If you need only one GBA Street Fighter, get SF II Turbo Revival. But Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a great second choice.
The Street Fighter series has been pimped so much that Capcom needs to start wearing aquarium platform shoes. So naturally, the most successful games in the series are going to be considered for portage to a cramtillion platforms. Street Fighter Alpha 3, in my opinion, was the best game in the entire series; therefore I wasn't surprised when I saw them try to squeeze it into a GBA cart.
A quick note: Street Fighter Alpha 3 for the GBA is actually Street Fighter Alpha 3 "Upper" -- which means you get more characters, staying faithful to the upgraded version of Alpha 3 (Zero 3) released in Japan. You also get three new characters: Maki, Yun, and Eagle, none of whom I was able to unlock. That's because I don't have mad skills. On with the show.
I'm not going to sit here and regale you with tales of Street Fighter and how it relates to the history of the world starting with Neanderthals and boomerangs (and I can hear you readers take a collective sigh of relief). That honor should be saved for the console versions, which is how this game should be played seriously and not on this cash-cow port. I say that, though, semi-facetiously, because in reality what you've got here is a good little port job by Crawfish that does a very good job of capturing the gameplay given the natural limitation of the Gameboy Advance's button set up (it's time for four face buttons, get with it).
It's obvious: you've got four buttons on the GBA... and you've got six in a Street Fighter game. (No, I am not counting Start and Select.) Crawfish remedied this by having two attacks be activated by a two-button press. Although I've grown to use this method with various SNK fighting games, it's easier to press two buttons when you're using the four-button layout of arcades or more than two face buttons. It's a bit harder to coordinate pressing down on a shoulder trigger and face button. Call me nitpicky, but I'd bet you'll notice it, slightly at the very least, in the heat of battle when you want to combo off of a crouching forward kick and you end up whipping out a weenie little crouching short kick or a slow crouching roundhouse instead. At any rate, I suppose you could assign both punches to shoulder buttons and both kicks to face buttons or vice versa. Still, I preferred the tap versus hold functionality of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Revival.
There's nothing so wrong about the two-button-press setup, however, that diminishes everything else that Crawfish tried to do with this game. Gameplay wise, the team did everything it could to stay true to the Alpha 3 engine. I shouldn't be surprised, given how Capcom was able to pull off near-perfect gameplay with Turbo Revival, and given how Crawfish did an admirable job with Street Fighter Alpha on the Gameboy Color... but Crawfish makes sure the Capcom name is not soiled, by bringing in all the moves and all the combos, along with crisp control that makes a fierce-into-hadoken just as easy as it was on a console pad.
Crawfish also tried to squeeze in as many modes as possible. Unfortunately they couldn't fit the entire World Tour mode from the console versions in, but all the bonuses that you get from that mode are certainly unlockable -- so my dream of creating a Ryu with a recharging X-ism bar and air-blocking -- while on the john -- can still be a reality. The dreaded Saikyou mode is unlockable as well (it's the first one I unlocked) and, because I didn't know what it was at first (everyone's harder and stronger, and you can't do combos...!!), I was swiftly and cruelly victimized.
More than just the World Tour mode was sacrificed, however. On the aesthetic side, while the graphics are certainly commendable -- with all the correct colors and astounding, almost pixel-perfect recreations of everything (of course sized down to fit GBA resolutions), a scant few frames of animation were missing. Big deal -- that's alright; if I'm going to actually complain about anything it'd be the lack of backgrounds. There were quite a few backgrounds that just did not make the final cut; I think the amount in there was surely in the single digits, and if I had to recount them I could *probably* guess around six. For example, I think at least three or four characters fight in Blanka's backdrop -- the one with the little hut in the background. Further, I believe all the endings are the same, templatized "You beat M Bison now you are TEH WORLD of HERO! CONRATULATION" ending.
The sound also had to be sacrificed -- both in quality and quantity. Like the backgrounds, some are missing, and the quality is mostly Gameboy Color quality. I can't really fault them for that, since there's just a ton of content in there already (same goes for the graphical omissions -- I can understand and tolerate them), but sometimes it's just grating to hear how some of the songs made the conversion to portable. I guess I expect too much out of GBA developers, since I believe that the sound chip is just capable of so much more. At the very least, the more enjoyable sounds of the game -- the crunches and the vocals -- come out crisp and clear, just like you remember it. I love hearing Zangief blare out Final Atomic Buster (which my friend comically misinterprets as "Final Mother Russia").
The package as a whole, though, is wrapped up nicely into a good port for fighting on the go... except for one thing: the difficult AI. I'm not very good at the game, I'll admit that. But I still firmly believe that Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper for Gameboy Advance was made to please demons from the depths of the underworld the likes of whom you have never seen unless you've eaten Atomic Wings with additional hot sauce and have suffered the morning-after-on-the-toilet hangover. (Buffalo Wing Doctors have established that for the next 36 hours following such a hangover, you should be gentle when sitting down. Try to stand or lie on your stomach.)
Seriously, it's frickin' HARD. I put the difficulty on one star, and tried to go through the fifty-fighter survival mode. I believe I got to nineteen before I was whipped into a mint-green jelly-like substance. I re-played that mode on Playstation, and I was the one doing the whipping, and Rose was the one being the damned jelly. And I had set the Playstation version to five stars of difficulty. I don't know, maybe they're just smarter when they're smaller, who knows. Regardless, it's hard to unlock some stuff when you can't complete some modes even on a two-star setting (that's the lowest difficulty allowed to unlock modes). There's a thin line between being challenged and being frustrated -- this game toes that line. But hey -- it's Street Fighter Alpha 3. Even when it's harder than it should be, it's still fun to just fight. There are enough characters in there to learn that you don't need to unlock every blasted thing to enjoy the full value of the game. Besides, unless you've got absolutely no skill, they only start getting truly merciless in the various Survival Modes, or when you're fighting Bison.
In the end, if you need one portable Street Fighter, I'd say Turbo Revival. I enjoyed it more, I felt the gameplay was slightly more fluid, and I didn't suffer a hernia trying to play it. But Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper is a great second choice. If you haven't gotten tired of the console versions, pick it up. (And make sure you pre-chill your toilet paper -- it gets really painful.)