Great Game, Could've Been Better
Next up, the graphics. While most would say they are great, I would not go that far. The problem is that the colours contrasts turned way up, a trick that was pulled in a lot of early GBA games to make the games easier to see on the original GBA's horrendous screen. The result creates poorly defined sprites with too high a contrast and general washed-outness. When one looks at games like the original Advance Wars, you realise how much better the graphics could've been. In that game they use really nice full colours and blocky lettering that gets scaled. Whereas in SSF2TR everything just looks plain and as if it were ported straight in from a PC desktop. A lot of the new things that have been patched onto this game just don't work, ie the character face icon next to the energy bar. There's a million things I don't like about the graphics and you'll probably say it's because they are different to earlier version of the game. The only new graphics I really like are the pictures of the players as they are being chosen or as they win, fantastic artwork.
Oh god! Did I mention the music?! I hate to keep doing this, but it's horrible! Again, I know there were problems with a lot of music on the GBA and that many people said that it needed "sorting out". And again, just listen to Advance Wars, nothing wrong here. SSF2TR sounds like Game Boy music, not Game Boy ADVANCE music. At least the voice work sounds pretty good, I think. But the music, while being pretty faithful, is just pling plong all the way through.
So, down to the meat and potatoes of the game itself, we find tight controls and solid mechanics. Unfortunately, and this may be subjective, I think the A. I and in particular the difficulty to be rather bizarre. I can honestly not tell the difference between the difficulty no matter what setting it is on. Now, I am a SSF2 veteran so this may not count, but I can finish on level 8 almost as easily as on level 1. Some guys are so easy to defeat. I would say that Vega and T Hawke are the hardest. I just wish I had some friends, so that I could play against them with this ) ; What also annoys me is that the matches are not generated randomly like they should. For instance, if you pick Ryu, then you will be guaranteed to play Ken first, then Dee Jay, then Dalsim etc. You play the same people every time you pick the game up and start again. Only by picking a different character can you avoid the same string of fights. What makes things worse is that if you win all your matches up until a certain point (just before M. Bison, I think?) then this evokes some sort of strange glitch whereby you get a **** up picture of Akuma and the game crashes! Great...
Anyway, even with all my complaints I still enjoy this game a lot. Infact I think it's worth having a GBA SP for this game alone. It's got a lot of content and unlockables. I would recommend it to anyone.