Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Review

The parry is the idea. Tapping forward on the exact frame an attack lands negates it entirely and gives the frame advantage back, which means no situation is ever safe for the attacker and no lead is ever secure. It converts a genre about spacing into one about reading a person, and it is the reason a fifteen second exchange from a Californian tournament is still the most watched clip in the history of competitive fighting games.

The animation deserves its own paragraph: Chun Li's hair, Dudley's footwork, Q's coat, all hand drawn at a level of detail nobody has attempted since because nobody can afford to. The costs were real. Capcom retired almost the entire classic cast for characters the audience had no attachment to, the arcade release landed as arcades were dying, and it lost money badly. Competitively the top of the tier list is famously lopsided, and learning to parse it takes months before it starts giving anything back.