Street Fighter Alpha 2

1996 · Fighting · Arcade

About Street Fighter Alpha 2

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996), Street Fighter Zero 2 in Japan, is Capcom's arcade sequel that added Custom Combos, secret rival battles and Sakura, and was Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1996.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 in Depth

Alpha 2 keeps the first game's three-level Super Combo gauge, Alpha Counters, air blocking and fall breaking, but replaces Chain Combos with the Custom Combo. With at least one level of gauge, pressing two punches and a kick, or one punch and two kicks, starts a timed window in which the player can string any basic and special moves together until a timer gauge runs out. Only Guy and Gen can still chain, and to a lesser extent. Every character now has two Alpha Counters, one on punch and one on kick.

The single-player mode runs eight matches with a fixed final opponent for each character. Each character also has a secret rival who, if certain requirements are met, interrupts a match for a scripted exchange and a fight. With Akuma now a regular, a stronger Shin Akuma takes his place as the hidden challenger, appearing before the final opponent. All thirteen characters from Alpha return, with M. Bison, Akuma and Dan selectable from the start, joined by Dhalsim and Zangief, Gen from the original Street Fighter, Rolento from Final Fight and the newcomer Sakura, a schoolgirl who took up street fighting after seeing Ryu fight. A "classic" Chun-Li wears her Street Fighter II outfit.

Making Street Fighter Alpha 2

Capcom unveiled the game at the AOU show in Tokyo in February 1996. Game Machine named it Japan's most successful arcade game of April 1996, ahead of Virtua Fighter 2, and it became the highest-grossing arcade game of the year in Japan; Gamest readers voted it Best Game of 1996. An update, Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha, added EX versions of more Street Fighter II characters, a survival mode and a two-on-one Dramatic Battle, and reached home consoles as Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold in the Street Fighter Collection.

The 1996 PlayStation and Saturn ports were praised for their faithfulness and for dropping the first game's easily exploited chain combos. EGM made the Saturn version, which kept more animation and the Western extra characters, a Game of the Month and later ranked it 36th among the best console games; it sold over 400,000 copies in Japan. Critics found the SNES version slow and choppy, though IGN later ranked it 96th among SNES games for how far it pushed the hardware. Street Fighter Alpha 3 followed in 1998.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 Trivia

Capcom USA chose three extra characters for the Western arcade release: Evil Ryu and "EX" versions of Dhalsim and Zangief using their Street Fighter II moves.
Shinji Mikami said normal hits were made to do more damage so the new characters would stay balanced.
Nintendo published the SNES version outside Japan; it used the S-DD1 chip to decompress graphics but still had loading times.
Capcom sold unsold SNES cartridges at a loss outside the US to clear its warehouses.
Gamest readers voted Dan and Sakura first and third in their top characters of 1996.