Throughout the series, most of the dragon transformations available to Ryu can be divided into three "tiers," each of which contains a group of dragon-forms that share a basic sprite (with the color-palette swapped to distinguish different forms), similar abilities and attack strength, and a comparable cost in AP for each use. The forms available in any given tier tend to be larger, more powerful, and more expensive than the previous group. There is also his "ultimate power," the nature, appearance, and usage of which tends to vary extremely widely from one game to the next.