null1024 wrote:It does. The game certainly tried, but SFII is such a different game [and so is every fighting game after that, and even a game that was designed by people from the SF1 dev team, Fatal Fury: King of Fighters, is wildly different [and somehow, very similar to SFII still, despite being made concurrently]] -- playing SFI is mostly hoping your special input was recognized so you could hit with your Hadoken that did 1/3 or 1/2 damage, and dealing with the choppy motion. It was really janky, and as innovative as it was [it was the direct ancestor of all modern fighters, and it provided a bit of a framework for its sequel that started the fighting game craze], it is still quite the black sheep. No other SF title seemed as "off" as it, not even the EX games [which are fundamentally just ordinary Street Fighter games, but with polygon characters].
It's the black sheep because it suffers from first installment weirdness -- they were trying to get to grips with how to make a fighting game, when the other examples around weren't that great, and many were based on tournament style sport fighting with point systems instead of health.
The only other fighting game I can think of that's really similar to SF1 from before it is Yie Ar Kung Fu [but that doesn't have specials or blocking, which were some rather important innovations SF1 provided, although that doesn't mean SF1 is any good].
Yeah, but you can say that now in retrospective. At the time, SF1 made some cool advancements and wasn't much worse than its contemporaries. Both Yie ar Kung fu and SF1 were heavily inspired by Karate Champ, the first in the genre.
I mean, if we are going to judge games that way then World Warrior is a terrible game too because it didn't have reversals so you could be tick thrown to death, it was extremely broken and random, didn't let you do mirror matches (except Ryu vs. Ryu with a glitch), most of its "innovations" were glitches (combos, crossups) etc. But it's not really fair, because at the time it was released it was a great game and influenced many games after it.
If you want a black sheep, you have to look at the Street Fighter III series. Regardless of tastes, all the games in that saga play very little like Street Fighter. Parrying either nullifies or waters down a lot of Street Fighter (and 2D fighting game) strategies and basics; projectiles are pretty much worthless, anti-airing works very differently, crossups are much less significant, all the fighting is done at close range (except when both characters step back to whiff normals to charge their super bar), stage positioning is much less relevant... it plays closer to a watered down 3D fighter than to Street Fighter. So different they play that they were a commercial flop (whereas Alpha 3 was a huge success, selling roughly a million units in the PSX at a time when 2D fighting games were passé).
