Somethings wrong here.....but its not terrible like say "alpha 3"
Lets start off
Story: 2/10
Even more ridiculous than Alpha, 3's story has two god brothers that want to take over the world and use a tournament to kick every fighter's asses so that no one stands in their way. Yes im making this up because if I told you the actual story, you would commit suicide realizing that the simplistic stories of street fighter games were destroyed in an attempt to compete with snk's cliched anime crap storylines. Because of this, Ryu and Ken have no purpose for being in this game. Hell they weren't even supposed to in the first place [/captain obvious] which leads to my next point.
Gameplay: 7/10
Firstly Ryu and Ken SUCK in this game. If you thought shoto's had it bad in alpha, wait untill you get a hold of this series. all 3 games and they are punching bags for the rest of the crew. Alpha actually gave shoto's a chance (hell they were the only one's people cared about) and alpha tried to be a more advanced SF2 with ism's that destroyed the balance. SF3 is much different from those games and it shows if ryu and ken dont have a chance in hell in this game unless you set the difficulty to noobzilla. That being said these two characters haven't changed AT ALL over the course of the entire series. Sure ryu gets one new move that no one will use, but one move does not = improvement. Add insult to injury akuma gets more moves and the ability to use MORE THAN ONE FRIGGIN SUPER ART! You'ed think that since this game takes place 5 years from SF2, ryu would improve at least MORE THAN ONE NEW ATTACK! But it seems like akuma is the only one paying attention to his training since he can bypass game mechanics and STILL go god mode on everyone's booty.
Well anywho, that rant's over and capcom decided to bring back the sexy Chun Li (who is actually easy to use given her moves will never be pulled off due to control issues) along with having 4 new characters (all but one play terribly). Now you have a T2 ripoff who can go invisible and morph into other people, one dimensional karate punk who's AI is the equivalent of every character off of galaxy fight (very very cheap), some inspector gadget wannabe with an iron mask and a theme song that would get capcom sued by the makers of the x-files, and Remy, a guile wanna be who actually makes guile look like crap (then again he didn't need help) and despite having a dull persona, he's actually pretty damn good. Everyone else is vastly improved (Cept Sean Matsuda, who got screwed over big time in 3S, he is now the WORST character on the entire roster. and to think he was the best shoto in 2I) Oh well...now my trio is Alex, Yang, and Remy, while everyone else is either the same or just significantly worse than before. Add to that, better voice acting this time around, and better music (without the rap) The announcer from garou has been replaced with what sounds like some gangsta wannabe and sounds terrible on the character select screen. Backgrounds are no longer cool or have that awesome alternating affect, they can only change the songs during rounds (what a stupid improvement). So far the gameplay itself has turned from balance to absurd. Ibuki is just about the ONLY character that can dominate everyone else. She even makes fighting makoto feel like fighting dan even. That lets you know the entire balance itself is demolished if one character has the ability to wipe the floor with every character on the damn roster. Urien still sucks, Necro has been improved A LITTLE, Alex...not so much, Yun is more defined from Yang, making yang the superior brother. Oro is still the same old fart he has been, Hugo still kicks ass but hasn't changed, elena is still cheap as hell, dudley still pwns balrog, Gill is still the resurrecting football fan we've come to hate. idk about you but the characters were just fine in 2I, but capcom changed them up to pound the idea in your head that this is a new game, so they made more changes out of spite (yet refuse to improve ryu thinking fans will have BF's over "nolstagia being demolished") so this destroys any balance the series had left and basically the sound track is the only improvement worth noting, oh and the better voices are good too I guess (sean sounds better and plays worse....how do you do it capcom?).
Well now that akuma is a full blown character like in alpha, there really isn't a reason to replay the game other than find a way to play gill (which would take years) and you have the ability to turn on/off some features to get more balance out of the game (well you could try) and make the game feel more like 2I but with the char's moves being more crappy than the last game, its not going to be helpful. hell Alpha 3 made commands easier to do for characters, they didn't radically change the character's move sets (and risk the possibility of making alpha 3's roster even worse than it already was))
In short, 3S is a step backwards in terms of character balance and gameplay. Surely yes this could've been the best SF game of all time, but thanx to shoddy decisions to alter characters out of spite and blow the balance straight to hell, and only the soundtrack is the more rewarding feature. Sure its not BAD bad, but it sure ain't no cigar in my definition.