The first Street Fighter game is not a memorable one.
The Street Fighter series is amongst the most popular and best fighting game series ever made.However,the original Street Fighter plays very differently to the other Street Fighter games.In the first Street Fighter game,special moves are very difficult to do but extremely powerful and the fighting is a lot more basic with only 2 buttons(punch and kick)and you could perform a punch or kick while standing,crouching or jumping.
Everytime you pulled of a special move and it connected with your opponent,it would cause massive damage,even if they blocked it.You could easily defeat any opponent if you're able to land 3 special moves of any kind on your opponent.If you're able to hit your opponent with 3 of Ryu's hadoken,it will KO your opponent.The only 2 characters you can use are Ryu and Ken.
The gameplay feels clunky and slow too.
The CPU opponents are often quicker at landing blows than you are and the scissors,paper,rock system is heavily in their favor and the lack of technical depth to use to your advantage means performing special moves is vital to defeating your opponent.Especially since your opponents will use special moves too.The special moves are difficult to perform to the extent you often will keep attempting to perform different special moves numerous times before you can get them to work one time,but they will do a lot of damage.
When you select your character(which will be Ryu or Ken),you'll choose a path with different locations on the globe and fight opponents from those places.Adon and Sagat are the final 2 opponents and are very difficult to beat and unless you can land special moves on them you'll have no chance of beating them.
You will see familiar characters such as Ryu,Ken,Gen,Birdie,Adon,Sagat.There is also some interesting characters such as a ninja named Geki who is rumored to be the father of a female ninja named Ibuki from Street Fighter 3(you'll even see Geki hiding behind the trees watching Ibuki fight in SF3).Lee is a traditional martial artist and Retsu is a fighting monk.Mike is a boxer.Joe is an American karate expert.Eagle is a bouncer who appears in the GBA version of SF Alpha 3.
The graphics looked great for their time,the game has nice asian style buildings,Japanese forest with mountains and a lake,industrial zones with heavily graffitied trains,in the desert with faces of famous American historical figures engraved on the rocky formations,great wall of China,Hong Kong streets,English streets,castles,in Thailand near a river with a Buddha and another stage in Thailand with a temple.
It gave the game a real global feeling.
The bonus stages required good timing for power and positioning because you'll need to break blocks and tiles(which has a more martial arts feel than the bonus stages in the later SF games).
The music tries to match the country you were fighting in and sounds decent considering the limited sound capabilities at the time.
Overall,the gameplay was average for it's time but I still appreciate the good variety of characters from diverse parts of the globe and different fighting styles and environments in diverse locations in the world.