This might be the first long-form essay on 3s that hasn't made me want to poke my eyes out. Most people with any refined opinion on the game are busy playing it, leaving this kind of content to be pretty frustrating for real enthusiasts of the game. Really nice work.
Thank you very much faffel!! I really wanted this vid to stand out from other vids on 3s which I also find kinda frustrating at times. I really love this game and admire what it achieves, which I think gets overlooked in some ways. People know about the parry, but the game is a lot more than that (though the parry is great)
My 3rd strike cab i played back when i was a kid in high school is still in the same exact spot and billiards bar it always has been. such a wonderful place to visit when i go back home.
Oh that is so cool! Rare to see a cab maintained for that long these days. I wish my childhood soul Calibur 2 cab was still around. But it had issues and they just got rid of it
Parrying something you predict is one thing, doing it under pressure is an entirely different matter. And then following it up with a combo ... *Chef's kiss*. Really miss playing Third Strike at a Coney Island restaurant with my friends.
Oh yes and nothing feels better than landing it in the match. I love the way the parry is balanced in this game timing wise, where it s challenging enough to test your nerves, but lenient enough to be reasonable
I didn’t play SF3 until I found it in an arcade in London in 2015. I loved how mobile the characters felt compared to other SF games. I was never a hardcore player of SF3, but I keep going back to it just because of the cool style of it.
I love to hear that Philip. I think people underestimate how fun 3s is to play purely on the feel and fun factor, another reason why I play it on arcade mode on highest dip switches to this day. I have a little switch I carry around in my pocket and it pop it out for quick matches all the time ha
Arcades didn’t have every Street Fighter title by the end of the ‘90s. The landscape was still fierce. People didn’t play the “outdated” games. You’d see III next to a Tekken Tag, not SF II.
Great Video overall. I found really interesting the idea of measuring videogames success not by their sales But by how many years in the future after they stop getting updated they still are being actively played
Exactly! That is something that I think is extremely important which doesn't get acknowledged a lot. There are a lot of games that come and go, but the ones that persist over time are really special and tend to be the most influential
it's kind of 'step one' for any art criticism. We wouldn't need critics if $$$ was all that counted. Influence is how we actually measure success in art and it takes a lot of cultural knowledge to assess that.
Every single one of them bungled their international releases in at least one major way. Yatagarasu had a great run as an indie doujin darling, but as soon as it came west. The Nicalis, Kickstarter and Legend of Raven stuff happened leaving us with a Steam release which is far from being "complete" (even if you didn't care about rollback) unless you only care about the roster and even this year's update after ages of Japan only arcade stuff didn't change enough to get noticed. For a NEO GEO pocket like game, Pocket Rumble did come out on console but still had a long span of miscommunication and delays. Still Early Access on Steam with no updates in years despite being the most polished game in my comment. Blazing Strike? I'll hold some of my thoughts till it comes out but between the worst communication of all of these titles, a higher price, no demo/Early Access, a publisher reusing the same poor trailer a year later... I'm glad it is coming out soon for us to finally see a move list. It did have a demo that some people on Patreon may have played at some point but the pre-release period for the last 4 years is only rivaled by Square Enix when they publish a non-FF or DQ RPG.
Yeah it s such a hard model to try to sustain these days. I have a lot of respect for modern indie game that try to be more true to the genres roots, but it s also sad how hard it is for them to survive money wise
Ha yeah I really wanted to show that this is a huge different between what 3s does and what resi4 remake does, despite both mechanics being called "parry." Great design needs to be all through the system and limited to exist in that system, vs being thrown over the top of an exiting system and then just balanced with knife durability ha
Man, this is a good one. Lines like "system mechanics are context sensitive" and "the parry exists to subvert setplay" are why I keep coming back to this channel, that's excellent analysis
great thing about third strike is how casual players can still sometimes accidentally pull cool shit off. As a kid I played against my brother and getting something as simple as an accidental parry into sweep was super hype, and kept me pushing onwards despite getting beaten every time. great video man
Agreed positivity! It has great game feel for everyone, whether you want to play it casually or competitively. It also drips with so much style it s hard not to have fun even as a beginner
wasnt even the same team who did sf2 either. it was some new staff who didnt even have any experience making a fighting game... parry is what made sf third strike hype tho. where it got perfected. be real about it. most fgc wont even brag about new gen or 2nd impact. lol.
Yes exactly! It didn't work out as exactly as they had hoped in the first version of the game, but I think in 3s bringing back a few of the legacy characters and re adapting them to the 3s system was a fun idea. I think 3s does a fantastic job of feeling very fresh but keeping the street fighter spirit
Oh absolutely the cps3 and it's visual design is incredible. So iconic and has stood the rest of time in both music and visuals. The 3s ost is also really fresh still. The games presentation really helps underscore it s free form mechanical design too
@@TheElectricUnderground gaming isn’t dead because indie games and double AA are doing a lot better than triple AAA games please don’t be nostalgia blind.
@@TheElectricUnderground you should play more indie games and double AA games because indie games and double AA games are doing a lot better than triple AAA games, I hope you respond back because I’ve been asking. I’m not going to stop unless you gave me an answer so please respond back.
@@TheElectricUnderground you should play more indie games and double AA games because indie games and double AA games are doing a lot better than triple AAA games, I hope you respond back because I’ve been asking. I’m not going to stop unless you gave me an answer so please respond back.
I'm a bit too young to have experienced the arcade era in real-time. The insight you gave about how and why SF3 was so different from SF2 due to the arcade environment (literally) was pretty enlightening, and I love when a channel does that for me. Subscribed!
Thanks very much my dude!! Yes I was on the tale end final days of the arcade era for a lot of fighting games so I was early enough to see this era's ending but late enough to not be too enmeshed in the sf2 scene. So I always tend to encounter the series cabs all together these days ha
KoF operated differently probably because the NeoGeo systems could house multiple games in one cabinet that you could switch to. Thus, this meant less of a need to buy multiple cabinets. This was often more financially feasible for arcades, especially in third world countries like places in Latin America and South Africa (where I'm from) and is a big reason why KOF has a bigger presence than Street Fighter when it comes to the arcade era.
Thanks, I had heard of how they operated on carts which could be switched and were very arcade operator friendly but someone who has experience as a player in those regions can make the point better.
SNK had a lot more fighting game IPs in the 90s than Capcom, who also had a lot, but Capcom was more willing to use the SF branding on experimental and lower quality games, or even outsourcing, like SF the Movie arcade (janky attempt to compete with MK's digitized sprites) and SFEX (experimental poly 2.5D game). SNK fighters definitely had a bunch of gameplay variety, and their games pioneered the majority of FG mechanics still used today, but they didn't confine them to a limited number of IPs. That practice carries on today in the live service era where they'll make SamSho and Fatal Fury alongside their flagship KOF, while on the Capcom side you can only expect Street Fighter and maybe another Marvel if you cross your fingers
That s a great point! However over time I think the street fighter model ended up being stronger in that these days all those versions of kof just kinda blend together to where players just have to pick 98 and 2002 and the rest kinda fade into history. Whereas now sf2, sf alpha, and sf3 all have distinctive audiences and game design which I think has held up better over time. That s my opinion but I do like KOF
Regarding the Neo Geo MVS, the games were very easy to pirate. That was one of the main reason why SNK face a lot of financial problems during the late 90s
when games like KOF XIII and Guilty Gear Xrd/Strive exist, it is ABSOLUTELY embarrassing how awful sf4, 5, and 6 look. ive said since sf4 that 4, 5, and 6 are not mainline Street Fighter, they are Street Fighter EX games in both art direction and gameplay. 3rd Strike was the last true Street Fighter.
I like 6 a lot. They refined the 3d graphics and has that beautifull RE Engine touch. Now IV and V are indeed weird. Saying infinitely is infinitely exagerated.
Sf3:3s let’s not forget is the last hand drawn capcom game and I’m sorry but I’m a 2d guy when it comes to 2d games. Hand drawn sprites age like fine wine. 3d or 2.5 d does not. My wet dream is if capcom adopts arksys style graphics in one of their games, make it alpha 4, cvs3, a versus game but dear god i miss hand drawn sprites. Sf3 also made taunts a viable thing it’s so cool to have your taunt serve a purpose. I wish they brought that back.
That is the dream, especially alpha 4 omg (but without the alpha 3 infinite combo jank ofc) Or actually I also want a street fighter game that plays like mvc2 with easy QC supers on every one lol
Yes it cost them a bunch of money to do, but it was so worth it to this day. One of the best looking fighting games still! I was researching and the production of the game on the first version barely broke even and then 2nd impact and 3rd strike made a small profit, but it's clear Capcom were putting so much effort into the game because of their passion for the project, rather than purely to make profits. In the end though with all the console ports 3s finally did bring Capcom money. It s a long long term investment that still Endures to this day.
It would be great seeing sprites again but since they're so expensive, Capcom would either take a huge financial loss or sell it at a high price. Though I'm not a big 3s guy, I do love how it looks and would pay a high price to have a sprite fighting game.
@@TheElectricUnderground I sometimes wonder if arcades were still booming when SF3 had been released if it would have been a crazy popular game. You see how much love the game gets nowadays that everyone knows about it, but when it came out up until street fighter 4 got released, the vast majority of people who did not live near an arcade had no idea that there had ever been another street fighter game released after the Alpha series.
I'd like to push back a bit on the intro of the video (not the actual analysis of 3rd strike) cause I feel its missing some of the context from back then. First, it equates SF 3 with 3rd Strike, which basically glosses over New Generation and 2nd Impact. On its release in the arcades, New Generation was weird, unrefined and unbalanced (though graphically excellent - i actually love it). So the "betrayal" and "black sheep" angle actually came with NG - 3rd strike being a iterative update on all the ideas left unrealized in NG. But by then it was too late - the 3 series was already dead for the greater public. For more on that I recommend the SF3 oral history article over at Polygon. Second, the whole "let's dump most of the cast and do a soft reboot for the third game" was not exclusive to SF3 in the old arcade scene. Back then, Fatal Fury 3, Samurai Shodown 3, Art of Fighting 3 (and to some lesser extent Mortal Kombat 3) also had different styles and casts. But like SF3 none of them were really popular and were quickly erased through iterative sqeuals (Samurai Shodown IV, Fatal Fury Real Bout (Special) and UMK3 walked back on a lot of the soft reboot stuff). Love your stuff though so keep it coming - cant get enough talk about older arcade games
24:53 that was exactly how I felt Capcom just was in late CPS2 through CPS3 and NAOMI. Vampire Savior, MvC2, Garou: MotW, CvS2, even Melee, or GGXXAC all have that unsupervised kids left in the amusement park alone kind of feel. Hell of a learning curve to learn how to work all the rides but we figured it out and still survive 😂
Yeah that is the classic arcade design philosophy that I love. Where games were balanced around fundamental principals which left players a lot of agency. Whereas now devs go in and install guard rails over everything so nothing gets too wild (or interesting)
One of, if not the very best video breakdowns I've ever seen on 3rd Strike, the nature of fighting game design, and the current state of the scene vs old school days. Awesome work dude!!
I'm 10 minutes into the video, but I think you've concluded with your points about the topics in the intro by this point and move on to talking about 3S as a game, but generally I find your evaluation of console games and the "live service" model just entirely unfounded, especially in relation to how arcades were. I think a lot of what you say about the arcade design is fair analysis, but it's more just a "smart business decision" rather than "this is how arcades were," because even in your preamble to this idea you mention a couple games that buck the trend you're saying was the norm with KoF and Tekken. Those are games that are incredibly iterative and focus on legacy design (and still do to this day) which is entirely contrary to your point with Street Fighter. I agree that it was smart of Capcom to make every new mainline SF title an individual pillar that stands on its own so that new and old games could succeed next to each other, but I fundamentally disagree that this was an arcade thing. Another series that was also very iterative in the arcades was Guilty Gear. You had Missing Link which is a very rough early outline for the series, but when X and XX roll around the series locked in for a decade into that being what Guilty Gear was. You had +R fans at the time complaining about how simplified and easy Xrd was compared to +R, but the reality of it was Xrd just went back to # Reload instead of being an AC revision. And to even further argue against the points you're making, you say that console games and live service design has forced devs into this iterative style of design where the new game eats the old game so it MUST have the DNA of the old game, but let me counter this idea with Guilty Gear once again. It's no hot take to say that Strive is a huge massive fundamental shift in the Guilty Gear series, that by this point has changed how every part of the game works, to such a degree that only in the most abstract sense does it resemble the prior games, in the same abstract way that SF Alpha is an iteration of SF2, except I would argue that the difference between XX/Xrd and Strive is even more vast than SF2 to Alpha, but Strive still ate Xrd despite both games being so vastly different because that's simply what the playerbase does now, the majority of players play the latest entry in a series instead of the 20 year old entry even though the old entry might still have a smaller and more dedicated playerbase. Even outside the realm of fighting games, if you want to get into the most live-est service-est games ever created by man, look no further than free to play mobile games. One of the biggest developers right now in the F2P live service mobile space is Hoyoverse, and they currently have 3 major pillar titles running simultaneously. Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and now Zenless Zone Zero. Genshin is an open world action adventure Zelda Breath of the Wild game with puzzles and dungeon crawling, Honkai Star Rail is a turn based RPG in space, and Zenless Zone Zero is a real time action game with combos and juggles and perfect parries and perfect dodging. They are all entirely different games for the exact reasons you outlined Capcom did in the arcades, so they can stand side by side with each other. You're greatly conflating the business decisions of 20+ years ago to being how a certain area of business was, which wasn't even true back then, to argue about how new things on console are different in this very specific way, which isn't true now. There's nothing stopping Capcom from making a drastically different fighting game just like ArcSys did with GG Strive, they just choose not to. Probably because they don't want to take risks and lose out on making money, because all game development is profit incentivized and they would rather make safe money than gamble. Speaking of which, you say this yourself towards the end of this 10 minute intro, about how even an indie game wouldn't have the profit motive to make a game like 3S. Have you heard about Yatagarasu? Because to me it kinda sounds like you haven't. Not that it's gonna be exactly like 3S, the devs behind it have their own vision for what they want the game to be and it has its own unique quirks compared to 3S in ways that a 3S purist probably wouldn't agree with, but if you want to talk about a game that is running contradictory to profit incentives, look no further. Game was crowd funded and said they were going to add rollback netcode and never did. Disappeared for years only to come back with a sequel release that is actually just a revision update with 3 new characters and barely any balance changes, still doesn't add rollback netcode. Maybe this sequel to you works to your argument of live service games and the new game eating the old game since it is just a revision, but I feel you could easily make the same argument about the various revisions of SF2 and how, sure, some people prefer Hyper Fighting, but most people just moved on to ST and that became the dominant version of SF2, or how no one really plays New Generation or Second Impact because 3S ate those games and became the real version of SF3. Maybe live service was here the whole time. Anyways, I'm gonna watch the rest of the video, just wanted to get my thoughts out about the intro segments.
It's becoming increasingly clear that he's out of his element when talking about fighting games(especially old FGC and "dark ages" times) and many 3d action games/action RPGs. Where his takes are surface layer, reddit/online sentiment researched, and very touristy/new money. His shootemup, and beaten up/belt scroller content is the meat of this channel, and the stronger content. I do hope that his tone would loosen on the "matter of factly" delivery, as it creates contention when unnecessary or could easily be avoided. But maybe that's what people like this have to do, to grow channels.
I put Vampire Savior in that same elite category. High level Vampire Savior is insane to watch and the skill sets required to compete at that level are of the highest order.
It's also such a blindingly fast game. Easily my favorite Capcom fighter next to Alpha 3. I'd love to see what the audience would feel seeing VSAV as the retro title for Evo.
@@dangerousshoes Wow. I had no idea you loved Vampire Savior that much! I'm surprised you never popped into my channel and subbed. And yes, the Alpha series was a favorite of mine too, so I get it. 😄
Ohh yeah I should have clarified throw invul Iframes, yeah that s what I meant. Where you use dash to bait throws, which is a really cool nuance to the games throw system
Oh the memories. Lived through the whole Street Fighter evolution. By the time 3rd came out I was in a 24 hour arcade playing till 2am every night, going to work the next day tired. $1 for two credits, man what a cheap half an hour. Ah, the parry and the long jump . Also played cave shooters Ketsui and Mushihimesama. And Battle Gear 3 (racing) with the online key system to mod your car and world ranked times. That was the last real arcade in Auckland, they died out after that, about 2005-6.
I think fighting game character balance is really overrated… it’s just like you said, the game design today is philosophically in a place where it’s too polite, it’s too safe. They kind of don’t take risks otherwise you risk breaking the sacred game balance. Which really is a tragedy of the commons type of situation because being fearless when designing things, you may end up with broken stuff but you also cover a lot more of the exploration space so you also get much more innovative. What are some innovative designs in modern fighting games? Can’t think of anything that really stands out even though I find SF6 for example solid… it plays well even though it may get a bit boring at times.
Forced balance is IMHO the dumbest thing that's ever happened to fighting games. Instead, of attacking the main issues that's plagued fighting games since the dawn of their inception: The base mechanics itself. And not any bullshit burst system like guilty gear or a band aid defense patch like the drive system in sf6. Once devs learn to get fgcs out of that base rut it's been in since the early 2000s we'll have another golden era.
I’m a Darkstalkers fan. Love the game, the gameplay, the characters, everything about it. I never got to play the games in an arcade setting until this year when I went to EVO and it was in the arcade alley. I played the game on consoles of the past & present with pad and fight stick, but here was my chance to play with a proper stick & button layout. Vampire Savior has a push block system similar to the Marvel Vs series only you have to rapidly press unique attack buttons while blocking for the percentage of opportunity to push the opponent off you, which seems needlessly complicated and impossible until I saw top tier players swipe their hands across the buttons, the intended way to utilize the pushback for Vampire Savior. After having played the game for decades, I learned tech I never knew. The 90s Capcom era is currently being looked back upon as an era of glut, where oversaturation led to the death of the fighting game scene, and while that’s not entirely untrue, I feel that’s not the best way of looking at it. The mid-late 90s, when Capcom brought out numerous franchises, led to such creativity and innovation, where gameplay elements introduced in one series would be brought over and refined in another, seen especially in the triumverate of Marvel, Alpha, and Darkstalkers. Such innovation led to the latest entries being praised as the best of their series. It’s telling that in 2013, when Darkstalkers Resurrection failed to relaunch the franchise, the excuse of “fighting game glut” was bandied about as part of the reason, except likely the number of games out were but a fraction of the numbers in the 90s. I hope one day Capcom releases more franchises to bring back the cross-pollination of ideas that led to stronger games and truly bring back the FGC spirit of old.
This game reminds me of my friend who died a couple years ago. He was a Hugo main and I have vivid memories of him just destroying people with Hugo lol. He always played the wrestler character like zangief. Best sf player I ever met, RIP brother! Also this is the last game I remember playing at arcades before the scene started dying off...this game just makes me feel very nostalgic and bittersweet😔
Never saw a Third Strike cabinet until around 2010 when a small local arcade imported a dual Japanese machine. It became THE go to machine for just about everyone and it single handedly started a local FGC here in San Antonio.
I was trying to get into Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike at one point, but I’m already sick of parries, and the balance issues made it a lot less appealing to me. Even though I probably wouldn’t touch it, Alpha 3’s kusoge aspect looks a lot more interesting. Street Fighter needed that wildcard element to stand out to me as a series. Whether it's the aggressiveness and parry system of 3rd Strike or the creativity and atmosphere of Alpha 3, the series needed something distinctive to catch my interest.
is it just me or does 3rd strike look freakin cool, while the more recent sf games look weird? sf6 in particular, something about the art direction in that game looks weird to me. the character models have this uncanny effect, almost like q or hugo in 3rd strike but every character is that way, they move like they're something abnormal going on neurologically. i thought the same about 4 when it came out but its style has grown on me, so idk
With the recent Terry teaser trailer, I've seen some people talking about Street Fighter 6's graphics again. The thing with SF6 is that sometimes the games looks incredible, but in the world tour and some of the close-ups on the characters faces can make them look very awkward. In my opinion, the Street Fighter series was never meant to look photoreaslistic, ever since the first game in the series it had a very comic/anime look, with the Alpha series and III going for a more anime style. IV and V went for a more stylized look, very cartoony, though it had its problems
This video explains the street fighter strategy in the 90s better than I have ever heard. They were definitely companion pieces. It may confuse newer players-even older players-too.
Best video covering third strike I’ve ever seen. Love the consideration of arcade vs console experiences. One more thing id like to say about parry’s interaction with crouching damage buff. Light normals and certain special moves can be parried low, which removes the left/right mixup, but going for the safer low parry opens you up to eat a more damaging mid starter combo. Just shows capcom’s mastery over risk reward.
I would personally squeeze Alpha 3 into this category as well, but yes, we will never see another game like Third Strike. I remember some local arcades running more than one cabinet. It was a shame that this game was a little overshadowed by the gaming tech gold rush pushing 3D to the forefront. 2D gaming was still innovative and doing great in the arcades where I live. I spent a small fortune playing Street Fighter 2 and Third Strike dropping made it worth every quarter. This period was my favorite stretch of Arcade fighting games.
Hello Mark Electric Underground I would like to inform you that I had a dream where I was in an arcade convention and I bumped into you and wanted to talk about how you inspired me to start playing arcade games and you proceeded to call me a casual and started explaining why some Wario game was a masterpiece
Kudos for the 3rd Strike Online Edition love. I already have it on my PS3 but I’m thinking about grabbing it on 360 just in case. The game has some of the best sprite work in any fighting game ever made and it feels great to play against the computer, even if you completely ignore the parrying mechanic. The game looks so much more visually appealing than any fighting game Capcom has made in years - as do Garou MOTW (which was a marvel considering how much it squeezed out of the original Neo Geo hardware compared to the far more advanced CPS-3) and some other late Neo Geo games like Last Blade 2.
Funny that games on the stock NeoGeo games run laps around the entire CPS 123 library, there's nothing like Metal Slug 3 on CPS#, even though you'd think it could handle it considering SF3-Warzard-JoJo's. Even pre-rendered games like Strikers 1945+ or Blazing Star graphically beats any similar CPS title
Growing up with all the IIs and Alpha series going crazy in the 90s, I thought I was late to the game back in '04 playing 3rd strike for the first time (mpls scene, everyone had those MAS sticks) 🤣🤣 It was hands down the best fighting game for me to play competitively. Just got back from a trip to Osaka & Tokyo, and it's awesome that every arcade I visit peeps still playing and kicking ass in 3rd strike. Granted these aren't the arcades in the malls that usually have only latest machines/driving/music stuff.
Most peopel hated SF 3 then or completely were apathetic to it. It failed saleswise for a reason. Literally any other game blows it away in terms of Sales. It put the series in a coma for a decade for a reason. It was so much failure. To claim people who latched on to long after the fact who never played it in arcades completely invalidates the notion it endured. It didn't it simply found a completely difference audience who didn't grow up with it ni Arcades. That is not the same thing. SF 2 endures as the greatest fighting game for a reason and doesn't require revisionist history or ignoring it's sales to justify that. Even the Alpha series blew away SF 3 in terms of sales as it was Alpha 3 was released multiple times with new versions. No one gave a F**k about SF 3 to bother with that. It wasn't worthy of our time.
The punish windows were also smaller and you sometimes had to go for a single hit and confirm into a special. They are also increasing frames given to input combos, even if the games were the same speed, arcade era fighters would still finish the combo before the latter. Add to that, the combos are getting longer, even for punishing, and cinematic supers only adds to the slowing down of the action. Instead of a constant flow of action with little breathing room, they a breaking it up as much as possible.
I played 3rd strike in the arcades for over 10 years and watched every arcade with it slowly shut down over time. I can still play it on console but nothing compares to the feeling of competitive arcade gameplay and atmosphere of the old days.
Absolutely! And I do hope in this vid I explained why the arcade model created such bold compelling design which feels so lacking these days from the genre.
Honestly 3rd strike is just such a good game that still holds up till today just looking at what happened this past evo 3rd strike was likely the best game in the event
Yeah I think this needs to be discussed a lot more, because I think if people start seeing the games tiers and uneven tiers as having a really interesting effect on a game's design that is not just outright a flaw ha. Usually really healthy games tend to have the right characters be top tier and the right characters be lower tier ha
@TheElectricUnderground this is literally just cope for third strike lmao. Yun and chun being top tier is super un healthy for the game considering they are both degenerate
Dig the video! I appreciate as well the thoughts about the design that go beyond either "Third Strike = GOAT" or a focus on difficulty of games, even though for sure some of the latter was there. The whole character/artistic lens is one that's not common among content creators and, I think, well put.
"One character is the best balance" What if you had a fighting game with really only one character and it had a hundred moves available. No pre-fight customization, really have all moves in one character available during the fight somehow. Shang Tsung but without having to transform. No idea how to make the moves available because of the input problem. Maybe an arcade controller with 20 buttons. Sounds like a really unique game!
Besides parry, whatever dislikes I have with it aren't SF3 specific. I like parry as a concept, I don't approve of it being a single motion tap with no whiff animation for how high the reward can be as the risk isn't always high. You're not parrying raw Chun supers all the time. I don't like character tools being locked behind meter. Gaining meter on whiff. Gaining meter for getting hit as a comeback mechanic. I like a fast dash, but I also don't want it at the expense of potentially slower movement speed. Everyone should be fast all of the time. I feel like people that call it overrated don't all call it for the same reasons. It's not like anyone ever talks down the visual presentation and music. It's mostly how the modern impression of the game is comprised of people that never really played the game at its time and they're now the majority. Their impression of it almost always comes from the EVO moment parry. A mechanic that defines the game more than it has right to. It's rare and situational and requires the players to have played each other long enough for the guesses to be anything more than blind fishing. You are most likely not playing anyone who has real intent to use projectiles besides the odd Denjin Ryu. The cast is both small and underused to even further thin it and parry is a contributor to that. Street Fighter 3 is like Touhou - most people that like it and talk about it don't play it. You can make rewarding hard reads in any fighting game even without parry. Parry is just a flashier way to go about it. There is no game that doesn't allow for it. Don't pretend SF3 invented hard reads. There are few duos more iconic than "We should play Third Strike. It's awesome!" and then not playing Third Strike ever.
A lot of the types playing it these days never get passed B rank on fightcade. or have played it at a high level offline where it is 2x better. doesnt make it not a stale game. your on the ball with the hard read part. but theres also all the parry OS parrying on minus, air parry being very safe and most anti airs being very low damage comparative to the jump in unload tiny super bar characters. the argument that this games balance is fine because parry exists is probably 1/3rd true once the parry happens what do you get out of that? if that were the case oro SA2 should be god tier but he isnt because parrying does very little to move the tier list. what does move the tier list are confirmable lows that blow up people on parry cooldown mis inputting hado-walk. all of yuns normals having super priority ken being advantageous in almost any scenario. Parrying with Q will only go so far. the game is fun at a super casual level . taking it seriously is asking for years of dedication for a game you will ultimately realize is actually poorly thought out.
I love seeing the concept of "balance through imbalance" being championed so heavily in your vids. It's something I've always believed in strongly even in non-competitive games due to providing choice and player-driven difficulty selection that's not just menu-based difficulty. Fromsoft does this pretty heavily with everything being wildly imbalanced in a way that ultimately balances out, and every time they get called out for it from the players it just pains me to see how myopic most players are not understanding how superior that is to pure mathematical balance. Glad your channel's starting to pop off as more people need to get exposed to that type of thinking.
Mathematical balance, a very common comparison tool that does not create reliable, gameplay experience, competitive or non-competitive due to multiple variables within systems and pacing
SF6 is nothing like USF4, not iterativeness. SF5 killed off air normal variety and linking lights up to fierce. FADC isn’t the drive system, and in USF4, classic “shimmies” weren’t a thing yet because teching a throw just gave you low short, fast recovery.
Well I think the skeleton of the games is essentially the same, but sf5 stripped out so much that it feels deprived in the end. Sf5 is a sad but strong example of how the specifics of how a game is designed is just as important as the concepts themselves. So think of it like a root with branches. The root is sf4 and 5 and 6 are two different branches of that root.
Keep in mind 3rd Strike is the 3rd iteration of Street Fighter 3. First was New Generation, second was Double Impact. All 3 had the parry system which was completely different in each game.
I’ve said this three times and I’ll say it again. SF3: 3rd Strike and MvC2 are examples of how to make a good fighting game. They are mechanically deep, have a blisteringly fast pace (though 3rd Strike isn’t as fast as MvC2), and are so goddamn fun.
Agreed!!! I m really excited to dig into mvc2 when the collection comes out! I really hope they do more with the game than just bare bones modes like the sf 30th collection
It is the player's fault. People wanted so much 3d graphics at the time and those 2d graphics take lot of work and time, so SF3 failed and SI and 3S made a little proffit only. SNK gave up on 2d too after showing peak 2d graphics with KOFXIII and here we are. Ater all that people started to love and worship the game and all but it was too late and Capcom moved on.🤷♀️
your takes on character balance are interesting, and i do agree to an extent. however, i do think a lot of modern games still have those nuances that you describe, maybe even to a greater extent, as they flesh out mechanics and encourage the need to explore them. ken's 2MP being disjointed is a pretty well-known thing, and there are moves in modern games with strong disjointed hitboxes like that too the problem with imbalanced games is that when something is so overpoweringly good, the decisionmaking around it is inherently less layered. perhaps the way the opponent needs to respond can be fun, but at the end of the day the attacker is still just encouraged to spam that move over making any other interesting decisions. now, i still understand that third strike has insane longevity for a game because the mechanics often balance themselves out and there's really no other fighting game like it, but i don't agree w/ the idea that balancing the roster makes the game stale in the long run because imbalance does the exact same thing with the top tiers being overwhelmingly represented in every single tournament. that gets pretty stale too. i know, it's hype to see a bad character win especially with the x-factor of parries in 3s, but it's just so rare and a lot of the characters feel utterly wasted in what would otherwise be a really cool and interesting character design. Q and hugo tread that line of just barely viable, but the chars below them just cannot be played and i find that pretty sad. ultimately, a bit of imbalance still contributes to this effect pretty well, and you still do see chars like this in modern games a bit (e.g. not much reason to play jamie in SF6 competitively, so it's pretty cool to see him played even if he's kinda boring) but i guess these old games having really bad low tiers really is part of what gives them some extra longevity... that part i can see. the fact that a player like amsa can pick yoshi in melee and find some crazy new tech that made a terrible character look really good is always cool, but i dunno if it's really worth designing games for complete miracles like amsa. at the end of the day i think similar power levels in chars is gonna lead to a more consistently fun and interestring game-though i can see the highs of an imbalanced system, i feel like the equally dramatic lows end up making most players' experiences more flawed and their understanding of the game hampered
I also found that the video seems to come off saying that character balance is something intentional. Specifically, he kind of went on saying "game design this" and "game design that", but never kind of stops thinking where intentions end and begin. In some ways, the death of the author applies to game design; because players are bound to find meaningful interactions or mechanics that the developer just never accounted for. Whether these are good or bad for the game and its competitive health can vary from game to game, and you can't just brush these under the blanket statement of "good/bad game design", particularly when it comes to something as flimsy as character balance in a fighting game. A situation where even the slightest changes to moves' frame data can have huge consequences. Sure, there can be cases where developers intentionally nerf a character (Sean from 2nd Impact to 3rd Strike), or intentionally make a character crazy strong (initial versions of Yun and Yang in SF4 AE), but beyond that? It can be just be design intentions backfiring, or some underlying issue(s) that players discover and exploit. Some of these can be a bit obnoxious (don't think Capcom would've let Urien have Aegis unblockables if they had caught that in time), while other times it can just be unfortunate (oops, many of Twelve's moves get punished by Chun-Li's super on hit or block). In cases like Remy's Blue Nocturne? You might just wonder what the hell they were smoking. Developers can only do so much about any given game's balancing through location tests and playtesting before handing it off to the players, who will inevitably find something that may make or break the game. Third Strike, among many others, is a game where despite the imbalances present, it's still an enjoyable title. It has interesting pieces of game design brilliance, but the character balancing? That's where I don't quite agree. Could've used some minute touches here or there, but Third Strike is what it is, for better or worse.
@@farout_tech good point. obviously remy's blue nocturne is nothing more than an oversight. there are lots of moves in 3s like that, where followups whiff on either airborne or crouching opponents, and it's especially apparent on low tier chars that they didn't test these moves in these even very basic and realistic scenarios or simply didn't see it as an issue worth fixing again, this is where i think modern fighting game design wins. even if the interactions are more reeled back and pre-calculated, at least the devs try to make consistent rules, giving players positive feedback loops when their moves can actually work for unique scenarios that they find in their matches. really, just try playing a low tier in 3s and punishing a crouching button with a button into a special that whiffs on crouchers... then realize that you don't have any other moves to confirm into, so you simply cannot get a punish.
@farout_tech totally agree re: death of the author. I would say arguably this applies much more to game design than literature. I think where I disagree with Mark is that there is so much more given to chance in game design, especially ones that's are competitive based. 3rd strike is a great game and Capcom deserves credit but much of its legacy is also just down to pure chance in my opinion...it just happened to allow for a lot of longevity and emergent gameplay more so than other fighters of its era. A perfect storm of game design that wasn't always so intentioned as suggested in this video.
Thank you for this video. As a former 3S player who loved this game from the 1st time I played it at my local aracde this video really explains why 3S is so special and why its still loved to this day great video bro.
Good stuff. I am not nuanced in these things, but when you mentioned roster and balance, the end of SF4 was a ton of fun for me to watch because people from all over the world who were character specialists were showing up and putting up results. Good times. 3rd Strike, MvC2 and Melee will always be at the top for me.
I remember when I got 3rd strike on Dreamcast, non of my friend wanted to play it saying it was'nt a true sf.... Felt in love with this game instantly and never stopped playing it and finally got them into it.
Feetwork101's 3rd strike film room series is a must watch if you enjoy 3s. He goes over the top players for each character and breaks down aspects of their gameplay like baiting out attacks, preemptively jumping lows etc.
SFII Champion Edition wouldn't be the same without Dictator's overpowered flaming torpedo or Ken's shoryuken arc. Playing overpowered bosses was a big part of the appeal.
The best overview of 3rd strike I think I'v ever seen. I especially like the commentary on balance, something I'v thought for awhile is that the main way modern games balance large rosters is simply by making the characters more similar, they tend to do pretty much the same thing just slightly better or worse in some areas. In 3rd Strike by comparison you have some vastly different characters which exist together in the same game, such different characters with different win conditions playing against each other is a lot what makes the game so fun and diverse.
SF3, I think they are trying to bring in some of the formulas of Vampire Savior to Street Fighter franchise without really turning it into a Marvel-esque game.
Pretty good vid overall! I think some of the ways ya described modern tittles as more homogeneous was a bit too dismissive of how they are different at times. Strive in particular is a odd example, given how much it's critized by being the most different from older main tittles. (Myself included to a extend, I dislike stuff like the new air dashes and how a lot of character kits were adapted/changed) But still a interesting view of capcom's design phylosophy during that arcade time, and how it pushed them to make their games as distinct from the other as they can be. Another small criticism is the way ya described Urien. Like ya said it will be wack if a character with the unblockables he has would be top tier, and is good he kinda sucks... When he is usually considered high tier and pretty good in my experience, hell the lists ya shared in the vid marks him as such lol. Personally I would be fine with him being top tier, because of similar reasons of how ya described the 3 main top tiers, would be a interesting challange to learn to fight, and the meta of the game would adapt around him over time. But I get Yun, Chun and Ken fit the fundamentals of the game better Also ya mention there being no special moves that can prevent the parry. Generally true, but there are sorta some exeptions. The first hit of akuma's kkz super cannot be parried at all. Tbf ya can parry the rest after blocking the first hit, so relatively minor, but yeah I very much like the way ya described third strike neutral as freeform jazz, as opposed to the super intellectual thing many describe it as. I think third strike is way more easy to pick up, than many say as a result. Is really straightforward, and ultimately, even the shittiest lower tier can shine, because of stuff like the parry system, and its limitations ya described, allowing skill to be the main thing to shine above all So great stuff, always love sreing third strike content :]
In thinking about the broader idea of games with 'staying power', it's quite something that only a few games achieve this status. There's not a lot of games, considering how many have been made, that endure the years and come out smelling like a rose at the end of it. I mean, there's a lot of older games that were 'good' at the time but going back to is hard. To feel fresh even 5 years later is a pretty good achievement.
I think it's remarkable how through old game jank, games can obtain that ''meta balance shifts over time". Look at Melee DK, two decades since that game came out and only recently did people lab out the character and turns out he's on that same degree as Yoshi/Pikachu/Samus/Doc where the character has potential to win majors and super majors on top of overcoming its flaws and bad matchups. That one aspect that's long gone from game design is that games don't get the time explored deeper and deeper because ultimatedly, modern games AND modern gamers don't like effort because either some cool trick gets found that can sauce up a character but then oopsie doopsie, someone on twitter loses to this tech and it starts snowballing into a wave of ''ooga booga pls nerf'' and thus, limitations happen, but unlike the saying ''limitations breed creativity'', the limitations of old games are getting told to draw the Mona Lisa using crayons while present day limitations are like getting told to draw mona lisa with a pen with a limited quantity of ink so you can't afford to make mitakes but you also can't afford to deviate too far or else its wasting the ink and god help you started drawing that Mona Lisa during the time said ink is no longer produced because by then, no one's going to buff your low tier main.
But that's exactly my point, the people labbing games aren't playing games the way the original audience who rejected SF 3 did. They're using data to optimize everything and perfecting combos on trainign dummies. No one playign game played it that way, as they spent quarters learning against other players or the AI which was designed to kick your ass and take your money. People cast SF 3 to dumpster of history rightfully so. People going well I looked up all the answers to the test and didn't have grind out the game playing people think it's great. If the internet has to solve the game for you, it's not a very good game.
This game is solved. Only reason to watch anyone play this game is the East VS West war or Cooperation cup where they do the team tournaments and you see a lot of players just picking their favorites. This game is really fun at a beginning level. but as you improve and understand the game you realize how stale and boring everything ultimate boils down to. the game has serious OS problems. and degenerate win conditions. And it tries to solve a problem from older fighting games with a system that creates more problems than solutions. Maybe if they iterated on this game design for another 10 years they would have figured it out, but this game is a mess competitively.
I am ridiculously bad at parrying. I don't do it because I'm bad at it and am bad at it because I don't do it. Very self-defeating, I guess. Anyway, Yang is getting more popular? That's nice. I tend to play Yang, because I also play him in 2nd Impact.
Parrying in Street Fighter III is very difficult, but I think it has to do with the fact that you have to move forward towards the attack which kind of goes against all logic for most people. Garou: Mark of the Wolves does have a similar mechanic to parrying, called Just Defense, but in MotW you have to move the stick like your trying to defend, which can result in an accidental Just Defend if your timing is right, which I think makes it much more natural when you discover how to do it
3rd Strike is fun to watch. I don't care much for playing it competitive tbh but I respect the game. I was always more of a Garou person. I do find the game to be overhyped a bit but it is stature is deserved. It's just an imbalanced mess competitively imo. I don't think any other SF game has this kind of disparity in tiers the way this game does (Alpha 2 Rose and Champion Edition Guile come very close). I played Makoto, Dudley and Ken and it doesn't even feel like characters like Q, Twelve and Necro are even getting to play the same game.
Also pre PS2/Dreamcast/X Box era games were built around their Arcade Development Boards and then changes had to be made to make sure they could try to run properly on consoles. Now days since PS4/Xbox One the Game Engines themselves are built to spec in line with the consoles to get the best performance and visuals possible since they are far more powerful than the arcade systems were....
Mark, I understand where you're coming from but I think you romanticize the developers and their design philosophies back in arcade days a bit too much. They implemented these design choices because it was profitable at that time. As you said, they made Street fighter 2, Alpha and Third Strike in distinct styles because they could keep selling multiple cabinets to the arcade owners. None of these games would really replace one another. Again, profitable strategy at the time. I bet if the technology was advanced enough where gaming companies could implement DLC's and live service models back in the 90s, they would definitely do it. At the end of the day, video game industry is a business just like every other industry out there. Even though I appreciate and acknowledge good game designs and the effort behind them, I still keep this fact back in my mind. Anyway dude, my take might sound a bit negative but I love your takes on games. They're really unique. Keep up the good work!
As much as I'm still a casual enjoyer of Street Fighter + fighting games in general, I still think it's one of the greatest fighting games in 1999, no matter if it's 1P VS. CPU games or if it's PVP matches. No matter if it's on Arcade, Dreamcast, PS2 or XBOX. Casual, or competitive. All because of the excellent game flow that this game has. I adored this video, even if I'm at the first minutes of it!
"if you came to arcades and said 'ye this is basically SF2 but with some small updates' no owner would want to buy that" Maaaaaan, you haven't paid much attention to street fighter 2 or 3 have you. 3 has 2 updated versions in 2nd impact and 3rd strike, and 2 has over half a dozen versions.
Absolutely Fantastic video… I’m a fight game casual and have zero skill but I love observing the community and this video was extremely educational for me. Parts of it felt like an economic course on how to service a market with different products depending on the markets expectation and environment. Absolutely loved it. Subbed.
Good analysis, especially in regards to why the parry system endures compared to other attempts. I do love your point about iterative game design vs the previous arcade design when it comes to letting things rest and allow older installments to still see the light of day. However I'm a bit split between some of your earlier points about game design needing to priotize legacy skill over resetting everything back to zero with every new entry. Of course every new fg automatically brings legacy skill regardless of how radical the system mechanics change, but my point is: isnt SF6 maintaining legacy skill by iterating on the design of SFV and SFIV (by preserving some V Triggers and bringing a more simplified but maleable FADC back through drive gauge) instead of streamlining everything and cutting corners to appease a new audience? Of course, 3S changes dont make the game easier but it's still a radical change that affects legacy skill just as much as what SFIV through SF6 did. I'm honestly confused. On a different subject, and my main disagreement with your essay is that I do think your points about balance and the comparison you brought up are a bit disingenuous. Most of the tech searching, labbing and studying the game still exist in modern fgs. Even at the end of a game's lifespan, somethings werent as set in stone as you made out to be. For example, the Elena issue from ultra sf4, although very present in the first half of that CPT, culminating in the healing-fueled set in evo losers finals, the back half of that cpt showed the players demonstrating signs of life against it which in return culminated in a Capcom Cup with no Elena's in top 8, Xian whom played Elena as a secondary for Gen's bad mu, never picked her once on top 8 nor the top 32 if I recall properly. Moreover, I think the design choices behind who gets to play the game the strongest are still implemented today somewhat. You cant say that sf6 even with a more homogenized system with drive rush, impact and supers, doesnt apply such principles. Just look at season 1 before the patches. There were top tiers who played the game as is (throw loops and drive rush like Ken), that played behind the chip damage of drive gauge (JP, Deelay and Guile) and others with strong poking into drive rush cancel (Chun Li). Luke was the one who had almost everything in all regards, surely, but the end result for CPT was Juri a char no one saw coming. UMA did his homework, used the universal mechanics especially parry against the more trigger happy Lukes and came out on top. You might call UMA an outlier amidst a bracket fueled with Lukes but wasnt that EXACTLY what happened to Hayao at 3S Evo? Its less about the game design itself and more about when the chips are down people will play whats best for them to win. Even when it comes to balancing, I dont think Capcom is looking to make the cast equally strong. Zangief and Dhalsim for example receive pedestrian buffs precisely because of their perceived strength and the need for them to be ass in certain areas of the game. Gief won Topanga recently but that's his only result to show for in months of season 2. So somewhat this philosophy still stands.
While I still prefer Alpha 2, I do have a lot of respect for Third Strike. I wish Cammy, Guile, & Zangief were in the game. I never liked how stingy the ranking system can get! The FGC should play more fighting games instead of talking about them. Like, SHOW _gameplay footage_ of those other games if you want them to get MORE recognition.
I know he was trying to explain the differences, but basically SF3 series was the last fighting game developed on arcade hardware CPS3 that was meant for the arcades primarily and then later on had ports to console, where as SF4 and onward was developed with a console release in mind from the beginning. Again from a development and business mindset at Capcom
one thing i hate is that with modern games is that people 1st goal is to find the so called safe poke strings and spam them over and over. and those people have that play style hate third strike
@@TheDsLeet There's no honor in it. Whenever I'm playing against some idiot who refuses to engage, I'll just stop playing in the middle of the fight. Lol.
