It’s not balanced but it is definitely not unbalanced either, it’s somewhere in the middle. There’s a top 8 of fully tournament viable characters that can all fight eachother, so if you master any one of them the tier list should be no excuse for your loss. You’ve got chun with her usual stuff, yun with geneijin, ken with his many playstyles and versitility, the scary ToD-esque characters Makoto, Dudley and Urien, Yang the stun monster+good normals and gouki with the best anti-air, and all-out rushdown. If you remove chun (and to a small extent yun) from the equation the game becomes much more balanced, because now Ibuki/oro/denjinryu/elena can fight the top 6 of the top 8 characters. That’s not me bitching about chun but just to show that the lower rows of characters can fight the high tiers; read the most up-to-date, Japanese 3S tier list which I am sure most regulars here are familiar with already
http://wikiwiki.jp/3rd/?�����䥰����
Take away the yun, chun matchups and suddenly there are rows and rows of 4-6, and 5-5s all over for a huge chunk of the cast, with very few 7-3s lingering up until you get to around Alex and Remy. That’s pretty damn balanced if you ask me, maybe not at AE2012 levels (where the top tier is midtier) but still pretty good especially considering the SF3 series never really had proper balance testing like we have today, and in comparison with other games around that time. A 4-6 matchup in 3S is very close to a 5-5 in any other game because of the freedom you get in offense defense and your neutral game, it takes just 1 extra read or capitalization of a mistake; a 7-3 match can be won over with 1-3 extra reads and solid defense, all it takes is one knockdown and you now have the potential to kill a character. Not like in other games where you knock someone down and are unable to do anything even if his decision is the most blatantly obvious, but that’s another debate.
One thing I’ve always been curious about is the comparison between other 2D fighting games, particularly ST and VS. To be really honest, just by looking at the tier list 3S is more balanced than VS, and I’m not taking anything away from that game because I love it to death. Zabel is clearly the best character with no bad matchups; infact iirc he has IAD unblockables from anywhere on the screen using j.short off hitting the opponent with an air-to-air. But VS tournaments like AOW have all characters quite evenly distributed and some top tier often underrepresented… like 3S you can use the mechanics of the game (guard-cancelling, AGing, proximity glitch and all other stuff) to overcome matchups.
ST is a very strange case. There is clearly a top tier which all overwhelmingly hold 6-4 and 7-3 matches, but often times have a 1-9 match against them versus a much lower tier character, who is proceedingly beat by the rest of the cast. Sim beats O.Sagat, Claw beats Sim+O.Sagat (who both beat a huge chunk of the cast), boxer strangely does well against claw, and then both sim and O.sagat beat boxer…nothing set in stone of course.
http://curryallergy.blogspot.com/2008/09/super-diagram-turbo-version-2.html (latest one I could find, O.Hawk negative edge loops may not have been known)
If anything, the mechanics of ST (besides the super, I’m talking about solid zoning and flawless ground game) don’t allow for miraculous comebacks with amazing reads. So to sum it up, I think the real reason 3S gets the appearance of being at HnK levels of broken is because the high and high-mid tier are all strangely much more technical characters than chun and ken, so not only does the player have to know so much more and has to practice more, he has to work a little extra hard to get the win. A lesser reason (that only concerns Japan) is the level of play has gone so high that 1 point differences in matchups can make all the more difference when both players are at near-highest level. People who think this game is all about YCK (even though makoto is better than ken and dudley rivals him) don’t know that Makoto, Dudley and Urien and can kill a character with full bars. Or that chun doesn’t even have a solid anti-air and dudley can hit her at a very specific distance off a jump in. etc. etc. If anything, I think people would do BETTER with other characters besides the elite tier if they followed their specializations (mixup, footsies, command grabs etc.) Another example is tekken; albeit it is always a very balanced game, mishimas always tend to be at the top and I think that’s a good thing. No one ever says that Tekken is all about Mishimas because they’re high-execution requirements and technicality prevent easy entry barrier. Same for Akira in VF5FS. It’s just unfortunate 3S Chun just so happened to be the easiest and best of the top tier, and most characters that fight her all require a lot of knowledge and time invested to contest.
