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SOJ Street Fighter Alpha 3 · Vintage Fighting Games
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What Is the World Tour Mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3?

An RPG campaign wrapped around arcade fights, built only for the home versions.

World Tour is a single player mode Capcom created for the home versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3, first for the PlayStation in 1998. It does not exist in the arcade game. You take one fighter around a map of the world, fighting short sets of matches in country after country, and everything you win is converted into experience points.

That experience rebuilds your fighter. Levels rise, attack and defense can be rebalanced, and your chosen ism earns ISM Plus abilities, special powers that bend or break the restrictions the ism normally imposes. GameSpot's reviewer, writing in January 1999, compared it to the Edge Master Mode in Namco's Soul Blade and treated it as the centerpiece of the home package.

HOW IT WORKS

A map, not a ladder

You pick a fighter and an ism, X, A or V, and the game puts you on a world map. Each country holds one to three stages. Clear every stage in a country and new countries appear on the map; you can revisit a country you have already finished, but the manual is blunt that your experience points will not increase there. Between fights you can check and adjust your character's status on the Setup screen, or save the run to a Memory Card.

Your score in each fight converts into experience points, and the manual and GameSpot's contemporary review agree on the shape of the system: the better the fight, the bigger the reward. Your character levels up to a maximum of level 32, and each ism separately levels up to level 5, which the game treats as mastery. As levels rise, the Setup screen lets you rebalance power against defense, trading one for the other across a range that widens as you level.

ISM PLUS

Bolting new rules onto old styles
Up to three abilities
At set experience thresholds your character earns an ISM Plus, a special ability that can be added to the base ism. The manual allows up to three: a green ISM Plus costs one block, a red one costs two.
Named examples
GameSpot's 1999 review names auto guard, alpha cancel and damage plus among the abilities on offer.
Breaking the ism rules
The point of the system is rule breaking. X-ism normally cannot air block at all; through World Tour, an X-ism character can earn air blocking and carry it into fights where the arcade rules say it should not exist.
Entry mode
Built characters are not trapped in World Tour. The manual's Entry mode registers up to six of them from a Memory Card so they appear on the character select screen in Arcade, Versus and Training modes.
Versus, by Memory Card
GameSpot noted the social half of the design: characters built in World Tour could be brought into versus mode by importing them from Memory Cards, so two players could fight with their own raised fighters.
PocketStation, in Japan
The Japanese PlayStation version also supported Sony's PocketStation peripheral, letting players build their character's strength away from the console.

WHAT IT UNLOCKS

The mode is also the key

World Tour is not a side dish in the PlayStation version; it is where part of the roster lives. Guile, Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma are secret characters in this version, and they are unlocked through World Tour, with Shin Akuma sharing a slot with regular Akuma. Finishing the tour's hidden locations is the road to them, which made the RPG mode the gatekeeper for three of the six fighters the PlayStation version added over the arcade.

Contemporary reviewers noticed what Capcom was doing. GameSpot compared World Tour to the Edge Master Mode in Namco's Soul Blade, called the whole package Capcom's best home conversion ever, and closed by hoping Alpha 3 was the first step in a trend of console games exceeding their arcade predecessors. The mode survived the port: the Dreamcast version shipped with a different World Tour, and the Saturn version kept the PlayStation's almost unchanged.

THE GAME ON THE SHELF

Street Fighter Alpha 3, at home
Japanese PlayStation cover of Street Fighter Zero 3, Ryu in the foreground over a red collage of fighters
Street Fighter Zero 3 · Japan · PlayStation
The Japanese PlayStation box, under its home title Street Fighter Zero 3, for the port that added World Tour mode.
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