My old opinions about 3rd Strike are interesting to reflect on, because I still don’t like that game, but I now have a much better understanding of why I don’t like it than I did in 2018. A lot of my points here are pretty prescient, but these days I care less about the risk-reward dynamics surrounding parries (thank god no one talks about that anymore) and way more about how most buttons aren’t allowed to be advantageous on hit, as well as how homogenising the two-button throw ended up being for how each character plays. I don’t think I like 2nd Impact either, but it’s definitely much more interesting to me than its younger brother because it doesn’t suffer from those issues. You should definitely play EX2 Plus, though.
Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar to you.
You’re playing a casual set against someone. The specific game doesn’t matter.
Time slips away, as it always does.
You soon realise two things. The first is that you’ve somehow been playing this game for a good hour.
The second is that you have not derived any enjoyment from this game for that hour.
That happened to me, recently. I played a casual set against my friend, and it slowly began to dawn on me after about 45 minutes that I was just not enjoying myself. I was not enjoying playing Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike.
This could be a tweet. It kind of already is, in fact. It doesn’t really need to be anything more than that — if I don’t like the game, I don’t have to play it. Why go beyond that? It’s not like I’m about to make some wildly controversial case for how the game actually sucks and is the worst Street Fighter game to date. I’m not Viscant.
I could just leave my reasoning for this entire blog post as “it’s my blog and I wanna write about it, shut up”, but I want to at least try to explain myself here. Keep in mind that I am far from a 3S expert — I’ve picked up on some of the little mechanical oddities and character quirks through osmosis (it’s hard not to when so many people swear by it), but I am by no means “good” at the game. Really, this entire post will be me justifying why I don’t want to be good at it. If that and/or the concept of correcting any of my misconceptions of the game sound appealing to you, then by all means, stick around.
Let me preface all of this by, again, saying that I do not think 3rd Strike is a bad game. My definitions for a “bad fighting game” are actually quite strict — often, fighting games I dislike are enjoyed immensely by many other people, including those I know. It’s much easier to recognise that not every game can provide the things I want from it, and that’s okay. Play to your audience.
Parries
Maybe we should talk about the elephant in the room, which, ironically, happens to be the least concerning aspect of the game for me — parries. You’ve seen Evo Moment #37. It’s the video that helped kickstart fighting games into the global phenomenon that they are today. It reinvigorated the competitive 3rd Strike scene. It got onto World Star.
I’m not about to complain at length about how parries ruin the game or ruin the balance or whatever. Parry mechanics in any game turn normally clear-cut situations into ambiguous ones, and facilitate more thoughtful interactions between both players in more scenarios, and to its credit, this is especially true in 3rd Strike.
That being said, I find that the people that are the most vocal about 3rd Strike being “the best fighting game ever made” are often the people that understand it the least. One of the most common things I hear from these people is:
The risk-reward balance on parrying is perfect, because you have to give up blocking to do it.
Now, in defensive contexts, yes — this is true. You do have to give up blocking, the safer option, to parry an attack. It’s far riskier, since mistiming or guessing wrong will get you hit, but a successful parry will often lead to you getting a fat punish of some kind. The issue with this statement, however, is that it erroneously assumes that parries are only used defensively. It’s the other contexts in which parries can be (and arguably are best) used that leave me feeling tired.
Parries in 3rd Strike are performed by pressing forward or down (depending on the hit level of the attack) in time with the attack making contact. We all know what happens from there — you build some meter, get standardised parry recovery rather than variable blockstun, close fierce EX donkey kick, et cetera. But here’s what happens when you attempt a parry when there’s nothing to parry…
Nothing.
Taking a step forward, crouching — they’re just movements. They’re technically parries, but there’s no other animation tied to them if there’s no attack coming your way. You could be standing at midrange, pressing forward or down, and you’ll parry any attack that comes your way, with completely innocuous movements masking every attempt. This is why you can option select a parry into the startup of every attack, why relatively safe guess parries are a thing, and why it’s so common for beginner players to just get accidental parries. The lack of commitment attached to a parry attempt means I can accidentally parry attacks, and it adds a dimension to the game’s movement that I really just can’t jive with.
On top of that, the post-parry interactions aren’t very interesting to me. The interaction after a parry happens isn’t over, of course, but the set of interactions feels constricted, limited only to making the opponent guess whether or not you’re going to do something else after. I dunno, maybe I’m just spoiled by SoulCalibur’s Guard Impact system.
That being said (again), this isn’t an indictment of the game’s design. If anything, the only real problem I have with the parry system is the fact that red parries exist. Sure, it’s got a much smaller window of success, but it still amounts to what is essentially a free guard cancel with basically anything into likely a significant amount of damage, or a setup, or maybe even both. I dunno, maybe you’re into that laissez-faire approach to block pressure, but I think this concept was better executed by Garou’s just defend guard cancel mechanic.
Character Identity
I say “identity” because as much as it has been discussed in the past that there’s not a whole lot of major variance between character playstyles (since parries tend to force more mid-range interactions), this isn’t really an issue in and of itself. Neither is balance: as sad as it is that Remy is low tier, 3rd Strike’s viable characters are all fairly well balanced between each other. My primary concern is that, with some exceptions, what defines each character’s playstyle feels largely locked behind what they can do with their super meter.
What I mean by that is that a lot of 3rd Strike characters feel defined not necessarily by any kind of cohesion between their various tools, but by the ways in which their EX and super moves contribute to their identity. Yun’s defining trait is Genei Jin — an install super on a short bar that both allows custom combos and gives all of his normal attacks Super priority, making them nearly impossible to counterpoke. Dudley’s defining trait is arguably his meaty rose okizeme, which you can only secure opportunities for by landing a super. Ken gets the famous Shippu Jinrai Kyaku, a two-frame startup super that can confirm from almost anything and punish nearly as many attacks, and doesn’t stand out that much from Ryu outside of that. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Chun-Li, who is universally considered the best character in the game, almost entirely because of her Super Art II. Houyokusen is an insanely fast, highly damaging super combo with enormous range and a super-jump cancelable launching final hit, allowing for further damage and an ambiguous left-right mixup. Without her super, her footsie game is actually somewhat middling — her most usable pokes consisting almost exclusively of cr.MK, st.HP and b+HP actually leaves her with a fairly linear footsie game. In fact, it’s having access to easily confirmable damage in the form of Houyokusen that makes most of Chun-Li’s pokes so scary.
I find it hard to really connect with any character in 3rd Strike, and this is a large part of why. Characters feel like their identity really only shines through when you have things to do with their meter. And while those fleeting moments of “I am actually playing my character now” are indeed satisfying, they don’t last long enough or happen frequently enough to really give the characters any feeling of significant dimensionality outside of what the systems provide everyone.
So yeah, that’s pretty much it. Parries are too non-committal for me to really feel like I should care about them more than other parry mechanics, and character identities feel locked behind the super meter. It’s still a fine game, and really that makes all of this amount to little more than meaninglessly yelling into the void. But hey, isn’t that what the internet is all about? I mean, someone else could make this exact same post except talk about the effects of stepguard and G2 on the competitive balance of SoulCalibur II (one of my all-time favourite fighting games) and it’d have about the same effect.
The real takeaway from all this is that if someone tells you that they think 3rd Strike is the greatest fighting game ever made, nine times out of ten they probably haven’t thought about it that much.
p.s. play EX2 Plus xoxo