13. Street Fighter EX3 (2000)

Arika’s third and final (or sixth and final, if you count each upgrade edition) 3D Street Fighter spin-off launched day-and-date with the PlayStation 2 in Japan, and unfortunately, it definitely had a few hallmarks of a zeroth-gen launch title. That’s not to say it was a bad game, but EX3 was not the big improvement fans of Street Fighter EX2 might’ve hoped for.

The 3D lookin’, 2D playin’ action was pretty similar, with the main change being a new tag-team system that let you swap characters on the fly, or even use both at once (amazing name for this: “Critical Parade”). It also went all-in on “dramatic battle”-type scenarios, with up to four players in the fray at once. Fun! Finally, a character-customization mode let you give a generic guy whatever moves you wished, predating Street Fighter 6’s World Tour by some 23 years.

So EX3 had its good points, but there were also essentially no new characters, and a couple didn’t return from the earlier games. The high-res PS2 graphics were terrible, too; forget MvC:I Chun, the Street Fighter crew has never looked so crudely off-model as in EX3. Stages felt bland, and while a lot of the god-tier songs returned, there were few notable new tracks.

Street Fighter EX3 felt kinda rushed, like it was treading water. The unique tag-team gameplay, over-the-top dramatic battles, and create-a-character stuff can still be a lot of fun today, but it’s not the all-around-superior sequel EX2 arguably deserved. — Alexandra Hall