyles and some changes fail to improve characters at all.

The game is largely unchanged graphically, saved for an added podium segment at the end and having the 2P color as the default for 1P. As a response to bootleg versions this Turbo does bring the speed, but doesn't so much improve the issues I had with the original game so much as it exacerbates them.