Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper

That a full-fat arcade fighting game could fit into a handheld console without powerful buttons and with a tiny display? In 2002 Capcom proved just the opposite. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper is a port of an acclaimed instalment of the Alpha series (Street Fighter Zero 3 in Japan) to the Game Boy Advance and ranks among the most ambitious fighting games ever released on the platform.

At the heart of the game is a system of three fighting styles, the so-called -isms: A-ism offers classic charging and multi-level super combos, X-ism is cleaner and harder with strong single-level supers, and V-ism rests on the so-called Custom Combo, in which the player assembles their own chains of strikes. This choice fundamentally changes the pace and strategy of each fight and makes Alpha 3 one of the mechanically deepest 2D fighters of its era. Added to that is a huge roster of characters, genuinely unusually extensive for a handheld console.

The Upper version originally arose for the arcade board and Dreamcast as a tuned, expanded revision of Alpha 3 with additional fighters and balance tweaks. Capcom then ported it precisely to the GBA, where it managed a devilishly difficult job: getting two planes of detailed sprite animation and dozens of moves into hardware that on paper was not up to it. The result was technically impressive for its time, though concessions in fluidity and sound were inevitable.

Culturally, Alpha 3 is part of the golden fund of the Street Fighter series. The Alpha line fills the story space between the first instalment and Street Fighter II and is to this day valued by the community of competitive players for its depth. With the port to the GBA, this depth became accessible for the first time to those who had neither an arcade cabinet nor a home console.

Today it is a title that reminds us how far the ambitions of handheld ports reached at the turn of the millennium. It is not the ideal version of the game, that you will find on more powerful platforms, but as proof of what the GBA could pull off, it is remarkable.

Why play it: Mechanically one of the deepest 2D fighters of its time in a handheld rendition, ideal for Street Fighter fans who want the Alpha system on hand at any moment.