Street Fighter: 30th Anniversary Collection Thoughts
It’s finally been announced. The highly-anticipated 30th-Anniversary collection of SF games is now known. Containing (takes breath), Street Fighter, all five main iterations of SFII games, and a trio each from SF Zero/Alpha and SFIII, it’s a behemoth package with a dozen arcade titles. Four of those titles will be online with lobbies and both ranked and casual matches. In addition, we’re looking at art galleries, a sprite viewer which looks kick-ass, game-release details and a full timeline of the series. There will be a music player and even save states for its single-player modes. It sounds absolutely incredible and is one of those day-one purchases you knew you’d make before you knew it existed. The trailer, as well as the SFV:AE intro and the Sakura reveal, plus the full season 3 roster was one of the hypest (most hype?) deliveries in recent memory. And then you add that magnificent Capcom Cup finale – the losers bracket comeback by MenaRD over the legendary Tokida. It was simply marvelous.
But…
There are few things to consider here. The main thing is that these are arcade versions and not console ports. As exciting as “arcade perfect” may be, that means there may be no training, no special modes like World Tour, no Dramatic Mode. When compared to home translations of the past, these games may feel very bare-bones. I’ll say, I expect some sort of training mode out of it all, but that wasn’t mentioned in the trailer.
A second thing is that we don’t know precisely which version of each game will be made available. When you look back at SFZ: Fighter’s Generation (Alpha Anthology in the west), we had all three Zero titles alongside alternate versions, all with dip switches changing arcade board revisions. I really don’t know if this 30th Anniversary collection will entertain this attention to detail. Of course, since SFZ:FG/SFAA already had “arcade perfect” games, my fears of a very basic translation may be unfounded. But with that unclear, we simply don’t know just which version of each game to expect. Might we see the arcade SFZ2A upon which the home version of Alpha 2 Gold was based? Could Tien Gouki be playable like he was in the DC port of SSFIIX? Or is it just a basic final-revision title for each?
But enough of all these worries! Let’s look at some basic facts. There are twelve games in this package. SFIII:NG and 2I have only been ported over once, to the Dreamcast nearly 20 years ago. While they were usurped by the far-superior and all-inclusive SFIII:3S, this gives everyone the chance to play these integral parts of SF history. This also makes Zero 2, my favorite Street Fighter game of all time, available for the first time in over a decade. We can surely expect the usual filters to make it look less shitty than usual on my 55″ 4K TV. There will be wallpapers for all games. There are surely trophies and achievements which may be like the arcade ports of the last few years (SFIII:3SOE, Vampire/Darkstalkers:Resurrection, MVC:O). Everyone gets to try the original SF that I played in arcades as a pimply-faced 12-year-old. SFZ3 will be playable online for the very first time! This is just insane: a fanboy’s dream. And this fanboy cannot wait for May to arrive.