As a fighting game fan in the '90s, I was naturally always drawn to anything Street Fighter, and because of that, I was always curious about any new fighting game I could find in the arcades. But no matter how many times I tried them, I just could not get into the style of fighting in SNK games (with the occasional exception of Samurai Shodown). SNK games just felt off to me, with characters that didn't interest me, and with gameplay that never drew me in. It makes sense to me that the creator of the original Street Fighter went to SNK after that initial game.

I think for what this is, this mostly works, but it has to make a lot of concessions to get these two franchises together. I sort of appreciate the ranked system, which means you can pick anywhere between 1 and 4 characters, depending on their strength, and I like how at its base, you can choose to use your special meter like you're in a Capcom game or in an SNK game. And for these SNK characters, I absolutely think they've never looked better or played as well as they do here. But goddamn, do those SNK character select animations look ugly, especially when you get the SNK versions of Street Fighter characters.

Yet while I played around with the SNK characters, and found myself enjoying playing as these characters more than I have in SNK-created games, I naturally kept wanting to go back to the Capcom characters. It's very fun to see how both franchises influenced each other through their characters, but beyond that, I still had very little interest in playing as these characters, especially since I don't know anything about them (again, my fault, not the game's fault).

I know this might be fighting game sacrilege, but this did make me wish that when SNK was struggling financially, Capcom would've bought them and their franchises outright, because I do think there's a lot to like about these SNK characters, I just don't expect SNK to make me care. I think it boils down to Capcom being a company that was very clearly interested in gaining a U.S. audience, and SNK having very little interest in catering to that audience. Which is totally fine, but it leads me to just wanting to play as the characters I know, and not really caring at all about half of this game. It's a smart combination of these two for what it is, but I still struggle with SNK, even with this upgrade to their roster.