19. Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers (2017)

As of this writing Ultra is the newest version of Street Fighter II, and to call it a mixed bag is an understatement. Don’t get me wrong, Street Fighter II is always a good game. But there are better versions and worse versions, ones you want to play and ones you want to skip. This one’s a skip.

Exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, Ultra took the (ugly, in my opinion) redrawn graphics of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, tossed out that game’s radical balance changes, and implemented its own more modest slate, such as “grapple breaks” (replacing throw softening) and some more minor character tweaks. It also added three new boss-ish characters in Violent Ken, Evil Ryu, and Shin Akuma.

If you asked the Super Street Fighter II Turbo community what updates they might enjoy to their cherished classic, adding more overpowered Akuma-like characters certainly wouldn’t rank, much less when implemented via cheap palette swaps. Nor would omitting the “old” Super Street Fighter II versions of each character—essentially halving the playable fighter count, despite Ultra adding the three “new” ones.

And consider the controller issue: No one wants to play Street Fighter on lousy Joy-Cons, and who’s going to shell out for a quality fighting controller for the Switch of all systems? (I guess you could get an adapter…) The online play’s okay, but it’s funny to consider that this being the Switch, almost every player will be online via the FGC’s most-feared bogeyman: a Wi-Fi connection. It’s just another non-optimal detail in a game teeming with them.

For these reasons and others, the Super Turbo community has not embraced Ultra Street Fighter II. It gave Capcom something to sell during the heady days of the Switch’s launch (for a much-criticized price of $40, no less), but it’s little more than a curiosity today. Credit where it’s due, though: That’s one epic-sounding title. — Alexandra Hall