/vr/ - Retro Games

>Gameplay
Alpha 2 for being more focused. A3 is fun with the options sure, and World Tour mode in the home ports may be the best single player campaign in a fighter, but A2 just felt refined whereas A3 is bloated and unbalanced.
>graphics
While they're both CPS2 games and A3 is really pushing the board to its limits, I still prefer the more consistent look of A2, especially when it comes to menus. A3's menus didn't quite feel like SF, and it's always triggered my autism in how Capcom renamed Z-ism to A-ism for overseas, but they forgot to do the same for X-ism (like calling it T-ism, making the reference to SSF2 TURBO a bit more obvious). Also some of the sprites for the returning SF2 characters is pretty fucking lazy, like Guile and Deejay. They look like barely refined SSF2 sprites with a handful of new animations, and I won't even get started on the added characters for later ports like Eagle and Maki who clearly do not look like they're in a CPS2 game.
>Audio
I'll actually give A3 credit here. The soundtrack may be abrasive but a lot of the songs have a catchy grove to them, and it's hard to not like the meme announcer. By contrast I can barely remember any of A2's music aside from maybe Rose's stage.

So A2 for me.