Street Fighter 3: Third Strike is a fantastic fighting game, and spend any time around fighting game communities, and you’ll quickly understand it’s a beloved classic. But more than just being a classic people think back fondly on, it’s actually still pretty relevant in the scene, surprisingly. People talk about it all the time, find new tech and scenarios to experiment with, and if you log onto Fightcade, the online multiplayer arcade emulator, you’ll see hundreds of people playing matches. Third Strike isn’t some relic from the past: it’s an active and growing community with a lot of engagement and activity. This leads a lot of people to ask, well, why? We’ve had a lot of Street Fighter games since this one, and it’s been over two decades since this game came out. What is it about Third Strike that gets people still excitedly entering tournaments and sparring against strangers? Well, I’ll tell you right now that it’s not because this game is secretly better than more recent fighting games in some objective manner. Third Strike gets so much attention because of how completely unique it is. You can’t get the experience it offers anywhere else because so many of the little details are completely different from more modern fighters. The little details can be hard to spot, though, so I thought it’d be fun to explain to the uninitiated out there why this game still holds such a dedicated fanbase.
I bet you’ve all seen this clip, right? It’s the single most iconic thing this game has produced, have no doubt, and fittingly, it spotlights the mechanic this game revolves around: parrying. Parrying in Third Strike is simple in concept, tap forward or down depending on the move, and you’ll parry an attack, take no damage, and be in a position to follow up with a move much faster than if you’d have blocked. This clip is what most people instinctively think that leads to, which is high paced games where superhuman reaction times of parrying a 17 hit super is what wins games. While moment 37 is an awesome piece of fighting game history, I’ve always felt that it kind of misrepresents what Third Strike is like to play. Frankly, adding parries doesn’t make every game a godlike reaction time slugfest where every move is being parried left and right, not even close. Go watch an average match where people know what they’re doing right now (here’s a nifty example) and you might be surprised how much blocking is still being done. So how does parrying actually impact the game?
Let’s put this in context first. Remember that Third Strike was a followup to the endless rereleases of Street Fighter 2. While certainly a fantastic game, many players had a common complaint about it, right or wrong: too much projectile spam. With how strong pushback and fireball damage was in that game, and the limited options around them, fireballs and zoning ruled the meta of SF2, or at the very least was frustrating many, many players. In light of this, and the limited defensive options a player had in general, the devs of 3 clearly wanted to give everyone better tools to defend against ranged play and a bit of spice up close, and thus, parrying was invented, giving every character a way to swat away fireballs and close in. However, there have definitely been a lot of unintended consequences from this mechanic, all of which end up giving Third Strike an incredibly unique feeling. Let’s start with that fireball problem: parries completely dumpster fireballs. Normally in fighting games, you throw a fireball to try to force the opponent to move or to force them to take chip damage. Parries are so quick that fireballs barely impact how a good player can move around the screen in many circumstances, and because they make you take no chip damage, the opponent has essentially gotten nothing. If I throw a fireball and my opponent parries it, they’re not in blockstun, taken no damage, and even build some meter, while I get nothing. This is why a good Ryu in SF3 will not throw fireballs nearly as much as a good Ryu in SF2, because what you get and what the opponent gets has been drastically flipped on its head. This completely changes how it’s best to play the game, obviously, and 3 is a much more close ranged game than almost every other Street Fighter as a result. A lot of characters clearly had to be designed with this in mind, with more tools at the close range, and there are many characters with more inventive takes on fireballs (Ibuki). This isn’t some random side effect, it was clearly considered quite a bit, and regardless of the ultimate outcome, it is clear that many people enjoy the more limited use of projectives Third Strike forces. It is not better or worse, just different. The projectile game is clearly still there, but fundamentally altered, and it is extremely interesting to dig into for many.
Let’s also consider the ramifications on the air game. Street Fighter is a series that usually positions the air as an extremely risky place. You can’t alter your arc or speed usually (think the old Castlevania jumps), and you definitely can’t air block in most of them. What this means is if you jump at an opponent, you’re absolutely risking them swatting you out of the air, and if they’ve correctly guessed your action, there’s literally nothing to be done. A jump in in Third Strike, however, is not so simple, because you can parry in the air, thereby bypassing the anti-air and probably getting some damage back. Does this make anti-airs useless? Not at all! Since parrying requires precise timing, you can simply delay your attack to fake the opponent out, making them whiff their parry input and giving you that sweet, sweet punishment. Of course, the opponent could realize this, and start varying up when they want to parry just as much, and they might just realize that, hey, if you’re looking for a parry, you’re not looking for an attack, and that’s an opening! This then quickly spirals out into all sorts of mindgames and conditioning that fighting games live on. Like, if I’ve been parrying all my opponent’s anti-airs, on my next jump in, I know they’re more likely to do nothing, which means I can get a free attack or just jump in for my sweet command grab… and so it goes. This game turns jump ins into a whole minefield of mindgames, where instead of “did I catch them off guard” it becomes “did I correctly read how they’ve been playing in this moment”, and that feeling is incredibly fun to a lot of people. Parries fundamentally change the air game of SF, is the point, and no other game in the series has really done this, and for fair reasons. Parries ultimately end up limiting the kinds of characters that can be made in many ways. Committal anti-airs with wind up become next to useless like this, and it’s clear that it makes jumping generally less committal than the design of some games wants. Like I’ve mentioned, I play Poison in 5, and a huge part of her gameplan is trying to bait the opponent into jumping over her whip attacks, and if you do it correctly, you’ve then checkmated them into eating one of her very powerful anti-airs. That kind of design would fall apart if every jump is functionally a mixup scenario instead of a win state for Poison, you know? It’s not better or worse design to include parries, but it’s clear that the developers of later games have felt that the design space that they want wouldn’t work with parries. People play and enjoy parry and parry-less SF, and parries create interesting scenarios that grip the mind of many players. That’s why a lot of people stick with 3: it’s just a kind of design that they love.
There’s also some miscellaneous stuff that people generally think is cool about the game. The whole parry thing makes frame data less of a sure thing: a character with a 2 frame startup punch (Chun-Li) can often just throw it out for free against a character with at most a 3 frame punch (Ryu), but of course, Ryu can just try to go for a parry! It makes the differences in frame data less of a gulf, and more of a better tool that still has counters besides “block”. Speaking of gulfs, powerful system mechanics generally tend to make the differences between tiers of characters less pronounced. Any low tier can make a good parry read into a damaging combo, for example, making their poor tools less of an issue in many scenarios. Chun-Li is top tier and Q is low tier, but I’ve absolutely seen good Q’s in tournaments mess up good Chuns because they were able to use these universal mechanics to patch up their weak spots and find openings for Q’s (limited) strengths. Most SF games don’t have such a universal mechanic, with later game gimmicks giving characters specific tools instead of one sweeping, universal tool, so people who like powerful tools like this find that Third Strike suits their tastes better. It certainly does have the helpful side effect of scrunching the tier lists ever so slightly closer together, even if you don’t care for the tech exploration. Alongside that, something people like in terms of flavor is simply different super bar lengths! Depending on which of 3 supers you choose, you’ll get different kinds of super meter bars, which effects how much that super can be used and how much you can use EX moves (powered up special moves). Later Street Fighter games gave static amounts of super bar to everyone, which is probably for the best balancing wise (some 3S supers are useless due to this) but it’s a bit of flavor that again, a lot of people prefer and enjoy due to taste.
And finally, I mean, Third Strike is an audiovisual treat that basically no game since has replicated. Pixel art is expensive, time consuming, and hard to modify and work with in a modern era, so it’s no shock that most fighting game franchises moved to 3D or different kinds of spritework when it became standard, simply because of how flexible that shift could make them. Third Strike was basically the last big name game that really went all in on pixel art (besides KOF), and my god is it gorgeous. You might not think graphics matter too much to a dedicated competitive audience, but it just makes the game feel so good. It looks old school but feels so smooth and fluid, and it’s undoubtedly gotten a lot of people interested in trying this old arcade game out. I don’t have the knowledge or experience to explain it in detail, but I mean, just look at it. It’s good. The soundtrack is also aces, and also does something no game in the series has done since, which is progression between rounds. Each song is broken up into 3 parts, and a new part will play for round 1, 2, and 3. This generally gives a really cool feeling of progression to each fight, a musical up and down that hasn’t been replicated since. Quite frankly, it’s one of the biggest things I miss from this game when I go and play later games in the series, because man, that little pinch of buildup makes the whole match that much cooler. Plus, the music is very unique, with a lot of D&B influence that makes the whole soundtrack stand out. Plus there’s a rap at the character select! How can you turn that down?
Third Strike is so loved and played nowadays because it’s so different, jank and all. Yes, it’s old, yes, it’s unbalanced as hell, and yes, it’s got a bunch of weird ideas that never quite panned out. But you can’t get what it does anywhere else, and the quality of those ideas on display is evident for those who love them. What I want to emphasize here, more than anything else, is that Third Strike isn’t some superior tier of gaming. A lot of people get it into their heads that it’s for the toughest competitors, a true test of skill, and that’s not really true. Again, go on fightcade, and you’ll see a lot of people who are just random casual players having a blast with friends or strangers. Third Strike is simply an incredibly unique flavor of Street Fighter with many nuances that a lot of people love exploring, whether it be at a high level or just to mess around with. I am not an avid Third Strike player myself, but when I do play it, I can’t deny how fun it is to swat moves away and all the layers of mindgames that it introduces. Third Strike is a classic, but it has a playerbase for reasons beyond that. It’s incredibly unique, incredibly fun, and an incredible standout of the genre. You don’t need to be unwilling to move on from the old to enjoy it: just take it for what it is. I hope I’ve helped you understand at least a little bit why people still love this game.
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