Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection has just released, and I’ve been getting endless requests to do some tutorials for my area of expertise: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Despite being almost twenty years-old, 3rd Strike is probably more popular now than it has ever been in the past — largely due to the massive influx of new players since 2008, as well as its cult following, and its endurance in Japanese arcades. In light of the new release, I’ve prepared a few guides to help new players get into the old engine.
The first of my two guides is a tutorial on parries. Parries are the signature mechanic of the SFIII series, and they add an enormous amount of depth to the game despite being very simple to understand and use on the surface. Parries lead to a lot of extremely interesting scenarios that aren’t really possible (or frequent) in other Street Fighter games, so I wanted to help players learn how to use them properly. I know a lot of new players are turned off by parries, since they often magnify the skill gap between new and longtime players, but despite their reputation they’re really not that hard to use well. Additionally, they give SFIII a very high skill ceiling, which means players will always have room to further develop, even two decades after the game’s release.
My other guide is on “Personal Actions”, i.e. taunts. Unlike other Street Fighter titles, all taunts in Street Fighter III have practical effects which enhance the way each character plays. Some taunts are so useful that they form the core of how the character plays. Others are completely unusable in any competitive scenario! It’s good to know the effects of one’s own taunt, plus one’s opponents’ taunts, so this video should be quite helpful for all prospective SFIII players. I tried to focus on the most practical components of each.
I’ve got many other Street Fighter III primers in the works, so subscribe to the ShoryukenTube YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss out!
Check out the prior batch, if you missed it:
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike tutorial roundup – Anti-air, okizeme, juggles, and piano inputs