Review RossBonaime 4/5 · Jun 22, 2025
The end of the 90s and the early 2000s are a fascinating time when it comes to Capcom's fighting games. They're a company that was once at the height of fighting games, now trying to keep up with a genre that is largely passing them by. This era is full of games that feel like they're trying to mimic the …
The end of the 90s and the early 2000s are a fascinating time when it comes to Capcom's fighting games. They're a company that was once at the height of fighting games, now trying to keep up with a genre that is largely passing them by. This era is full of games that feel like they're trying to mimic the successes of other games. With games like Plasma Sword or the Street Fighter EX series, both of which seem like attempts to recreate what other companies were doing in the 3D fighting landscape. But what's always made Capcom exciting to me is the ways that they innovate and try new things, leading the genre towards what they're doing.
One of the more successful experiments in this period for me is the Power Stone series, which utilizes the possibilities of 3D arenas, instead of trying to make a specifically 3D fighting game, akin to Virtua Fighter/Battle Arena Toshinden/Tekken/etc. It's a clever choice, and it makes this feel almost more like an adventure game than a fighting game in the ways that we know them to be.
It's also just a lot of fun and finds ways to make every matchup feel entirely different than the match before. I'm usually not great at making my strategies in fighting games based on the character I'm fighting, but with Power Stone, it feels much more essential to gameplay. While I couldn't care less about these characters (something I hope changes in Power Stone 2), I did appreciate each character's own unique specials and how that alters the way the game plays. Even the ways that the characters interact with the stages themselves make for some nice variations.
Like a lot of these odd Capcom eccentricities of the time, I wish Power Stone kept going further than Power Stone 2, especially since the Smash series would capitalize on a lot of what makes this game fun. I'd love to see Capcom flesh out this idea, or even bring back some of these characters in some meaningful way, because this is yet another example of Capcom trying something really cool, then abandoning it, and I wish they'd keep honing and fleshing out what is the start of something great.
