The new art is fantastic and apparently there’s plenty of fan service from the earlier games (note how the screenshot is a mixture of the two), but it didn’t do much differently enough to hold my attention any longer than the originals today. IIRC even the third installment had an adventure-like stage where you could backtrack, and who knows, maybe this one does, too, but we didn’t get that far.
I was thinking, why not use the advances in technology since, that surely have more to offer than the leap in character animation Street Fighter made in the 90’s, to take the side-scroller in another direction? Computing power must be there to split the screen like above and allow players to venture off on different paths, into buildings and up stairs (where enemies could be thrown out windows into the fray below) or into sewers, then converge at a boss. Or zoom out a bit and increase the playfield to “brawler” size, have teams face off against each other like gangs, and winners progress to subsequent maps, each of which represents a city block and might very well be roguelike procedurally generated.
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