It's Street Fighter. You probably know what the deal is with the SF games by now, and part of what makes these games cool is the look. The art style. There has to be something great, like maybe the sprites are top tier pixel art. Well, that's out the window here because this is a 3D game. Or rather, 2.5D because the fighting style is still the same. A few quirks are thrown in, like being able to launch your opponent far away, and then the game forcing you to dash towards said opponent. Fancy camera angles for super moves, that kind of deal.
This is where I have to criticize a mentality that existed in the gaming press at the time - numerous reviewers outright hated 2D art because it was "dated", feeling like the industry should completely move towards 3D. Graphically, EX3 was a solid argument AGAINST that. My goodness, you'd have to go back to the previous EX games to find uglier Street Fighter entries. You really see how ugly the game is during intro sequences and during the post-fight celebrations. It feels like it was still too soon for Street Fighter to hop on the 3D bandwagon. The stages are mostly uninspired, too. Akira could have gone for easy nostalgia points via making 3D versions of classic stages. Imagine bringing in Dhalsim's SF2 stage with the elephants in the background. Or maybe Vega's cage. Or M. Bison's raining Street Fighter Alpha 3 stage. That'd be cool, right? Nah, enjoy generic forest stages, plain temple stages, enjoy never being able to pick the stage you'll fight in, for whatever reason.
Maybe they wanted to hide the fact that there aren't many stages in this game, who knows?
The characters themselves all still look too blocky for my liking. Ken, in particular, looked ugly as hell in this game, you really see it during his post-match celebrations.
On a more positive note: the soundtrack. It's great, though there are numerous theme songs that are recycled. A LOT of them are recycled, but when they're all good songs, can you really complain? I'll put over the newer tracks for this game: Ace, Sharon, Nanase, Area, Vega and Blanka got fancy cool theme songs, and particularly, Area and Nanase got cute sounding tracks. To keep this short, just look up the soundtrack on Youtube. You won't regret it.
Let's get to the gameplay. It's...fine. The fighting system is so familiar that veteran SF players won't find much new here. There's special moves, there's super moves, there's throws, etc. - however, the few surprises here are not really inspiring. For example, characters can pull off "surprise attacks" which in practice, are mediocre single-hit strikes that maybe you can turn into combos. Maybe. Generally, I don't bother using them in combat.
Speaking of combat, I stuck to playing against the CPU, and found that there's only 3 difficulty settings: Easy, Medium, Hard. That's fine by me, less settings to test. Medium seemed too easy for me, I managed to knock off about half of Skullomania's health in a match by just standing still and kicking the air with Ryu.
At this point, the fighting felt like the same old story. So, with that in mind, there had to be features that made the game worth continuing to play. That's where this game starts to crumble. Instead of a normal Arcade mode where you face characters in a simple 1-on-1 setting, one after the other until reaching a boss, this game has an "Original Mode" - get used to strange names for things, the texts used in some screens are just so poorly worded.
You saw how I praised the soundtrack of each character, right? Imagine making a mode where you hear none of those tracks. Imagine an Arcade mode where you don't make use of character-specific music, or stages that fit each character. No intro like in Street Fighter Alpha 3, where they at least bothered to have flavor text. They put flavor text for the endings here, though, but I feel like the ending of the Original Mode should have way better presentation than just plain text over your character celebrating.
They instead decided to do this: You pick a character and start off in a Dramatic Match, which is the Street Fighter Alpha 3 term for handicap matches where you are at a disadvantage. Thus, you start off fighting 3 characters at the same time. Granted, they have low HP, but I still feel like this is such a goofy way to start the mode. You win, and the last character that was KO'd is the one you can pick as a partner. You can also continue with just one character. I hope you enjoyed the plain stage that took place in, because you will start the mode in that stage every single time, with the same song every time.
Then, you have a match against two opponents in a generic forest stage. If you chose a partner, he'll tag along with you. In fact, you can switch characters like in Marvel vs. Capcom game, it's neat.
After that, you face Garuda alone, so if you have a partner by now, great, now the handicap favors you, which is...silly. Garuda's badass theme song doesn't play here, which feels like a crime. You can also have him join your team if you want. The game will keep asking if you want to take a beaten opponent as a partner until you have two partners.
Following that, you'll have a match against two characters in a plain, crumbling stone temple stage. Then a match against Sagat in another rather plain stage. Finally, M. Bison in a temple, where you can bring a partner with you. No character-specific stage, none of the flavor that was even in Street Fighter 1 or 2.
I just don't understand why they'd get away from something so simple that worked so well in early games.
Secret battles (vs. Kairi, Shadow Geist, Evil Ryu) are unlocked by finishing stages with specific moves (Meteor Combo, Meteo Tag Combo, Character Parade). It's a nice touch, but not enough. Beating this mode X amount of times unlocks different characters, which feels lazy. Beating Original Mode once gets you Sagat, twice, M. Bison, three times, Garuda, etc. - if you want Area, you have to beat this mode 7 times. Her song's good, but not that good!
Then there's the other modes. Arena Mode has numerous Versus mode settings. Tag Battles are always nice, it's a 2-on-2 setting where you can switch fighters during a round. Here's what's not so fun, the text. When you pick your partners, you'll see a setting that says "Semi Auto" or "Manual" - I have absolutely no idea what each setting does and the game makes no effort to explain this. Awesome. You can switch partners by pressing strong punch and strong kick at the same time, that's something else the game should teach.
If you really think about it, there are lots of Quality of Life features that are just not in this game.
Now, okay, in fairness, there is a Trials mode, but we'll get to that later. I will also mention a nice touch in the Tag Battle mode: when P1 switches partners, the music changes.
Speaking of weirdness with text, there's also something that bugged me about the Arena mode. You'll notice that there's no "singles match" option. How do you have 1-on-1 matches? The answer is that you can only do that through the "Team Mode" which is not intuitive at all. Team Mode lets you pick the number of members on each side, with 5-on-5 matches being the high limit. Thus, this is where you can force the game into a 1-on-1 match.
There's also the Multi Play mode, where you can get a 3rd controller and a 4th one involved in the action - good luck with that one! On top of that, you can unlock Bison II mode, and Shin Bison mode, where you just fight the secret versions of him. Meh.
Let's move on to another mode: Character Edit. What is with the strange labeling in this game? I saw that and thought this was going to be a way to change colors of outfits, or something similar. Instead, it should be called Ace mode. Ace is a plain character who can get moves added. How? Well, you have to unlock them via in-game credits. How do you get credits? You go through the Trials with Ace, where you are put in a training-like environment and do the moves the game asks you to do. Thus, Ace is a fully customizable character. See what I mean? Like, okay, you are editing him and Ace is in fact, a character. I'm still pretty convinced that calling this Ace Mode would be much more fitting.
And let's keep talking about the text in this game. When you win a fight in the Arena mode, you're shown a little menu screen that has unclear text. It says "Character change" and your options are "CONTINUE" or "EXIT" - In my first time, I took that as "do you want to change your characters?" and chose continue. The game restarted the match I just did.
What? Why label your menu options in such an unclear manner? Here's what it should say, that fits a small limit of characters:
REMATCH?
YES
NO
Easy. That's what the game really means. It's a small detail, but man, coming from the 2020s and seeing this really, really stands out.
It's all of these details that just makes EX3 feel like an awkward high school yearbook picture for Street Fighter. Akira is the photographer that took the bad picture. In general, the EX series didn't look good. The controls may feel good, but compare the blocky graphics to beautiful 2D pixel art on other entries in the series. Alpha 1, 2, 3. SF3: New Generation, 2nd Impact, 3rd Strike. Hell, even Street Fighter II and its several versions. Even Street Fighter 1! They had character themes and stages. Granted, the controls were garbage, so that's one part where the EX series has an edge over SF1. However, it's so unfortunate that this game feels like it all came too soon. Like there was a pressure to jump into the PS2 era.
In reality, it would have been much better to wait numerous years. Hell, look at Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance and Deception - they look way better in the same console. Now, you may wonder why I'm nagging about the look of this game so much. It's simple: The wonderful 2D sprite art was a massive part of the charm to Street Fighter for a long time. If you're going with 3D graphics, you better nail the aesthetic. Otherwise, you're going to alienate customers and fans. It's as simple as that. Yeah, the game controls nicely but that was expected by the time this came out (2000). There needed to be some kind of surprise. Maybe Cammy, Akuma, R. Mika and Karin could have been added as unlockable characters, but you know what? Given how this game looked, I'm okay with all of them sitting this one out. And anyone curious about this game will probably be fine if they never play it in their lives.