Street Fighter EX3

I've never been akin to Street Fighter but, as years go by, the core elements it contains as a "half/full moon fighting game" sit nicely with the bit of taste I have for the genre. If you know a little about me though, I don't really prefer fighting games.

Street Fighter EX3 is an oddball. Mostly because EX2 was a weird product by itself. The idea of a 3D Street Fighter never really sits well, especially in the PS2 era. An understandable reason for this is how sloppy the whole thing looks. It's not just the gyroscopey backgrounds that feel like PSX texture warped all over again, which is already pretty bad. The character models range from decently accurate to stupidly uncanny: when the shadows clash against some of the women cast's faces, it feels like they're devouring your inner soul. Some body proportions look disjointed and overgrown too. It's like the anti-Mortal Kombat 4, where the kombatants were so skinny and blocky they seemed worringly anorexic - but the jankyness feels the same.

It also has one thing that I fucking detest in some fighting titles: masquerading the lack of features with pointless game modes. "Character Edit Mode" is awful: you edit this character, Ace (which looks as bland as margarine), adding new moves and combos to his repertoire. It's honestly just a "learn to do some basic combos with this specific character", which you won't do, because the character itself is boring and not very customizable. Like, don't fool yourself: do you really want to play as him, with its vanilla combos and kinda uninteresting strings? Or Chun Li, or grappel Zangief? D.Dark is better. Garuda is better. Yeah, his Meteor Combo is the best in the game, but you have to play that short burst of a slog first... It's not like you'll struggle anyway. Even the basic training mode is lacking; were are the goddamn input logs! At least I didn't found them.

What this has going for is the Tekken Tag gameplay response: it's a Tag Team-type fighter with a quirky twist, and it's the best (if not the only) feature in the game. You defeat enemy packs or tags, and the last character that lost may be recruited. You then play with both characters on-screen or tag, depending on the stage. I have to say it's damn fun! Kind of chaotic sometimes, but not at of Dead or Alive levels of stupid. The admitedly cool load of characters to choose from (and to unlock) makes the original mode a lot more interesting than it really is.

And that's the problem: it's not very interesting, because it's too short and too aimless to actually be challenging as a team battle. 6 Stages, and only two of them are actually tag team-based. Three of them are technically boss battles. I love the idea of fighting Bison with a handicap ladder, but it's still nowhere near as engaging as it should be. You can breeze through the mode with each character eigh minutes each in normal difficulty. Hard will take you more continues, but will extend the mode by two minutes maximun. That's not a lot of content if you consider those mechanics implemented. Add in the fact it's slower than SF Alpha and the likes. And I'm not even mentioning some of its control and positioning problems, like getting ganked by the first fight because you don't even get a breath for changing objectives.

It's an adrenaline injection that lasts for half an hour. You'll have a good time, it's just not a stellar time, and gonna probably stick with 1v1 SF games.This feels desperate for getting some of Tekken's attention. A SF beat em' up seems fun. A SF Tag team game seems fun. If you mix both of them, it just doesn't fit all that well together. Nah, let's just stick with vanilla Street Fighter.

P.D. Skullomania/Agent are some of the best characters in the SF lore, fight me.