Continued my Streets of Rage 3 (JP) Zan playthrough and got up to Stage 7, then played the first 2 stages on US version normal w/Zan to compare.
This game pretty much sucks. Like even when you take away the padded enemy HPs in the US version and tons of enemies on-screen which makes the stages drag and take forever in the US version, it's not a very good game. The music is fucking AWFUL to the point where it sounds like maybe it's the emulator glitching and not actually music? But no, that's just the music. It doesn't go with the game at all. The sound effects are pretty terrible too and most of the enemies are just palette swaps of SoR2 enemies.
Zan is pretty good, between his full screen dash and his forward HP drain attack with his electric arm out you can pretty much just keep moving and dashing into people left and right and then extending your arm out when the enemies get up or after one or two hits.
But...he's not very fun to play in the long term because that's all you can do. He can't combo worth shit, his jumps have no range and suck and basically with the new system of being able to use HP drain moves everytime the bar fills up there's a lot of keep away -> electric arm -> repeat.
He also keeps saying this GARBLED AUDIO that sounds like POWER UP or BATTER UP or something with every.freaking.move and it sorta makes me hate playing as him.
But besides Zan, the movement is kinda weird. You dash and roll up and down but then there's spurts of slow when you're actually normal moving between that. It feels odd. The enemies are pretty boring so far and way less threatening in their moveset than SoR2. Like the whip girls after getting knocked down just like...sit on a knee for a few seconds before getting back up? Weird. Seven stages in I can't really think of any new enemy types since SoR2 outside some karate dudes who are less interesting than the SoR2 karate guys. The bosses suck too with the only sorta memorable one being the Robo-Mr.X and only because he shoots a rocket which is heat-seaking and the part with the 3 samurai ninjas because they were samurai ninjas.
The backgrounds are zzz and don't have any of the character of the SoR2 locations.
But now there's lots of cutscenes after every level. Eh, they don't interfere that much so this is one thing I'm not really gonna hate on. I guess it's ok.
Oh and going back to Zan, I don't like how he can't use weapons and every weapon just because a glowing light bowling ball he can throw zzz. I feel like there's a lot more knocking enemies down and waiting for them to get back up in SoR3. Maybe because there's more enemies at a time so you need the downtime?
SoR3 really feels like one of those games where a company licensed out their IP to some shitty shovelware company who made a quick sequel. Even though I wasn't feeling SoR1 because of its simplicity and lack of combos/blitz moves, etc..at least it sorta felt like a simple SoR2 by the same team. SoR3 just feels shitty as fuck.
I guess I like that they push more on the robot angle in this one.
Will finish my JP run up next time I play. Fwiw, the main difference with the JP version are the enemies have like 1/4th or 1/3rd the HP and are way less aggressive (Shiva boss on Stage 1 is like super fast and psycho on US version, but more like SoR2 speed on JP version), on the JP version the enemies will hardly ever beat you to a throw whereas in the US version some fucker threw me out of my Zan dash mid-dash wtf.