Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams (1995)

After years of multiple iterations of Street Fighter II, I was so excited when Street Fighter Alpha came out, and on the new PlayStation, no less. I don't know how, but I remember knowing so much about the Street Fighter characters, their history, their lore, and the conflicts between them. With Street Fighter Alpha, I was given essentially the first prequel I was aware of, the story before the story I already loved. It wasn't Street Fighter III, but to me, it didn't matter.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo ended the SFII iterations on a high note, but Street Fighter Alpha just felt like an important step forward. The game looks gorgeous and feels so satisfying. The supers work surprisingly well, and again, as a fan of the Street Fighter story, learning more about where these characters were, and meeting characters who were only hinted at before, or were even from other games like Final Fight, really blew my mind. I still love how this integrates the Final Fight characters into this world, and I love that Charlie is present here, after being mentioned in Guile's story. It just felt like a cool way to move beyond SFII, but still have fun with the possibilities, without nailing themselves down to SFIII.

I still find this to be one of the better Alpha games, and therefore, one of my favorite Street Fighter games. I love it when this franchise tries something wholly different, like with the EX series or even the Street Fighter: The Movie game, and takes a swing. This might seem like a minor swing in hindsight, but it felt huge to me as a kid. As an adult, I think it's a fantastically balanced game that feels restrained in a way that this series rarely would from here on out.

Note: This is the for the PSX port of Street Fighter Alpha.

At a certain point enough revisions of Street Fighter II had released that there wasn't too much of a way to iterate upon that entry. Alpha proves that not only are there more interesting ways to fight your opponent but radically changes the style and improves input options for a great experience.

Alpha puts itself as a midquel between 1 and 2, meaning most of the plotlines feature interesting prequel story setups (Charlie's backstory, Ken meeting Eliza, etc) while sneaking in both distinct new character designs (Rose) and integrating the Final Fight series' roster in. The roster is slightly less than Super Turbo but in a way it's less overwhelming.

The tiers are pretty spread out this time, with charge, grappler, and lesser shotos (see: Dan) below the heavy hitters like Ken, Rose, and Guy. Some characters (read: Guy) get more love in their moveset than others and some get terrifying inputs for their supers (read: delta motion) but a couple of interesting new mechanics have been added to level the playing field. Along with a command input roll that people can utilize for quick wakeups and a special Alpha Counter to use on block, characters can also block midair and can chain hits of increasing strength in via combos. These help add to the complexity of gameplay and give some extra options to people who are savvy enough to hit these extra inputs. There are also speed settings for those who prefer faster or slower play and an extended super meter to store for different levels of attacks. On the console ports in particular this comes with the additional mapping of the 3P/3K moves to a select button, alleviating the pain of finnicky three button inputs.

The PSX version also allows a decent training mode, which can add some basic behaviors to AI along with move practice. Without an input window it's not totally clear where inputs are going wrong and apart from repetition there's no clear way to figure out some of the input windows. While not as harsh as SF2 there were some inputs I could not get a good handle on, double HCF/QCFs included.

Style and music is in a boldly different direction, possibly one of the first big games to lean towards an anime art-style. It's colorful, fast, and character portraits look wonderfully stylish. Music is peppy but not as memorable, save for throwbacks to some other themes like Ken's theme.

Street Fighter Alpha feels less like an iteration and more like a breath of fresh air, focusing less on being fast and difficult and moreso on changing up how people approach basic matches while exploring a variety of characters. If you can get that roll down, you'll have a heckuva time.