It’s a bit wild to think that Street Fighter is only three years away from celebrating its 40th anniversary — and just how many games Capcom has made in the series over that amount of time.
Super Smash Bros. commentator, streamer and recent winning team member of the Sajam Slam 2 for Tekken 8 Coney put together a tier list ranking almost every Street Fighter game after speedrunning the series.
Coney challenged himself to play through the arcade mode of every major Street Fighter entry (plus some side games) in one timed sitting starting with with first and ending with Street Fighter 6.
While he did go through all three Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter EX titles, Coney only ran the rest of the games through their final iterations — so other previous versions like SF2 Champion Edition and SF3 New Challengers were also excluded from the tier list.
That leaves Street Fighter, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter: The Movie, Alpha 2, Street Fighter EX, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, EX 2 Plus Alpha, Alpha 3, EX 3, Ultra Street Fighter 4, Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition, and Street Fighter 6.
Between the 13 games featured, there were 2 in particular he ranked at the top as “Peak” being Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 6, which he says are also the entries he’s put the most time into in general.
In his own words, these rankings are “NOT based on any meta or high level play, STRICTLY the look/game feel/aesthetics/characters/vibes of the games, as a dude who only played Arcade Modes & did jumping HK > sweep over & over.”
Interestingly, Ultra Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition ended up in the same tier of “Hideous now but great in their time. Lack that ‘time capsule’ feel other games have,” which is under Street Fighter EX 3 and just above SF The Movie.
Human Akuma is SCARY pic.twitter.com/JSsSAyU7Ue
— Coney (@CONEY) July 15, 2024
And then the very first game was all the way down at the bottom, and we recently covered many of the aspects that makes the original Street Fighter so bad.
“Honestly kind of amazed at how consistent this series is as a whole, despite their differences literally every game was extremely fun to play except 1,” wrote Coney in his follow-up post. “I might do a VS series version of this next, really enjoyed it.”
It ended up taking Coney just over 10 hours to complete the run, so he averaged around 45 minutes per game.
The original Street Fighter took the longest to complete, however, at a whopping hour and 39 minutes to beat Sagat followed by Alpha 3 taking him almost an hour and a half.
I am the World Warrior pic.twitter.com/MxUT9bPhEz
— Coney (@CONEY) July 15, 2024
He ironically followed that up with what was his shortest run for EX 3 taking just 18 minutes until he beat that at the end with SF6.
This is obviously a very personal and not serious competitive tier list, but it’s still very interesting to see someone rank the games after seeing how they compare back-to-back-to-back in one giant marathon.
You can check out Coney’s full Street Fighter tier list below as well as his 10-hour run in his Twitch archive. Or if you want to see just the highlights, Coney also just released a 40-minute version of the challenge to his YouTube too.
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