Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper (GBA) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
333A playthrough of Capcom's 2002 versus-fighting game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper.
This video shows two runs through the arcade mode. The first is with Eagle, and the second with Shin Akuma (begins at 21:54). Both were played on the six star difficulty level.
The GBA port of SFA3 is a pretty amazing effort on the old 32-bit Nintendo handheld. Somehow they smashed all of the characters (not just the arcade ones!) into the tiny cart and added three new characters to the mix for a grand total of 37 playable fighters (!!).
In addition to an optional modified control scheme to make things easier on the tiny handheld, all of the -ism styles, special moves, and combos are totally intact here, the character sprites and special moves look amazing and animate far better than you'd expect on the GBA, and the storylines and extra play modes from the other versions are included. It's easily the best 2D fighter to ever be put on the system, and it plays just as well as its console-based brethren. And somehow, they packed it all into an 8 megabyte cartridge. You can go ahead and pick your jaw up off the floor now.
Sure, a few compromises had to be made. Many of the backgrounds are gone, the intro is missing, the music quality has been put through the ringer like most ports to the GBA, and a good many sound samples have disappeared in the conversion, but it seems silly to complain about these things considering how much was retained because of the omissions. The voices that are there still sound great, and the music remixes are pretty good in spite of the GBA's limited audio capabilities. But even with the sacrifices in the name of memory space, the presentation of this one is beyond reproach. The quality, of both the graphics and gameplay, are absurdly close to that of the PS1 port, and without the load times!
After the impossibly good Game Boy Color version of Street Fighter Alpha, Crawfish somehow upped the ante yet again for the GBA. It's just a shame that SFA3 spelled the end for the company - one can only imagine what they might've accomplished on the DS if they had had the chance.
I can't recommend this one enough - it simply has no peer on the GBA. KOF? SSF2T Revival? GG? They're quite good...until you play SFA3 Upper. Then you won't want to look back.
*This video was recorded through an LCD shader in Retroarch to replicate the look and feel of playing on the original GBA hardware*
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete