Favorite's always been 3. Always. In story, music, and characters. I like how Ryu begins the game as a naive coward who can't even look at monsters when he tries to kill them, but by the time you rescue Nina, he's confident in his own abilities and realizes he wants to save his friends.

My ranking now goes:

3>1>4>2>5 (which is oddly the same order as the DMC games from 1-4 in terms of story lol)

It used to go something like 3>4>2>1>5, but after trying to replay the SNES version of BoF2 again, I have no patience for it anymore due to the level grinding (although I love the GBA version still). So BoF1 ended up overtaking it for me.

1 is a basic game, but I prefer how dragon transformations work in that game, even though they are broken as smurf lol.

BoFVI is coming or is already out, but it's a mobile phone game. Should have figured that would happen. The budget for the games kept fluctuating. It was bound to happen that way. The first game had a decent sized budget because of how long it took them to make it, plus getting Square to translate it. Then Cap translated BoF 2 in-house (big mistake lol), and then spent over 2 years making 3, only to, again, have an outside company translate it. The same company (Bowne Global Services) helped localize the first Phoenix Wright game. 4 came out, and was a watered down game which was basically a giant desert with a bunch of palette swaps, because 3 didn't do as well as Capcom would have liked; still a good game though. Did I mention that Cap translated it in-house too? And then 5 ended up having aspects of RE put into the design (limited save), a limited story, only three characters to use, and that SOL feature, to cover up the fact that the game is only about 5 hours long without it. Of course, it may have also partially been because the same team was also developing MMX Command Mission at the time (it started when BoFV was like 85% done). After V it seemed like Capcom just didn't care anymore. We got some ports here and there, but that was it. And Capcom couldn't clear BoFIII for the PSN because of some legal hoopla with Bowne, so most people who still haven't played it have to pay like 50 bucks for the PSX version or get a PSP and get the European UMD for about 20 bucks.