Cindi, I am right there with you on that Alpha 3 hype. I fucking
LOVE me some Alpha. Even Alpha 1!
Alpha was my favorite Street Fighter 'series' before SF4 came along. I still enjoy it more than the III games and was never as into III like I was with Alpha. This is despite even getting my hands on a 2nd Impact board before it got a home port on the Dreamcast.
I know I've posted this here before but fuck it, will re-type- I was absolutely addicted to Alpha. I was in arcades all the time on the original and then played Alpha 2 to death on consoles, spending hours and hours every day or weekend playing people or the CPU/training. It got to the point where I could beat everyone locally with ease and would challenge myself by turning off most of the buttons and just playing with a handicap. When Alpha 3 hit, I drove out to the one arcade that had it and picked Dan. Beat everyone playing there until they all just gave up and left, played the CPU and got the hidden Boxer fight and lost, then figured "whatever" since I had KOF '98 by this point and had "mastered" Alpha. I did get really into it when the home ports came out though.
(Note that I never played in a tournament or I probably would have had a wake up call, although I did routinely get to play people involved in the local FGC and would win.)
I finally got that wake up call in 2001 when I went to Japan for the first time. Sat down to play Alpha 3 and got utterly humiliated by a player who V-ism'd me to death all over the screen. Then I was humbled.
Most of the games people consider the best are some of the worst balanced. Soul Calibur 2, MVC2, ST, 3S, XvsSF (ok only I like that one). That's not to say balance sucks or something, that's a silly way to look at it.
The difference between Marvel and the other games you mention is how broken MvC2 was. I had never seen a game where everyone pretty much agreed it was a broken mess but would play it anyway before. Then came other broken messes like SvC Chaos and nobody cared. :'(
You're right. When I bring up anime in relation to the Alpha's I mostlly mean the speed (they're on Turbo speed by default) and the combo creativity. They're games that allow more freedom and flexibility in the combos, I feel. They lack anime mobility but they still have things like air guard and air techs. They're like a half way step between a stoic fighter (SF, KOF) and full on anime (Vsav, GG).
I got exactly what you meant but figured Toku was talking about the aesthetic.
I didn’t know that was Upper. I thought Upper was the psp version.
Hilariously the PSP version is Double Upper in Japan. Capcom naming schemes. 
But it's just a port of Upper, except it adds Ingrid who wasn't in Upper IIRC (I'd have to boot the arcade ver to double check that at some point).
Either way, that's not the version people use for tournaments cause everyone wants the broken version instead
So it goes like this. Will use the Zero names since everywhere else, it was just Alpha 3 for every version until the PSP version, called SFA3 MAX, was released:
Street Fighter Zero 3 (arcade- IIRC Boxer, Juli, and Juni were the hidden CPU bosses later made playable)
Street Fighter Zero 3 (home- added Dee Jay, T. Hawk, Fei-Long, Evil Ryu, and Guile to the roster, more stages, and included all playable hidden boss characters. Can't remember if Shin Akuma is a separate playable character in this release!)
Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper (arcade port of the Dreamcast SFZ3)
Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper (GBA- this port added the CvS2 sprites for Yun, Maki, and Eagle. It is also a phenomenal port of the game!)
Street Fighter Zero 3 Double Upper (PSP- this is basically all the content up through the GBA version with the CFE Sprite for Ingrid thrown in)
...I think that's it.
So going from Zero 3 to Zero 3 Double Upper is an increase of like 10 characters. It kind of sucks that they aren't putting a version of Upper in the collection because I like having extra characters, but all my mains are in the vanilla release so I'm still OK with it.
And that's also not getting into extra modes. There were some additional dramatic battle options in the Saturn and DC versions of Alpha 3.
