Street Fighter Zero 3 (aka Street Fighter Alpha 3)

Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a 2D competitive fighting game originally released by Capcom for the arcade in 1998. It is the third and final installment in the Street Fighter Alpha sub-series, which serves as a prequel to Street Fighter II, and ran on the same CP System II hardware as previous Alpha games. The game was produced after the Street Fighter III sub-series has started, being released after 2nd Impact, but before 3rd Strike. Alpha 3 further expanded the playable fighter roster from Street Fighter Alpha 2 and added new features such as selectable fighting styles called “isms”.

Alpha 3 has also been released on a variety of home platforms starting with the PlayStation port in 1998, which added an exclusive World Tour mode and brought back even more characters, with further versions on the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable. The game was also included in the Street Fighter Alpha Anthology, as well as the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection.

Gameplay
Street Fighter Alpha 3 discards the “Manual” and “Auto” modes from the previous Alpha games and instead offers three different playing styles known as “isms” for the player to choose from. The standard playing style, A-ism (or Z-ism in Japan), is based on the previous Alpha games, in which the player has a three-level Super Combo gauge with access to several Super Combo moves. X-ism is a simple style based on Super Street Fighter II Turbo (the term “X-ism” being a reference to that game’s Japanese title, Super Street Fighter II X), in which the player has a single-level Super Combo gauge and access to a single but powerful Super Combo move. The third style, V-ism (or “variable” style), is a unique style that allows the player to perform custom combos similar to the ones in Street Fighter Alpha 2, but cannot use Super Combos. In X-ism, the player cannot air-block nor perform Alpha Counters, and can only use 1 Super Combo move in its powerful Level 3 version. To activate V-ism’s Super Combo, the player has to press both kick and punch of the same strength. X-ism has the highest attack power but least defence, A-ism has more attack power than V-ism and a similar level of defence. All three modes have variations of movesets for each character, adding considerable depth to the gameplay. In addition, there are hidden modes that add handicaps to the player as well as benefits (for example, Classic mode, which prevents the use of Super Combos but also makes the character unable to be knocked in the air and juggled).

Alpha 3 also introduces a “Guard Power Gauge” which depletes each time the player blocks – if the gauge is completely depleted, then the player will remain vulnerable to an attack. When broken the bar shrinks and is refilled to its new maximum, it can be shrunk a number of times. Worth noting, while in X-Ism the character has the least defence of all modes it also has the largest guard bar, vice versa for V-ism with A-Zism being in the middle. Also the guard bar varies between characters, Zangief e.g. has a very large guard bar. The guard bar does not exist in Dramatic Battle matches so no guard crushing is possible there.

I-ism is a customizable style exclusive to the Dreamcast version’s Saikyo Dojo mode and the PSP version’s World Tour mode.

The controls for several actions have been modified from the previous Alpha games. For example, the level of a Super Combo move in A-ism is now determined by the strength of the attack button pressed (i.e. Medium Punch or Kick for a Lv. 2 Super Combo), rather than the number of buttons pushed; and throwing is now done by pressing two punch or kick buttons simultaneously.

Plot
Continuing the unfinished story in Alpha 2, some Interpol agents try to find the Shadaloo base and destroy it.

M. Bison and a brainwashed Ryu fight against Sagat, that realized the pettiness of his vendetta against Ryu after discovering that Bison had experimented his Psycho Power in Ryu. Sagat defeats Ryu and helps him regain consciousness. Enraged, Bison fights Ryu but is soundly defeated right around the same time that the military, led by Col. William Guile and Chun-Li Xiang, bust in to take down Shadaloo once and for all. Ryu’s willpower manages to pit Bison’s energy against himself, killing the villain (or so he thought). Sagat and Ryu decide that they will leave to make their tiebreak another day.

Everything seemed to be resolved, but what nobody knew is that Bison’s soul survived and possessed the body of the Italian fortune teller Rose. So he can wait until Shadaloo scientists clone a new body for him to call his own.

Versions
The Sega Saturn version of Street Fighter Zero 3 was released in 1999 in Japan only, shortly after the initial Dreamcast version. This port makes use of Sega’s 4-MB RAM cartridge and uses all the features from the PlayStation version except for the polygon usage and PocketStation mode. The Saturn version uses the extra RAM to include more frames and sprites (but has slower loading times than the PlayStation version), making it near arcade-perfect. Similarly to the Dreamcast version, Guile, Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma are immediately selectable, with the latter sharing a slot with his regular counterpart and playable via a special button combination. While the World Tour and Survival modes are virtually unchanged from the PlayStation version, the Dramatic Battle mode received some improvements with the inclusion of a 2-player mode and the addition of the Reverse Dramatic Battle mode, in which the player faces two computer-controlled characters simultaneously. This and the PlayStation Portable versions are also the only ports to feature the Dramatic Battle mode against the entire roster of characters, as all other versions limit this mode to boss characters only. The AI for the Dramatic Battle mode is far superior to the PlayStation version. Another minor change is the revised scoring system for some moves in the game: for example, many characters that earn 3000pts per hit from a grab move (a very important fact to exploit for the World Tour mode, where the score is the player’s experience points) do not receive as much in the Saturn version. The features, characters etc. of the first home port on the PlayStation are available straight away in the Saturn version.