Happy humpday amigos, I'll recap the Michael Lau show probably tomorrow. I'm still coming down from the buzz of the event. I did want to reply to a comment from my pal TruestStrike. He asked how I would have designed Juri, the new girl introduced into the SF series. I would like to reply to that and also point out the missteps that Capcom might be having with their character designs.

My pal Baberific made the obvious connection. Comparing the ponytails and coloring scheme of Juri to Jinx from Teen Titans. Many people on 1UP, Capcom-Unity and Shoryuken.com are comparing the character to Tae Kwon Do hero Kim Kaphwan (or his sons Kim Dong Hwan and Kim Jae Hoon) from the King of Fighters / Garou Mark of the Wolves. There are some good things going on with the character design and things which detract from her presence.

We'll begin with the good things.

Juri is based in part on the TKD school of fighting. Most of the classic SF characters are based on a particular fighting art. Hopefully Juri will bring a stylized version of the art into the universe, not unlike the way that Ken and Ryu introduce gamers to a fantastic version of karate. In the pics and video released so far Juri has long pants and padded feet. These mirror the aesthetic of TKD practitioners. The oversized pants also work well for animators as they can convey movement easier that form-fitting clothes. The lack of a TKD style has been an obvious shortcoming for the SF series. It's funny even that pro wrestling got into the series twice with Zangief and El Fuerte, three times if you include Darun Mister, while one of the most popular fighting arts from Korea was passed over again and again. I am glad that it finally got introduced into SF continuity, and even happier that it was introduced with a female character.

However not all of the designs behind Juri emphasize her history, work well when compared to the other SF characters or even acknowledge the importance of the fighting art she represents. Here is where the praise for the new character ends and the griping begins.

Street Fighter is popular among gamers for many reasons, including control, move selection, animation and balance. One of the title's biggest strengths was the character design. The SF series excelled at creating characters that were exaggerated practitioners of the fighting arts. Even though most of these characters were given fantastic abilities, the majority of their look and move selections were grounded in reality. I spent a lot of time this summer talking about the real-world fighters and arts that influenced the evolution of the Street Fighters. Unfortunately latter SF games began incorporating character designs from animé and film rather than actual fighters. This lack of respect for the legacy Capcom had established is one of the things I take exception with.

The first strong female character introduced into the SF universe was Chun-Li. She was a woman wearing a psuedo-traditional Chinese dress, with a dragon motif on her belt and her hair in buns. However her fighting cues were obvious and also understated. Chun-Li's arms were toned and she held massive weighted, spiked, bracelets on her wrists to give her powerful punches. Rather than heels or ballerina slippers she wore wrestling boots and kicked with powerful legs. She was anything but dainty and certainly not a girl. She became the strong woman archetype that few fighters have been able to equal. Instead developers began to introduce girls as fighters, most scantily clad, or with big boobs, but rarely strong females.

Cammy was the beginning of the younger, sexier trend in Street Fighter. However her fighting design features were obvious. Her color scheme, beret, metal gauntlets and combat boots all held military overtones. She was not placed in the universe simply to add sex appeal. She, like Chun-Li was placed in the game to fight and had to look like a fighter. Her extreme strength, even for a girl, was explained in SF canon. Cammy was the result of genetic experimentation and developed tremendous strength from steroids. Juri is shown to have several moves that defy logic and her diminutive size. Are these moves based on strength or something else? From the waist down Juri looks like a fighter, from the waist up she looks like an anime character.

Does this mean that I am against girls in SF? Or girls that do not look strictly like fighters? Absolutely not, provided that they have a purpose and aesthetic connection to the fighting arts.

Sakura might seem non-traditional and not at all dressed like a fighter. But upon further inspection she serves as a great balance and even contemporary for the "traditional" fighter Ryu. I bring up her purpose and the subtle cues behind her look on my the Frightful Symmetry of Street Fighterblog. Is says that not all SF characters had to look like fighters in order to be in the game. Yet, it also doesn't mean that any contemporary character design would work. The character of Makoto was a very powerful and traditional design. The producers of the SF games have always wanted to give Ryu a little sister character, or introduce Gouken's daughter into canon, yet were never able to do that. Makoto is the sort of end-result of that concept and her non-traditional karate style balances the style of Ken and Ryu, while not becoming redundant like Sakura's. Makotos discolored gi and the flowing yellow ribbon around her neck are aesthetic choices which work well on the character and remind us that she is a (strong) female.

There has to be a certain level of consistency between the overall theme of the character. None of the other SF characters has ever been designed as a half-fighter, half something else. Even the oddball characters like Dhalsim, Blanka, Birdie, Sodom, or even Skullomania, were one consistent and uniform design. Juri is split down the middle with half of her influence proudly Korean and half elsewhere. The energy that could have been used from a solid TKD design was dissipated from the "psycho powers" placed on the character. In a similar way the morbid obesity took away the kung-fu style of Rufus, and the silly cooking theme weakened El Fuerte's lucha libre.

Those that had psycho powers in the previous games did not look like fighters at all. The mad general Vega and the gypsy Rose balanced each other out, similar to Ryu and Sakura, and showed there was more than one way to fight in the SF universe, without the game becoming too immersed in nonsensical powers, ala King of Fighters. I am not sure how Juri could have worked as a younger person using psycho powers unless her design choices were consistent with the Vega / Rose theme. If her look was too extreme, as with the use of skin, colors or powers, then she would have been more like a KOF design than a SF one. I wrote a great deal about the problem with fighting game character designs in another blog, specifically the problems with fighters that do not look like fighters. Juri is skirting the line of acceptability within the universe. These were the problems with Remy and C. Viper. They are good designs, but not necessarily right for Street Fighter.

The further a character moves from human abilities, or fighting style, within the SF universe the less likely they are to have an impact with gamers. Seth and Gill were on the extreme end of the power scale and fighting them was a test in patience or dumb luck. Good character design always should incorporate fighting cues rather than fantastic powers. This goes for regular characters as much as for bosses. The closer the boss is to an actual art, the more likely they will be remembered and used by gamers.

I am not warming up to Juri based on the footage shown of her so far. She seems to be another odd character added to the SF IV universe, with moves and powers that beguile her purpose like her contemporaries. Her inclusion padded by marginally remembered Super SF II characters. Do I think there was a better example of a Korean female Tae Kwon Do fighter from a videogame? Of course! Panda from Capoeira Fighter 3 was a solid design that respected the art yet still left room for originality.