What is really confusing is why our beloved 2-D characters were thrust into the realm of 3-D to begin with. The Playstation's glory has just begun its decent into the background and most gamers will be less than impressed with the graphics of the current Street Fighter incarnation. There are plenty of graphical updates such as additional character shading and a slew of shiny special attack animations to add that extra touch of detail. Detail, however, is still highly lacking in this game. The characters themselves do not translate well to the world of 3-D. All of the detail that was drawn in on the previous 2-D versions of Street Fighter must now be represented by polygons. The end result, Ryu and Zangief end up looking like they were built from a sparse set of legos. Even with a set of new background animations, Street Fighter EX2 does not hold a candle to the simplistic styling one can find in Bloody Roar 2. All of SFEX2's backgrounds are drab with only a few colors to brighten up the few incredibly low-res animated items that flitter about stages such as a tiger in Dhalsim's level or plane propellers on Guile's runway.

Along with the grainy graphics, gamers must also deal with some pretty sloppy gameplay and a horribly difficult computer opponent. The name of the game in SFEX2 is supers since most of the characters regular special attacks will leave them wide open for retaliation. Most of the time this retaliation can come in the form of linked supers. Much like SFEX+Alpha, you can perform combos that consist of nothing but a guard crush linked with a special attack cancelled into a super move. To make things worse, Arika has now added the excel system which gives the player a 6-7 second period of time where your speed is tripled and allows you to perform custom combos previously only found in the Alpha series. With most of the game based around non-stop combo and super move chains, Arika leaves skill-based characters like Guile and Chun Li out in the cold. Too many of the characters are either too powerful or woefully toned down. To make matters worse, the computers AI is painfully difficult to challenge once you reach the higher stages. Even on the easiest setting, I found myself having to resort to cheesy tactics to defeat the last few fighters. You'll find yourself turtling in the corner due to the non-stop offensive put on by your last opponents.

Why Capcom licensed their Street Fighter series out to another developer is something that will always perplex me. While Capcom's own track record with 3-D titles like Star Gladiator and Rival Schools is nothing to boast about, I feel they could have done much better taking on this project by themselves. In all, the game is mostly good for a few oohs and ahhhs while watching some super moves with your friends. Otherwise, the poor graphics and loose gameplay keep this series from reaching the popularity of the previous Street Fighter series.