As long as I'm making enemies I've decided to take apart that EGM exclusive this week as well take a good long look at Street Fighter. Check the local Best Buy if you can't find an issue for yourself because what I have to say is not kind. 

This is not Street Fighter IV. The pictures that you see here have nothing to do with Street Fighter IV. Don't let the title of the EGM exclusive fool you. What you are looking at is not a true sequel. It is a new Street Fighter game yes, but it is NOT a sequel. 

Yoshinori Ono spoke at great length about the game he is working on. EGM / 1UP's very own Shane broke the project down with great eloquence and gave us a reason to buy the wafer-thin magazine. There are many reactions that I have with the game, believe it or not the majority are good, however that name is sticking with me.

This is not Street Fighter IV.

Mr. Ono doesn't have much experience with the franchise. He only worked on latter SF Alpha and III releases. His resume also includes the cancelledCapcom Fighting All Stars, featuring such Street Fighter luminaries as the "Rebellion Feather" Rook, the "Eternal Ray" Ingrid and the "Crimson Thunder" D.D.

Yeah, if you don't remember them then don't worry. They were as forgettable as the game he was stuck with next. Capcom Fighting Jam. Ugh. The good news is that Mr. Ono holds the Street Fighter series in high regards, he doesn't want this game to fail in the eyes of fans both casual and hardcore. But as Shane says in his article "Ono's goal is simple: He wants it to be the second coming of Street Fighter II."

This is the thing that worries me, it is where Shane believes that audiences were lost with sequels because of "convoluted gameplay systems and unfamiliar characters." There is some truth to that but by focusing the energies of the team at Capcom into making the alleged SF IV, they are sticking too close to their best seller. So close in fact that this is almost a summation of fan service for SF II afficionados. When presented with the question of why go to 3D if the entire game is still presented on a 2D plane he says "The thought of making SF IV fully 2D did cross my mind, as it would preserve the traditional gameplay... Guilty Gear does a good job holding the torch for for traditional 2D fighters, and Capcom's upcoming high-def remake of Super Street Fighter II Turbo has it covered for us... I don't want to brag, but if you look at Street Fighter III, we've pretty much done all that is possible with animated sprites... There's simply not much for us to learn from doing another 2D game."

Ouch. 

If that was the case then why go to all the trouble of creating brand new high-res sprites and rebalancing the entire engine for SF II HD? If it was a perfect game then it wouldn't need as much work. If he were confident in the series then he wouldn't be making his game so much like it. "As a nod to the fans, we're trying to get as many of the original SF II characters in the game as possible... SF III was a very great game, but we have our regrets about having a whole new roster of characters... We feel that we may have betrayed the audience we built up with SF II." Ono says of the characters "We really want to preserve the look from Super Street Fighter II Turbo but to also bring them up to date with modern times."

Shane does say that it seems like a revisionist history, since this game takes place between SF II and III. Despite the roman numeral and the 3D makeover, this game sounds more and more like another SF II redux. Or as I call it, SF II.5. Capcom knows a good thing when it sees it. SF IV may be on the label (for now) but this game is fanservice for SF II.

Can you tell me any other game out there that confuses sequel with remake? Even Final Fantasy can move on with whole new casts and entire new universes. Fans are never in an uproar because Cid acts like the contemporary to Ken and Ryu. He or she is the constant, the familiar name that weaves every FF together. Even with fans clamoring on and on about Final Fantasy VII, Square-Enix hasn't gone out of their way to revisit that game many times. We've seen at least 10 trips to SF II-land from Capcom. Not including the various sprite-rips used in VS titles. Add the forever-postponed SF II HD remix and now IV to the list of SF II do-overs. 

This is shameful.

Progression is the name of the game, or should be. There is a chance that SF IV is only the working title. Street Fighter Legends was the original title for SF Zero and before the game was Final Fight, it was called Street Fighter 89. If anything the game featured in EGM is the second-coming of Alpha and not a true IV. It is revisiting characters from II, III and possibly Alpha and is mixing up the controls for more balance. I'm saying it now, this is NOT Street Fighter IV, so don't get used to the number.

IV comes after III, the characters have grown a lot by then. But telling you what has happened in the universe would better be saved for another blog. For now I'd like to tell you what I think sounds great in this SF remake. 

Mr. Ono is approaching the game seeking more balance for both beginners and veterans. The new "Revenge" system isn't entirely that new of a concept for SF games. IN SF IV the Revenge move is an unblockable attack that can unleashed if your character takes a lot of hits during the game. About 10 years ago the 3D SF EX series also featured an unblockable strike as well that could dizzy your opponent. In SF III powered up special moves were also called EX attacks. Now the concept of the original EX game returns with the Revenge system. Mr. Ono then takes it a step further as expert gamers can use the Revenge meter, separate from the Super meter, to juggle opponents with SF III-like EX attacks. Beginning gamers wont be at the mercy of experts as they can also use the Revenge attack to counter an assault. 

Another thing that I respect Mr. Ono for is that although this game is slated to be online, he doesn't think it should feature the same wacky customization of Tekken or Virtua Fighter games. "The characters in this series are quite iconic, and everyone has a lot of respect for them... the idea of Ryu wearing a girl's sailor suit and a funny hat would kind of crush the SF memory we all know and love." Good for you Mr. Ono!

Right now the biggest sticking point for most fans are the graphics. Most people are talking about how ugly and unimpressive the graphics look. Even Shane says they weren't blown away by the graphics when they first saw them. He did notice that the characters had bulked up quite a lot. I'm not sure if I like the idea of seeing a beefier Dhalsim but it does harken back to the original Bengus drawings of the characters. They were always supposed to be very strong it's just the in-game muscles weren't as exaggerated as the drawings. It seems now they are. 

Mr. Ono has finally pushed Capcom to take Street Fighter into 3D. Yes, it will never be the same as the classics, but in this ay we can expect to see more timely updates as 3D models can be put together, animated and balanced much faster than a sprite.

What's more is that the game is very, very, very early in development. The only level for EGM to play on was the Chun-Li one. Mr. Ono said that level was only 50% done. There were many more details he wanted to add. Ken and Ryu were shaping out, Dhalsim was still lacking moves and Chun-Li was a sprite. It's what Mr. Ono said that gave me hope. According to him the game is only 2% done overall. If it plays as well as Shane says this early in development then the other 98% is going to be phenomenal.

You can expect the developers to keep going back and forth with the graphics, tweaking the filters until they find the right balance to achieve the graphics they want. Right now the game only looks slightly painterly, not quite like the teaser trailer and not like Okami at all. But given time they will find the balance between detail and style.

After a decade I think audiences can wait for Capcom to get this game right. Speaking of waiting, I'm writing this series so I can have some time to devote myself to the new NiGHTS. You can expect a review next week, once this series is over. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the beautiful mistake. How Capcom managed to create a legacy of memorable characters despite themselves. After all, Capcom is not infallible. They've laid a few bad eggs over the years ...

Timeless design is hard to come by, almost impossible, it is what all great games hope to incorporate and very few actually do. A classic character will live on long after their creator has passed away. It doesn't take 25 years to establish a legacy, some characters are classics from the get-go. Pac Man, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog are examples of a character that nailed it early in their career. Today we're going to talk about the most classic of all fighting game characters, the cast from Street Fighter. 

Before most gamers even had a favorite Street Fighter the cast had gone through a long process. Some characters with many revisions, some lost forever to the scrap pile and some perfect from the first brushstroke. Most people think that the designers at Capcom are gifted, that the Street Fighters have always been dead-on fantastic characters. The truth is that some of the original designs were really quite bad. 

Thankfully the people at Capcom kept right on working until they were able to scrap together a handful of fighters. Just about the smallest balanced cast that could ever be assembled, each representing different styles and countries. The actual story behind the characters was the stuff of legend, whether players were aware of it or not. Some of the characters inspired by popular culture, animation or manga. Some simply drawn from thin air. In the end Capcom created something unique. It's a formula imitated dozens of times but never duplicated, not even by other Japanese studios. The most important thing to know, to commit to memory, is the way in which the programmers approached the fighters. 

Japanese culture, as many cultures in the East have a long and storied history with the martial arts. These arts go back thousands of years, many are based on real people many just legends connected to a myth, a sort of Asian equivalent to Beowulf. The martial arts are ingrained into their culture. It is in the music, the movies, the manga and anime of Japan. Like football and basketball can define some of US culture, so too does karate and judo hold sway in Japan. This is one of the things that many Western designers fail to grasp. Those in the west do not have the same connection to the martial arts, they have not been learning about them since childhood. They do not have legendary swordsmen from a feudal era to inspire them. No poems about warlords or sonnets based on bare-knuckled brawlers are in our libraries. At best a gunfighter would be our comparable archetypes. People like Doc Holiday and Billy the Kid would be the closest we would get to martial heroes and villains. Lord knows I would love to make a gun-fighting game as a contemporary to Street Fighter, but I digress. The best fighting games come from Japan for a reason, they are the cradle of modern martial arts.

As influential as SF II was, it itself was influenced by manga, anime and cinema, but most important by actual martial artists. The character we associate closest with SF, Ryu, is based on a real man Masutatsu "Mas" Oyama. Everything in the life of Mas was something from a comic book, he lived and worked harder than any martial artist before. His techniques were and are considered extreme and psychotic. Things like 100-man fighting tournaments, isolating himself in the mountains and training under icy waterfalls. His path was destined for martial arts immortality as he was a legend while still alive. 

A Korean immigrant, Mas Oyama studied various forms of martial arts and Karate in Japan, travelled abroad in search of new challengers and spent his life trying to master the fighting arts. By the same template, Ryu is one of mysterious origins (where are his parents? is he really Japanese or a Japanese-Korean?), travels the world seeking new challanges and learning from the best. In the original Street Fighter, Ryu would put on breaking demonstrations not unlike the kind Mas Oyama did. Mas was said to have incredible strength and conditioning. He could slice the necks off of bottles, knock out opponents and kill bulls with a single punch. Thus earning him the nickname "Godhand." The name Ryu translates to dragon in Japanese, thus a mythological character as well. Both Mas and Ryu represent the physical, mental and spiritual peaks of their form of karate. To think that Ryu is too well-rounded as a fighter, or too exaggerated and muscular to be an actual karateka would be an insult to how massive Mr. Oyama was as a young man.

Of course this is where the legend of the martial arts begins to spill over and influence the direction of the entire Street Fighter cast. Ryu wanders the path of a warrior, always seeking a new challenge because somewhere out in the world is a warrior greater than he. Perhaps a style that he can learn from and a master willing to teach. This relates to Mas as he recounts the time he was humbled by an old Taiji master. Ryu faces one such fighter in the original Street Fighter, his name is Gen and the character returns several times in the mythology of the series. Gen is a great kung-fu master suffering from tuberculosis. He is said to have taught some forms of kung fu to other Chinese SF characters Chun Li, Yun and Yang. Gen was inspired by Huo Yuanjia a man who suffered from the same condition and was immortalized in the Jet Li movie Fearless and Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury / the Chinese Connection. Huo, Mas and others like Bruce Lee are the foundation for the modern legends of the martial arts. They have influenced the development of Street Fighter more than any mythological character.

There have been many films with legendary masters and tournaments from around the world. The one where we can easily identify a majority of fighters and styles that ended up in the SF mythos would have to be the Master of the Flying Guillotine. This movie featured the best fighters from around the world competing in a secretive trounament. Most of the archetypes were there. The female Chinese master who was as good as any man (Chun-Li), an arrogant Muay Thai fighter (Adon), a super strong wrestler (Zangief) and even amystical Indian with the odd ability to stretch his limbs (Dhalsim). This movie was so influential that it undoubtedly inspired Mortal Kombat as well. The team at Capcom figured out which archetypes worked best and how they could achieve greater balance by adding more unique (or slightly racist) charactersand combining them into a plot with more drama than just a fighting tournament.

With all the information available on Street Fighter, it amazes me how ignorant many die-hard players are on the origins and inspiration. When Capcom seeks feedback for a project like SF II HD or even Street Fighter IV, there are hundreds of gamers trying to put in their own imaginary character designs and plot points. Gamers in forums try to push for a daughter of Ryu versus nephew of Sagat or Violent Ken or Evil Mel (son of Ken). As you can imagine, many of these ideas come from fan fiction, misinformation or plots lifted from the Star Wars trilogy. 

Ryu had to face his own evil self in the Alpha series of games, not unlike Luke Skywalker had to battle his dark self in the Star Wars movies. Therefore most western gamers assume that every character in the series has an evil half they must defeat lest they become servants of the "dark side." A majority of these gamers expect Capcom to make these imagined characters real, to connect these invented plot points. Worse yet, some do not equate the martial arts history with the characters they represent. Yoga, kung fu, karate and boxing are not disciplines as much as the characters themselves have some sort of super power. A good number of gamers think of the Street Fighters like mutants or super heroes, they were born with magical abilities. They don't imagine people like Ryu actually existing at one time, training in the mountains and taking on challengers from over the world. How the "fireball" is symbolic of the fighters inner strength or "chi" made manifest as a form of visible energy. Many programmers just assume that a fighting game character needs projectile attacks without ever questioning how chi is energy that can turn a punch into a killing blow. This is where the philosophy and history behind the martial arts is lost on a culture that has no native martial arts tradition.

My message to those gamers is "don't make the mistake of throwing plots and invented characters of Capcom." If you do not know your history, where a character comes from, how the character fits into the world, what style they represent or even the foundations of good writing and mythology then STFU. You can't just think up random characters and throw them in to see what happens, SF will become just like every other game if they approach the design in that careless way. Capcom has made enough mistakes already, they don't need any help screwing up their games. As wonderful and universally accepted as the Street Fighter II cast was, the Street Fighter III characters failed to make an impact with audiences. Why was this and what were the lessons learned? 

When I started this series I mentioned how hard it was to create timeless designs, near impossible. The majority of game characters are easily forgotten and they really have to stand out if they want to last. Street Fighter II got many things right, some by sheer luck, others by timing. So what happened with Street Fighter III? Why didn't the cast gel as great as the previous lineup?

Just like the previous game, there were a lot of characters that were horrible. Take a good look at the designs above. The only one that was really fleshed out was the twisted up guy, he eventually became Necro. But the rest were quite bad. Even if Bengus did pencil many of the designs they were destined for the scrap pile. It seemed that for every good design there were four lousy ones. Imagine how had it must have been to try and guess what the global fan reactions would be if one character got in over another?

Characters do not exist in a vaccum. They have to come from somewhere and have to impact the world they are created in. These were the problems with latter SF III designs, characters had less time in the incubator. Overly Japanese-influenced characters made their way into the series and detracted from its global appeal. Previous Street Fighter characters were more or less neutral in terms of design. Latter characters were based on Japanese pop culture, if you didn't "get" where they came from then those characters seemed odd and out of place. Suffice to say contemporary characters spoiled the legacy. 

Many of the characters in SF III did have some classic styling and they didn't seem out of place at all. Dudley, Alex, Yun & Yang were characters had that same universally accepted feel and design of the characters in SF II. Anyone could tell we had a boxer, a wrestler and two kung fu fighters. Most gamers call these designs "playing it safe" but they have to for a reason.

Remy, Makoto, Q and Necro were characters that didn't seem to be fully thought-out when they were added to the SF universe. At first Makoto does seem traditional, however her look and move selection seem heavily borrowed from Akane' a character from the Ranma 1/2 game on the Super Famicom. The uppercut and dash punch animations are presented in comparison below. Those that remember the game notice some striking similarities with the characters. Of course you had to have known something of the anime to pick up on the gag.

Street Fighter II featured a good cross section of styles and characters that didn't lean in one direction or another, Street Fighter III was saturated with Japanese pop culture. Remy did not look like a fighter at all. Yes he had a certain cool-factor, but his design was very J-pop / metrosexual, he seemed better suited for King of Fighters games rather than Street Fighter. Remember when I mentioned in the last blog that designers in fighting games have a tendency to give projectile moves to characters just because rather than as a sign that they have martial arts training? How was a skinny guy with long hair supposed to have the same moves as the military strongman Guile? 

Q made no sense at all, was he a cyborg or perhaps a super-powerful man in a suit? In case you didn't know, Q was heavily inspired by Japanese science fiction heroes (Henshin) as old as those featured in the original 1960 Astro Boy series. Television characters like robot detective Keiji and as recent as Ginrei "The Mysterious Iron Mask" from the Giant Robo anime' series look very similar. If you didn't grow up with these shows then you'd have no idea what Q is about. Only Japanese gamers know for sure, other gamers aren't so sure. Whereas a gamer anywhere in the world would recognize that Zangief and Birdie were heavy hitters because they looked the part. There was no cultural bias there, massive characters with muscles don't need translation.

There were three releases of SF III, known collectively as the World Impact series. Aside from the problems with character design there was also not as much emphasis on global archetypes, or real world warriors. SF III had a very heavy Brazilian theme, and while Brazil is unique and possesses a native martial art, the majority of martial arts do not come from this continent. Sean is from Brazil but has moves inspired by Ken and Ryu. In case you don't get the "inside joke" here's a heads-up. The special uppercut move is literally translated as "Rising Dragon Fist" in Japanese it is pronounced Shoryuken. Ryu and Ken are the main characters and one translates to fist and the other dragon, all they were missing was a character named Sho, err, rather Sean. SeanRyuKen... pretty clever eh? 

Didn't think so.

Elena is an African that uses capoeira. Capoeira is a form of fighting invented by Brazilian slaves hundreds of years ago. Elena's move selection and animation did not represent the style to its full potential, nor did it work in the context of Street Fighter III. There were plans to have a capoeira character in SF II but that character was cut. Perhaps designers should have studied more of the move selection and styles of capoeira before they crafted Elena. Zumbi, pictured below right, is one of the characters featured in the game Capoeira Fighter. While not as fluid a player has a better sense of the uniqueness of capoeira in CF.

It is not known if the characters Oro and Yun were an homage or a parody of real persons. Oro, a Brazilian, is most likely inspired by Brazilian Helio Gracie. Helio is the founding father of the Gracie form of Jujitsu, known the world over by its precise locks and trapping techniques. Although he no longer competes in tournaments, the elderly Helio can always be spotted leading the procession of Gracie fighters in global competitions.

Yun is most likely based on longtime pro skater Kien Lieu, formerly with Dynasty skateboards. Yun's long ponytail, skateboard, cap and even Puma sneakers can be linked directly to Kien. Yun was given a brother that used inline skates. It is highly unlikely that SF III designers really knew enough about skate culture as to mix those forms of "action sports" but rather did so simply to ride the pop trend. It is well documented that skateboarding has traditionally had a bias against inline skating.

As if there wasn't already a cultural bias and a geographical emphasis weighing down SF III there were also redundant characters hurting the title. Sean follows the popular Shotoclone Ken and Ryu model. We have seen this model as the basis for Gouki, Dan and Sakura in previous games. The game hardly needed another character with the same moves. With the rubbery Necro in the game why add the shape-shifter 12? The boss Gill was very unique, however odd-looking he was. There was a reduced need for the Urien character. 

Fighting game aficionados would say that the redundant characters have a place in the universe because they play uniquely, employ different strategies and there are other noticeable differences aside from appearance. Serious competitive players they know the idiosyncrasies of these characters and would rank top-tier characters accordingly. They might argue that what I see as redundant is rather a character designed for competitive players or die-hard fans looking to breath new life into the aging franchise. At the same time, this type of dedicated mentality scared off many casual gamers as none of the characters was truly unique or understandable.

Street Fighter III had many obstacles to overcome if it was going to be as successful as SF II. In addition to decidedly Japanese character designs and complicated play mechanics, the plot itself seemed borrowed from a weaker fighting game franchise. It can be argued that the character Gill and the premise of a diety trying to take over the world was lifted from the World Heroes series by ADK. In that game, a powerful-alien character named Geegus would challenge the player that had managed to defeat the greatest fighters in history. Geegus was superior to the player in every way, he was humanoid whose final stage would raise the themes of the ragnarok / armageddon. This character also had a contemporary in the series named Dio. Think of the relationship and similarities between Gill and Urien. 

Geegus, and Neo Dio from World Heroes 2, were introduced in 1993 and 94 respectively. Street Fighter III came out in 1997. The plot of SF III and the character of Gill share several things in common with the World Heroes plot and their boss characters. There are enough similarities with the overall presentation that tie the characters Dio and Gill together. 

In all fairness it is difficult to pen a completely original plot or design a completely original character. Classic characters, plots and themes are thousands of years old. Millions of games, books, comic books, manga, anime and movies have come out depicting every shape and size of a hero and villain. Mythologies exist in every continent and any similarities in games can be coincidence. 

However the designers at Capcom should have taken a good look at the other fighting games and tried to figure out what they could incorporate into SF III to make it stand apart. A heavy Brazil context, overtly Japanese pop-culture character designs, tricky parry system, boss reminiscent of Dio and redundant characters were many things that prevented SF III from being as successful as SF II. I'm not even talking about how the US arcade industry was on the decline and the CPS-3 system was laborious to program on.

When it was announced that there would be a Street Fighter IV the battle lines were drawn immediately. Die-hard tournament players had their list of demands, casual gamers wondered if the control scheme would be as confusing as SF III, fanboys wanted a million characters with VS-style combo pornography, veterans wanted a return to the basics, tight control and a handful of characters. There was no way Capcom was going to appease everybody. The main argument being what do we want versus what do we need? A want and a need are two distinct things. We all want Street Fighter to remind us of the good old days, what we really need is a fantastic genre-defining game that raises the bar. This is the battle between fanservice and originality. Which would Street Fighter IV cater to? Is there a balance?

"Is there a balance between fanservice and originality?"

Interestingly enough there is! If you need a prime example then look no further than Street Fighter Zero / Alpha. Many of you might be thinking "hey wait a minute, didn't you say that contemporary Japanese design killed Street Fighter? SF Alpha looks more Japanese than any SF ever!"

You would only be half right.

The presentation of Alpha is more anime than any previous title, but take a good look. There was not a game before that approached the fighters in such a stylized manner or presented the characters in the exact look of the Bengus concept art. The look was definitely anime but the game was not cartoonish or pretentious. It did not pretend to incorporate a Brazilian theme or kitschy Japanese-retro characters and call itself the global impact. Even better the characters were all universal and the mechanics were better than any SF title at the time. 

Very few of the characters in the game were original, the majority of the cast was pulled from previous SF games and even Final Fight, how's that for fanservice? The producer could not have created SF III knowing full well that many members of the original team had left for SNK and ARIKA. Instead he gave fans a game that tied SF, SF II and Final Fight together. It connected the loose ends and created many more possibilities. The game itself was very tight and the balance was amazing. SF Alpha works because it catered to our needs as much as our wants. There was a character for everyone and all fell within that classic design that I've been harping on about for three days plus it had all the moves and evolution we've come to expect from Street Fighter. What Alpha did not claim to be was a true sequel to SF II. It was never meant to be III but rather an interim game to appease fans while the third was being worked on. Unfortunately this would go on to curse the franchise. After Alpha fans demanded fan service on every sequel rather than new characters. This was a reason why SF III received a lukewarm reception and eventually Chun-Li returned to appease fans. One of the hardest parts of the equation is designing a new cast that will go over with fans as much as the SF II or Alpha lineup. 

In the past 15 years there has been only three non-Capcom games to get the classic design of SF down perfectly and almost match the game mechanics. These games even featured a cast of characters that were interchangeable with the SF universe. If you don't remember they were Buriki One and Garou Mark of the Wolves by SNK and Street Fighter EX by ARIKA. None of the games mentioned got the control and balance exactly like the SF series but their character design was spot-on. I dare say these games had a more diverse and appealing cast than SF III's original lineup. We can start with Garou MotW because it was the first fighting game unlike traditional SNK fighters. 

The SNK style of fighter is the super-powered metrosexual that I abhor. If you're not a feathery-haired pretty boy in tight leather pants then you can't be in an SNK game. Simple as that. Garou MotW broke tradition by taking a page from Capcom, SF Alpha to be precise. It's sprites were large and bold, designed in an exaggerated Bengus-like style with disproportionate hands and feet and large muscles. The characters were a good cross section of styles and martial artists with diverse backgrounds. Remember that Blanka and Dhalsim were also unique fighters that didn't fit the traditional mold but worked in the SF universe? In Garou there was a SWAT officer, masked wrestler and a modern-day pirate that were odd-but-believable fighters. By taking cues from Capcom, Garou helped set itself apart from other SNK games and become a little-known classic. But it was a rare 3D SNK game that came even closer to designing modern Street Fighter characters better than Capcom.

I said previously that many of the SF III characters were universally designed, "safe" as many people call them. However they were lacking a certain je ne sei quois. SNK had a 3D title set in a fictional fighting tournament called Buriki One. There was a good cross-section of styles, something that most players had already seen in a dozen other titles. However what worked here, what none of the other games got quite right, was the caricatures of the practitioners and their styles. 

When I started this series I mentioned how Mas Oyama was the template for Ryu. But the world had grown a lot since the 50's. We'd seen the rise of several generations of martial arts legends both on the screen and in the ring. Names like Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris proved there could be crossover success. Just between the first Street Fighter and the most recent the world had become aware of the phenomenon known as mixed martial arts. Pride, K-1 and UFC were showcasing modern gladiator combat and forever changing the mind of the world. The back-alley secretive tournaments that SF was based on now seemed the stuff of comic books. The world was eager to see how a SF-type game would work with characters inspired by the modern fighters.

Buriki One was set deep within the SNK universe as Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting / King of Fighters fame appeared. Ryo was a little older and wiser from his previous games and had assumed the moniker of "Mr. Karate" previously given his father. The cast was inspired by modern fighters, the title character was named Gai Tendo. Gai was a flamboyant fighter, colored hair, bright shorts and a unique grappling style. He was not the reserved type or traditional fighter that you'd normally see headlining a game. He definitely wasn't Ryu, but he did represent a whole new generation of fighter.

Gai Tendo was most likely based on Kazushi Sakuraba. A fighter with a flair for the dramatic that has built his reputation by humbling the famous Gracie family. Incidentally, rather than create a Gai clone to balance him out SNK, like Ken is to Ryu, they created a Royce Gracie-like grappler named Jacques Ducalis... does he look familiar?

Over in the USA wrestling had reached its peak in popularity. Bald bad**** were en vogue. The Buriki version of Bill Goldberg was named Patrick Von Hayting.

For actual Olympic wrestling there was a Russian strongman named Ivan Sokolov. Undoubtedly inspired by the best pound-for-pound wrestler ever,Alexander Karelin. The boxer of the game, Rob Python had tons of attitude and most likely based on Quinton "Rampage" Jackson. These were the archetypes that current audiences could identify with. Classic SF designs now seemed very passe by comparison. However there were many problems with Buriki One. The graphics were horrid, featuring large and clumsy polygonswhen other 3D fighters at the time were very polished. The Neo Geo has never been a good system for 3D games but Buriki was just miserable in that format. A shame too because there was some great potential in the gameplay and superb character designs. 

What Street Fighter IV could use, the actual sequel not the II.5 version they are showing off in EGM, is to take a page from what worked in rival games and make them better. Find the things that worked in the previous SF games and make them better. It could start by finding the characters that most people identify with and building from there. Gamers in general are forgiving on the mechanics as long as the characters belong and are balanced. The Garou and Buriki designs were amazing and could have worked in the SF universe with some more tweaks. These characters were designed very closely to a real style and person. Of course there are a handful of people out there who'd want to see a SF version of Fedor Emelianenko / Butter Bean / Kimbo Slice / Tank Abbot as much as any Buriki fighter. Careful attention has to be taken to remove any identifiable features from the characters before they are included in a game else we'd end up in the M. Bison / Mike Tyson debacle in SF II.

In order to make them work for SF they would have to become even more exaggerated, bigger, stronger, faster versions of the styles they represent. For some this comes in the way they are presented. For example by wrapping a story around them. Take Guile, he is a brawler but with military training. This makes him more dangerous than a street thug. It doesn't matter if you were born in Japan, the US or Europe, just by looking at his flag tattoo, camouflage pants and combat boots, you knew a lot about him. Of course it would be blasphemy to incorporate characters from Buriki or Garou into Street Fighter. Which brings me to the crux of the designs that got it right. This is none other than ARIKA's Street Fighter EX. I'm going to cheese off a lot of fans by saying that Capcom should bury the hatchet and include EX characters in future versions of Street Fighter including this upcoming one. 

ARIKA was founded by a SF II designer and programmer Akira Nishitani. However there was, and I assume still is, some bad blood between Capcom and ARIKA. Getting the SF EX games produced was an uphill battle as many within the studio and management preferred to keep things in 2D, this meant they had to petition the powers that be to get the license to do characters in 3D. Not only that but there were many senior SF II Capcom employees working on the title in addition to those that jumped ship for ARIKA. Capcom thought there might be more temptation to leave if the game became a hit. Even after SF EX was released there were legal stipulations that prevented the characters from turning up in any other title, with the exception of Fighting Layer. Neither studio could lay claim to the other's characters and hence sequels could not be made without reaching a new agreement. Needless to say Capcom and ARIKA never reached a new agreement.

Another reason for the bad blood was that ARIKA's game had perfect dopplegangers of the SF universe. Remember that Capcom is not keen on copycat games? Just like SF II there was some real martial arts inspiration here. Allen Snider was the "Ken" character but his styling was inspired in part by both Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. In addition to their own Ken and Ryu-clones, SF EX also had their own Zangief in Darun Mister and a Chun Li called Pullum Puruna. They also included their own military agent, D. Dark, their own oddball, Skullomania and even their own maniacal tyrant, Shadow Geist and Gouki-like demon, Garuda. Of course the moves assigned to each was a unique take of classic SF II moves but with the forethought of how they would look in 3D. They were a breath of fresh air for players and didn't stray too far from the classic SF II formula without it being... SF II. 

Sadly the game was slow and unbalanced. Latter versions began to lean toward the same character design problems that plagued SF III, they began to borrow too much from Japanese pop culture. For example take Skullomania's henshin, Kamen Rider roots. EX would get passed on by the majority of gamers. At the same time Capcom seemed like a petty tyrant for trying to control the development of a game that in the end would treat like a bastard stepchild. The saving grace of the title was it being the first to put SF in 3D, the EX stun hit, , cancel out of supers, cancel out of combos, multiple-level supers and great character designs. If you read the EGM exclusive then these things all sound familiar. The seeds for SF IV were planted in EX.

But is that all Capcom needs to learn about their franchise? Just take a bunch of EX characters and mechanics and stick them in SF IV?

It's just one possibility but Capcom needs to be more aware of their own history. They do not have to keep reinventing the wheel or grasping for straws when a new SF is announced. If they need wrestlers in the next SF-legacy game then they need to look no further than Muscle Bomber / Saturday Night Slam Masters, which featured wrestlers as diverse as the original SF II lineup. If Capcom needs to introduce the next generation of fighters to the world then include characters from Rival Schools, who pretty much were the second coming of Ryu and company. Final Fight has a massive library to pick from and best of all, the three series' mentioned all fall within Capcom IP and the SF universe

This is where we as gamers must make the distinction. Do we want to see a new numbered Street Fighter or do we want to see an Alpha type game? Judging by what I've seen on forums the majority demand a lot of fanservice. Most gamers, casual or otherwise want an Alpha-type game. Hardcore gamers want to see an actual numbered sequel with not many familiar faces aside from Ken and Ryu. Now reread the EGM exclusive of SF IV, what type of SF game does this look like to you? Which gamer do you think Capcom is listening to?

This is not Street Fighter IV, this is the second coming of Alpha.

This is not a bad thing, just my observation. I don't doubt for one second that it will sell faster than any fighting game in recent history. I've already put my quarter on the cabinet, I'm already planning to buy a console for this title if I don't already own it. If Capcom were to put the one, unfinished level of SF IV that EGM played, with Ken and Ryu on Xbox live for $5 they would recoup the cost of development and then some. It would hold fans over for months as they learned all the intricacies of the new Revenge system. Fans would be appeased and that monkey would be off of Capcom's back... but this still doesn't make it IV.

When the real Street Fighter IV is finished, perhaps five years from now, we'll all be ready for it. Until then let's hope they get this one right.

Let's jump into the topic at hand, the newest Street Fighter character Rufus, where he came from and when is he leaving? Okay, so maybe Capcom wants him to be around for a while longer but let's take a good look at chubbo and figure out his design cues...

I've been on a kick these last few months drawing comparisons between the new characters in SF IV and how they look just like characters from other fighting games, most notably the competition. Granted I've also said that it's near impossible to design a completely original character, especially for a fighting game because all of the templates have been used already. At their peak the design team at Capcom could not be beat, competitors were sometimes subtly or blatantly stealing designs. It seems now that the shoe is on the other foot. The best Capcom can do now is design a character that doesn't step on too many toes all while trying to reboot their franchise. They haven't managed to do that as gamers are likening the new characters to what we've seen in King of Fighters, Virtua Fighter and now Tekken.

But to argue C. Viper is Mature, El Fuerte is El Blaze and Rufus is Bob would be ignorant of gaming history. Rufus (such an awful name!) is part of a legacy of morbidly obese fighting game characters that were nimble. He might have been based on a long line of fat bald guys with long braids like Wong Who, Won Won and Wong from the Final Fight series. These characters, some based on Chinese mythology, have been in games since the days of Buchu in Yie Ar Kung Fu. This precedence doesn't excuse the character Rufus or Capcom for their poor showing of new characters.

As much fantasy as the SF series has so too does it have a certain level of realism. The main problem with Rufus, as with Bob from Tekken, is that they both break our suspension of disbelief. It was part of my argument when I was deconstructing Abel that Capcom has to carefully balance what the characters can and can't do and animate that accordingly. Bob and Rufus have great girth but seem to have no mass behind it, as if they were made of jello. Rufus bounces all over the screen with the speed and dexterity of Chun-Li. A living Gummi Bear seemingly with no skeleton and no muscle, just jello. When was the last time you saw anybody as large moving as fast? How about ever? Bob and Rufus seem like pure oddball characters and not in a good way like Skullomania or Blanka. Bob and Rufus might exist exclusively for the sake of being silly. But if they were the new joke character, the new Dan, then why are we not laughing? Mr. Ono and his team keep putting funny visuals into SF IV but they are not getting to the punchline... So I'm here to call them on it.

Rufus, like many obese fighting game characters is inspired by the old kung-fu legends but also by pop culture. Conversely the look of those fat characters in anime and manga were actually inspired in part by living people. Rufus for example has some of the design cues from King Heart. King Heart was a villain in the Hokuto No Ken / Fist of the North Star comic series. The character of King Heart has come up several times in videogame form. As you may know the Hokuto No Ken books did influence the development of Street Fighter and illustrator Tetsuo Hara even designed characters for the Capcom wrestling series Muscle Bomber. Tetsuo created a morbidly obese but very strong wrestler with Jumbo "Flapjack" aka Kimala the Bouncer. Kimala was a sort of King Heart for the SF universe. Why Capcom didn't put Kimala in SF IV rather than Rufus is beyond me. But if you follow your design notes carefully, if you know your wrestling history even, then you would find out where Rufus came from, where Tetsuo got Kimala from and even where Data East got Karnov from. 

There is a 70-80's hardcore wrestling legend known as Abdullah the Butcher. His grossly scarred forehead, obese frame, genie pants and ability to beat up opponents is the stuff of legend on multiple continents. He is a character that has such a powerful gimmick that it would be foolish for the Japanese not to create fighters inspired by him. As it turns out though Abdullah is a big and strong guy but unfortunately his also a slow fighter. There's no way that Abdullah could do any of the things that we see Bob or Rufus do. So where did this incredible speed associated with men-of-girth come from? As with many SF characters it's usually based on an old martial arts legend, or most recently by an actor in cinema.

Hong Kong action star Sammo Hung built a reputation by showing that fat actors can fight well. His comedic presence, strong charismatic figure, amazing dexterity and memorable battles are the reason why the fat fighter hasn't waned in popularity (at least in Japan). Sammo has been in the business a long time, he's even shown that age hasn't slowed him down much. He is the template for which many overweight SNK characters come from. What the Japanese game designers do is take a cue from both Abdullah and Sammo and combine them. Make the character very obese and yet able to fight with amazing quickness. This is something that I find very unique from a cultural perspective. In Japan characters like Bob or Rufus might go over well but in the West we cannot separate the fat from the ability. In our minds the suspension of disbelief is broken when a fat guy can even jump. Take a look at our obese fighting game characters which are more gross and less dynamicwhen compared to Japanese characters. 

From a cultural perspective it is difficult for Mr. Ono to get anything less than anegative reaction when we see Rufus in the lineup. He seems to be joining a cast of characters "ripped from the headlines." This doesn't make us any better or worse to the designs, just culturally biased. The reaction to the other side of the Pacific is something that Mr. Ono should be mindful of. We are responsible for a large chunk of the commercial success of Street Fighter. The way the West perceives characters can help or hinder the potential for success. What happens when word of mouth gets out? "I was going to buy SF IV but then they started adding all these silly characters." Our cultural biases are part of the reason why our weekly sales charts and those featured in Famitsu don't match. Mr. Ono has to listen to how the world reacts to his character, not just Japan and make changes accordingly.

But I digress.

There is always room for a fat guy in the lineup provided he doesn't break the consistency of the series. Take for example some of SNK's biggest brawlers. Jack and Raiden, on the far left and right are respectively from the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury. They have some realism in their designs, be they back street brawlers or chubby pro wrestlers. They have powerful attacks which can bowl over smaller opponents but in general are much slower than the other characters in the series. Once AoF and FF had laid out what big people could and couldn't do it was easy to mix characters from both games into the King of Fighters. On the extreme side of things is Earthquake, pictured center. The title he appears in, Samurai Showdown, is based more on fantasy. Despite being one of the largest characters ever featured in a fighting game he was extremely nimble and quick. As gamers we accept this because he was a ninja. He wasn't just a gigantic fat dude with a weapon but an actual ninja. Even though the US doesn't have a ninja tradition we learned enough from comics and cartoons that ninjas are masters of deception. They are highly-trained assassins that can run on water, disappear in a puff of smoke, jump over walls and throw daggers with pinpoint precision. Earthquake's size is part of his deception, our mind tells us big and slow when in reality he is fleet of foot. This gives Earthquake a certain charm which also frustrates gamers that can't get over his size. However a character like Earthquake doesn't work well in the KOF series because the parameters of his game are different from the parameters of the other fighters. Fanservice be damned, the fantasy characters of SS and the realistic characters in AoF should never meet in anything other than a Mugen because they are impossible to balance. We can apply a similar eye to Rufus' inclusion in SF IV. Unless the game is built around ninjas, jedi or super-heroes we as gamers accept the big and slow rule as canon. If SF gets a new character then they have to fall within those parameters. 

The SF series has years setting the precedent as to what the characters can and can't do. The larger the character the slower they are, starting with E. Honda and going all the way up to Hugo. The same thing can be said for its 3D contemporary Virtua Fighter. The largest of the realistic athletes, sumo wrestlers E. Honda and Taka-Arashi can manhandle opponents in the digital world as they could in real life. Sumo wrestlers are not just fat dudes that push each other around. They condition themselves by lifting weights and training with other equally-massive men. If you look closely at the design of E. Honda you will notice that his arms aren't massive because he is fat but because he has a lot of muscle. In fact most of his upper torso and legs are well defined and muscular. Now take a look at how "soft" and cartoony Rufus is. The comparisons between him and Strong Sad are warranted.

This is where Rufus fails the legacy; there is no way one morbidly obese character is going to rewrite the history books. Even E. Honda, who has a mountain of muscle underneath his fat, cannot move with as much agility as Rufus. Like other large men he is instead slower and more pronounced with his attacks. So how is it that Rufus with absolutely no muscle definition, stumpy legs and arms even remotely do what he does? Unlike Abel and El Fuerte whose fighting style, athletic ability and background is more obvious, Rufus sticks out like a sore thumb. He is just a fat guy in a fighting game for the sake of being a fat guy in a fighting game. I haven't played as the character yet and most likely wont if he even makes it to the final build of the game.

Rufus is clearly not one of the Chinese villains from the Final Fight universe. He doesn't have the charm of Sammo or the brutality of Abdullah. His brightly colored uniform and odd ponytail are better suited for a Karnov or Double Dragon game. His girth doesn't even make sense as other SF character to-date have all been athletes, military or martial artists. I can find some redeeming quality in every new character introduced so far except for Rufus. I sincerely hope that Mr. Ono takes him back to the drawing board. I am a firm believer that if they return to basics then they should be okay. Don't just look at what everyone else is doing and go with the program. Capcom used to be the studio to beat, Street Fighter used to have the greatest fighting game characters ever. I know that Capcom still has the ability to introduce great characters into the series but part of that means never having to settle for the first character that comes to mind. Let's say that the designers are having a hard time coming up with new designs as timeless as the SF II cast. What are they to do then?

I've said it before and I'll say it again Capcom is sitting on an incredible IP legacy. Between the Street Fighter, Final Fight, Muscle Bomber and Rival Schools titles there are almost 200 characters to choose from. Why create Rufus when Wong Who or some other Mad Gear character could have filled that slot? This is something that is frustrating older gamers like myself to no end. There has been one new character announced for SF IV every month since January. None of the four shown have generated tremendous buzz. Will this trend continue through until the game is released? How many new lackluster characters do we have to wade through before we see a familiar face? Mr. Ono said that he wants to include as many SF characters as he can in IV. Although we have seen video of Sagat and M. Bison nothing official has been said by Capcom. Fans are wondering why Cammy and friends haven't been announced while we're instead staring at four new faces. Do you like what you see? If so yes, if not why not? If you have something to say you could post it in the comments section.

Now I have nothing against fat people, I'm a fat guy. I also don't have a problem with fat fighting game characters. In fact, I'd like to see more of them, provided that they are consistent with what has already been established in the series. Just the other day a new character was introduced for the boxing game Ready2Rumbe 3 Facebreaker. He's a fat boxing master named Steve Talking Head. The game is supposed to be cartoonish and over-the-top, so he makes sense in that lineup... Make of him what you will.

I've already spoken at length about the subject with my origins of Rufus blog. In case you don't want to read old news I'll sum up some of my gripes. A character like Bob from Tekken moves too quickly for a man of his girth. It's as if they did some motion capture moves and thought it would be funny if the animations were stuck on a fat character. It seems that Rufus is even larger than Bob yet seems to move faster. Maybe Rufus was inspired by strongman Gene Rychlak. He's also a big guy with wild hair and a trucker mustache that bench pressed a thousand pounds. Sure he's strong, but can he move fast? Is he flexible? I doubt it.

While thinking about this character I began wondering what it is that I don't like about Rufus. Smashbro mentioned that it could be the way obese people are demonized in US culture. But my issues are more about his speed, lack of muscle definition and seemingly weightless mass, not any bias against fat people. Marc lamented that he seems to be the only one on 1UP willing to try this game. I never said that I wouldn't play SF IV or that I wouldn't try out this character. In fact if there is a location test anywhere in the southland then I'll be there, getting in line and trying each character at least once. I'm also thinking about which console to pick up based on which will have a better joystick for the game. To think that I'll pass on a SF IV after waiting so long after III is absurd. Remember that I got the Wii for NiGHTS? Or the Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future? 

I've said that large characters tend to move slower in SF games, Rufus is contrary to that. Smashbro mentioned that the Japanese tradition of sumo might explain why they created him and seem to be more accepting of this large character than the US is. The US demonizes obesity yet has a large population that is overweight. My biases might be based from a cultural P.O.V. I began thinking about who Rufus reminded me of, aside from Gene Rychlak and where his place could be in the Street Fighter universe. I began thinking about large characters from cartoons, movies and even real life. Who were the ones that worked and why? As far as fighting games go, the fat guys in Final Fight worked, King Heart in Fist of the North Star worked and Karnov from Fighter's History Dynamite worked as well. 

Heck, Karnov could even inflate himself and become even more massive than Rufus, yet he worked in the game because he also had an assortment of mystical properties. Karnov could breath fire, teleport and float, he was a fat doppleganger of Dhalsim. In the context of his game these things worked, but this is a different game. The issues that I have with Rufus and the other new characters are because I feel that Capcom is betraying their own design legacy. Actually part of the problem is that DIMPS is developing this game and their approach to character design is different than the classic Capcom formula. I'll talk about it more tomorrow but I strongly feel that Rufus is just a more complete vision of the character Boyd that DIMPS had put in their 2.5D fighter Rumble Fish.

I couldn't just leave it at that. Like a scab I have to keep picking at the design until it starts bleeding. Where did Rufus come from? What was it about his costume that works or doesn't? Yellow jumpsuit, unzipped to his belly with built-in pads? What about that ponytail and facial hair? Looking at Rufus' trucker mustache I was reminded of the larger-than-life character of Bull Hurley from the movie Over the Top. 

I noticed that even though Bull, as played by the late character actor Rick Zumwalt was massive, he wasn't obese. I began wondering how "fat" a character could get and still be valid in the SF universe. I began wondering how big a person could be and still remain a valid fighter. Here is where the distinction between what "fits" in the real world and what "fits" in SF has to be made. We are willing to suspend our disbelief up to a point. If the point is crossed then that character becomes redundant, broken or laughable. At some point something has to be done with the character and design to make him or her fit into the game. This is the part that I think Capcom and DIMPS is missing with Rufus. They are not separating his purpose from his moves. The reason for my thinking of that actually goes back to the character of Bull and the movie he was in. The real arm wrestling legend at the time, Cleve Dean, makes a few cameos but isn't the last person that Stallone faces. According to the Wiki page the filmmakers didn't think that audiences would believe that Stallone could beat Dean. 

Wait a minute. We could believe that Stallone could beat Bull but not Dean? How much more massive and imposing was Dean over Hurley?

At his peak in the late 70's / early 80's Cleve Dean was a multiple time world champion. He simply dominated his opponents. The reason for this was because of his tremendous size and strength. He was about 6' 7" and over 450 lbs. easily dwarfing Stallone and even some of his competition. His girth beguiled his opponents, he wasn't just a mountain of a man but rather a mountain of a man with lots of muscle. Like a modern-day Paul Bunyan, Cleve became synonymous with power. 

Cleve represents a certain athletic aesthetic that is older than most people realize. Throughout history some of the strongest men in the world haven't always looked like bodybuilders. Some of the most powerful figures in myth have been on the heavy side. The giants and titans of ancient Greek and Norse mythology were usually heavy-set. The legendary Olympic weightlifter Vasili Alexeyev was another mountain of a man but he also did the unthinkable. Before his time many thought it would be impossible to lift more than 500 lbs. in the clean and jerk. Even though there were many strong weightlifters in that era, part of the reason for not being able to break the mark was psychological. Before his record-setting lift his coaches told him that he would be lifting 497 lbs. something that he had done in the past. As he lifted it he thought it felt heavier than normal but pushed himself to complete the cycle. Once he broke the barrier many in the sport realized that the human body had even more strength potential. 

But the incredible strength of Cleve or Vasili doesn't mean much in the fighting arena. Grappler Royce Gracie once said a person with an average build that is experienced with judo would be able to beat a person with a bodybuilder physique and no fighting experience. There seems to be a lot to his reasoning. Big, tough guys that know a little fighting are usually taken out by smaller, experienced MMA fighters. The only large people that knowingly have fighting ability are sumo wrestlers. I've already mentioned that sumo wrestlers have a lot of muscle underneath their mass. More than that they have technique. Being absurdly strong is one thing but most sumos are evenly matched, they need technique to counter the strength. They need technique to decide a winner. A champion like Akebono made for a great sumo wrestler because he had the raw size and strength of Cleve or Vasili but combined it with impeccable fighting technique and strategies. 

This is where I don't understand the purpose of Rufus. Street Fighter is already filled with archetypical strongmen. Zangief is a giant, bearded version, of Alexander Karelin. Like Alexander, Zangief is capable of superhuman feats of strength with his wrestling ability. E. Honda is a champion-class sumo wrestler, a kabuki-painted yokozuna. Where does Rufus fit between those other big men? He doesn't seem to have the design or purpose of the legendary strongmen I've mentioned. Instead he is a fat guy that knows kung-fu and moves really, really fast. He jumps fast, punches and kicks fast and has fast super attacks. Zangief and Honda are slower by comparison.

It just doesn't make sense to me. I'd love to see Rufus as massive as his is now, playing sickly powerful but also slow. A middleman between Zangief and Honda. Or a "slimmer" version, one that is still chubby but also fast and more reminiscent of Sammo Hung. But a Rufus that is both absurdly fat and fast? That, like Bob from Tekken, is a stretch and I don't think I'm the only one that thinks so. At some point character design stopped being great. It stopped evolving logically and just became absurd. I'm not going to lie and say that 2D fighters all had great designs, there were some awful designs back in the day. However the third dimension really brought the worst designs to life. Advances is animation and 3D modeling allowed a character of any shape or size to move as lightly as an olympic gymnast or as fast as a professional boxer.

When did the gatekeeper to great fighting character design go on holiday? Wish I could have been there in his stead, some characters would have never gotten the greenlight. All I can do now is point out the tragedies and lament the days gone bye. What do you think. Do fat characters have a place in fighting games? Is it about time or just a gimmick so far? Am I making too much about nothing? Does Rufus work in SF IV? Let me know what you think in the comments!

This Capcom blog made Rufus official. In case you don't read Japanese let me sum up Rufus' purpose in the game. He is a self taught kung-fu master that is out to prove that he is America's #1 fighter. He exists to dethrone Ken and prove he's the best. Kotaku reports that some of his moves are titled "Spectacle Romance", "Space Opera Symphony" and "Messiah Kick".

...

Pardon the language but how many long-time Street Fighter fans feel as if Yoshinori Ono just took a crap on the legacy? The feedback for this new character has undoubtedly been poor. I don't know what they are saying about Rufus in the Japanese beards but you can read the less-than-kind things people are saying about Rufus on Kotaku. It is as if Mr. Ono pushed forward with the character eve n though gamers did not like or understand his purpose. Rufus is an inside joke that only Ono understands and we are left out on. He even tried to downplay the reaction in the recent issue of Famitsu.

Q: How about impressions for the newly released character Rufus?

Ono: To be honest, our 4th new character Rufus was secretly released at the last Osaka loketest. As there were a lot of pictures taken with hidden cameras and put up on message boards, I suspect people already knew... For our longtime Street Fighter fans, to unexpectedly have a fatty show up in "4" for the first time, I'm sure it caught them by surprise. There were players who didn't hate him outright and even got used to his movements, so as a developer I was really happy about that. I also saw a players used the new characters we introduced at the AOU Show, Viper and Abel, at a level far, far beyond our expectations. We're taking into consideration the good and bad things, and with the research from this loketest and final adjustments we'll try to balance out the new characters.

Did you notice how he deflected the answer? "There were players who didn't hate him outright" this sounds like a small minority of players liked him while a larger majority disliked him. Rather than send him back to the drawing board he was kept in game and pushed with this plot of dethroning Ken. Then Mr. Ono goes on to change the subject and talk about Abel and C. Viper.

Why didn't Mr. Ono elaborate on the reaction to Rufus? Is it perhaps because we can tell that this is a joke character or because we could tell that the new characters in SF IV were out of place? You rarely get a chance to bring back a franchise, any new characters designed for this game have to live up to the standard set down by the original world warriors. Do any of the new characters have the same timeless quality of Ryu, Chun-Li or Guile? Or are these gimmick characters better suited for another fighting game? Let's figure out where the inspiration and purpose Rufus fails.

First thing's first, the official art for Rufus has him holding a bucket of popcorn and eating. We know damn well he didn't get that body by eating popcorn. But this is besides the point. Never before have there been any Street Fighters that have been so poorly out of shape and seemingly proud of it. Rufus is gluttonous with pieces of food sticking to his face. What an unflattering character to introduce alongside the icons. We'd never see a painting of Chun-Li with her dress caught in her pantyhose, or Ken with a 5 o'clock shadow and beer belly. Why add a slovenly Rufus? His origin reveals that he is "American." Is this a subtle or obvious jab about what Capcom things of American gamers? What is Mr. Ono trying to say here? 

Rufus is a self-taught master... how is it possible that an obese fighter can take on the legends with techniques he invented? We have 20+ years of story with the entire SF cast. We know that they have gone through some incredible challenges and have learned from the best masters in history. SF is filled with characters that have learned and fought muay thai, karate, ninjitsu, kung-fu and wrestling. How is it that after all these years, after all these adventures, they are only as a good as some fat guy that taught himself how to fight? A person without the self-discipline to condition their own body should not also have the self-discipline to invent a fighting art. This is an insult to the legacy of the previous games, inspired by actual martial artists.

But we also know that Street Fighter is filled with humorous characters. Joke characters that make fun of other fighting games as well as SF itself. Dan and Sakura are parodies of SNK characters and yet both were well received in the community. They play well and have moves that fit within SF. Karin is a parody of a Tekken character and also a rival to Sakura. Her moves more or less also work. Is Rufus nothing more than another parody character, and if so why am I not laughing? Possibly because Rufus has nothing to be a parody of.

I feel that Capcom has missed out on another opportunity to create a truly special character. Rufus is a design that was almost perfect for SF and actually a misstep for Daigo Ikeno, the character artist, because he had already walked down this path before. Let's take Rufus apart and see how he could-have-been. Right off the bat we notice his bright yellow jumpsuit. Yellow is a strong color that compliments the color-rich pallet of other SF characters. The red of Ken, green of Blanka and blue of Abel for example. Yellow has not really been used to identify with a character. Knowing that solid colors work well in the fighting game is a bonus. As for Rufus' ponytail, we can assume that it is actually a play on Gouki's hair. Rufus is supposed to be Ken's rival. In much the same way as Gouki was Ryu's. There is a bit of the Chinese kung-fu theme with that hair as well. A ponytail like that was previously seen on the character Lee in the original SF. It is not obvious right away but Rufus' costume is certainly a bit of an homage to Bruce Lee and his iconic jumpsuit from the film "Game of Death." This suit has been used before in movies like Kill Bill and in games like Tekken. 

Unlike the straight yellow jumpsuit with a black stripe, Ikeno makes this one different by making the fabric more like leather and putting pads on the shoulders, knees and sides. Instead of sneakers Rufus has boots. These are subtle but well thought-out design cues. I am not sure how a self-taught discipline could be incorporated into the plot, perhaps Rufus could have learned a rare form of kung fu. After all, Ken and Ryu learned a form of karate that was distilled from an older Chinese assassin's art. Rufu's form of fighting could have come from around the same era and yet have been all his own. I bet that fans would not have reacted as harshly to his introduction if he instead was wearing a jumpsuit and was in great shape. A plus if he had a more menacing presence like Gouki, with dark eyes and a scowl.

Unfortunately for gamers Ikeno had already helped create a rival for Ken that was based more on Bruce Lee than Rufus. This character was Allen Snider from the game Street Fighter EX. Think about it for a moment. If you are working on a 3D fighting game and have to design a rival for Ken, where would you draw inspiration from? With the game in 3D then any character you put in a red gi is automatically going to draw comparisons to Ken. Any character that you design that looks like Bruce Lee is going to be compared to Fei Long. Tekken suffered from these design limitations early on. So how did Allen Snider break those limitations?

Allen had a blue gi which was the opposite of Ken's red. Rather than wear punching gloves his hands were taped up. The sleeves on his gi were unique, held together with a red string. This broke the consistency of the solid top. Plus since Ken and Ryu already had torn sleeves on their gi, Ikeno and the people at ARIKA did not want to design another "shotoclone" with the same top. What made Allen most unique was his head.

Rather than create a head and face that was either an homage to Bruce Lee or his American rival Chuck Norris, ARIKA had combined the two. These men were iconic fighters in the 70's, when most of the world, including the developers in Japan were infatuated with their films. The hair and sideburns of Allen are Norris-inspired but the facial features were decidedly Bruce Lee. 

Combining this unique look with a gi that was a play on the classic Ken and Ryu wear was nothing short of genius. Rather than limit the designs to either a Bruce Lee or Ken rip-off, they created a true rival for the character that had enough classic and real-world design cues to make him memorable. I can argue that Capcom really does have it in for ARIKA as they do not want to use any of their creations. Characters that Ikeno had a hand in designing either. Characters that were better suited for SF than Rufus, Abel, C. Viper or El Fuerte. Think about it, an amnesiac laced in scars trying to find out his past by fighting others? Before Abel was in SF IV the character with that gimmick was Kairi in Street Fighter EX some 10 years prior. Is it possible that after the EX cast was designed and after the poor showing of characters in SF III that the Capcom artists had hit the wall?

Eventually as more and more games began going to 3D the designs began to branch out. Characters were no longer limited to one look or one style of fighter but instead were allowed to bring in themes from regular clothing or street wear. I feel that the less a character looks like a fighter the weaker the game becomes. However I can certainly understand that need for having non-traditional characters in a fighting game. They keep it looking fresh and new even if they are variations of 20-year-old characters.

So the question remains; is Rufus a design that could have been saved? Does Mr. Ono know what it takes to add, design, tweak or balance a character with the same staying power as Guile or Chun-Li? Is Mr. Ono willing to recognize his flaws and learn from them or is he going to push on stubbornly and force gamers to play what he thinks Street Fighter should be? A narrow view of fighting games is certainly what killed Capcom Fighting All Stars. Does Mr. Ono have tunnel vision as well? What do you think?

I'm a detail man, you know this. I'm good at spotting patterns in comics, games, movies and pop culture. I try to share anything I find out with you. It starts usually as a quirk that I notice. Then being the obsessive compulsive that I am I do my homework, study the history of it and I try to deconstruct the way the games were put together, find gaps, praise design and look for ways to improve the title. Sorry if I come off as some sort of videogame snob for thinking I can improve anything from the outside. But that's my hobby and someday I'd like it to be my job. Today I'd like to ease you into the Street Fighter world the only way I know how. Pick a few of my favorite subjects and apply it to the game.

I've griped about fighting game character designs in the past. I've also done my fair share to catch people up to speed with an abridged history of Street Fighter. What I have to say today is a little more esoteric. I'm delving into the psychology of game design. How something as subtle as a color or animation can take us out of the illusion of playing. Make us not like a title or character as much as we should. How minute and subtle details are sometimes missed by the developers because they can't see the forest for the trees. I'll begin by deconstructing one of the new characters, Abel the grappler. To do this we have to understand how something like his design, choice of colors and trademark "Tornado Throw" can make or break him. 

Abel is a strong choice to be added to the lineup, more so than Crimson Viper because he captures a lot of the classic themes that made the original SF II cast memorable. The most important feature is that he looks like a fighter. His punching gloves and gi are a dead giveaway but look closer and you'll notice more details. His face is young but stern. His hair an odd cut, almost a mohawk, not modern and not classic. His body is covered in scars, almost gruesome the way they are all over his arms and even face. Are these scars from fights, warfare or something else? The designers know how to put in enough clues and yet not make things too obvious. They allow us to imagine a characters history before he or she was put in the game. So let's take his design apart and see if we can find room for improvement. 

Abel is colored in blue, a very strong primary color. With the exception of Dan, who wears pink, every character in Street Fighter has vivid primary colors associated with them. Blue takes on an additional meaning for Abel. He is the new strongman, the modern European fighter who, like Fedor Emelianeko seems to roll over his opponents. He was pinned with the blue color because is as the opposite of red. As you may know red is also associated with Zangief the wrestler. Zangief is the original powerhouse,overly strong in design with a similar crazy haircut. He's covered in grizzly scars, not grizzly as in gory but literal scars acquired while fighting bears. The scars on both characters symbolize the brutal techniques they practice, which are not meant to be refined and "pretty" like Chinese Kung-Fu. The two forms of fighting focus on raw strength, power and the ability to take a hit. If you remember blue was also the color given to Rainbow Mika, a female wrestler and sort of Sakura to Zangief. It works well on Abel because his MMA style balances out the wrestling. 

The Street Fighter IV team could have worked harder to make the design of Abel fit better in context. The choice of blue was a good first step but putting it on a gi diffuses it. Originally a solid blue, the latest renders of Abel have stripes in the colors of the French flag on his shoulder, breaking up the color. Combining his gi with a black belt and punching gloves makes his upper torso too similar to Ken and Ryu; the "karate" guys. The design of his lower half is also odd, white shorts paired with oversized shin guards look poorly matched. Abel is supposed to represent the MMA dynamo, the new generation of fighter. His design is inconsistent with the best MMA guys who usually only wear shorts and gloves. They go without a top or shin guards for most of their matches. The gi's of Ken and Ryu represent the classic fighter, but are also archaic in the modern fighting scene. Very few MMA guys battle with traditional garb. Alex from Street Fighter III was the first new-gen MMA guy, his original image clearly demonstrates that. But his in-ring garb was replaced by a pair of overalls for the actual game. This minor change of clothes (not his primary color which remained green) sent mixed messages to players. By just being some strong guy in overalls players didn't know that he had an actual fighting background. The lack of some visual clue to his training diffused his style and purpose within the context of the game.

Abel can be seen as a second chance to get the MMA guy right, the second coming of Alex perhaps. So far Capcom is slightly off the look that gels with his purpose. The stripes on his gi are a national identifier and previous to him only Guile openly (or arrogantly depending on who you ask) showed off his national colors in the game. The solid color top works better without the red and white stripes which draw our eyes away from his face. In fact he works better without the gi altogether. His body is laced in scars, similar to Zangief, giving him an irregular quality, a memorable trait. Alex himself also had unique scars, under his eyes and shoulders. As we learned in my Ryu: Final dissection, the scars that many SF characters, like Sagat, carry are not only physical but psychological and symbolic scars as well. A good design incorporates the scar for a deeper reaction other than a visceral "it looks cool." It would be ideal to see more of Abel's scars, maybe he doesn't have to go shirtless like Zangief or Alex but his scars are part of his identity.

Even if a player is not interested in Abel or MMA characters in SF, in the back of their mind they know he fits. They may not realize it right away but they know he fits because part of the timeless design that goes into Street Fighter is deeper than a costume. The visual quirk is what sets them apart from every other fighter. Allow me to digress and connect this point with past Street Fighter designs. As I was mentioning to Adriel in the podcasts, I am a fan of lucha libre. I come from a family that loves old school wrestling. My brothers and I know our fighting arts, we even practiced a few, so when we play games or watch movies we can see the influence, spot the shenanigans, admire the choreography and so forth. By watching and listening to my family I know that many eyes see more detail than one pair ever could.

I believe that in order to design better SF characters everyone in the team has to learn as much as they can about the fighting arts, be they scripted or real. Wrestling for example has several styles, there is traditional Greco-Roman wrestling and it's modern freestyle counterpart. The there are also the pro wrestling formats that are popular on TV and in the independent circuits. A person working on SF should know the subtleties between lucha libre in Mexico, pro wrestling in the USA and puroresu in Japan. They aren't all the same thing yet share many elements in common. Not only should the people working on SF know the styles and history but also the various mechanics associated with simple strikes and stances. From boxing to krav maga, a programmer should be as well versed in how to throw a punch as much as an animator. I know it sounds like overkill but these are things that we as gamers take for granted but developers should know something about. Looking at the progress of fighting games over the past 20 years I've noticed that more and more of the characters and their moves are left up to pure imagination rather than research. I feel it has weakened the genre. 

To further digress... when Hideo Kojima starts on an Metal Gear Solid project his team goes on field trips and even has military-style exercises in their own offices to hone their strategies. He gives new members of the team a chance to opt-out of the training because once they are finished with it they never view the world the same way again. This attention to detail and complete immersion in military strategies, weapons and techniques helps make every generation of MGS better than the last. The more trained eyes on the project the more likely they are to catch and fix details during the development process. I don't expect Capcom to set up a wrestling ring at their HQ but perhaps they could send their team to watch wrestling matches, see actual boxing matches and watch MMA fighters train (if they don't already). It would give them a firm appreciation for the fighting arts and help balance the fantasy element in SF with the real. Wait, fantasy element, what am I talking about? Now we take things back towards SF IV...

When someone mentions a Mexican character being added to Street Fighter what immediately comes to mind? That's right, the luchador! 

Like my friend Adriel brought up in a podcast, why is that people in general think that lucha libre is the only form of fighting the Mexicans can contribute to the genre? I applaud the legacy of wrestling characters by Capcom but I am also saddened that this was the first place that they looked when adding another new character to the series. Part of the early charm of SF was in the character designs. They weren't strictly based on legendary fighters like Mas Oyama or Fedor but it didn't hurt if the influence was there as well. They also weren't caricatures of a certain forms of martial arts like Virtua Fighter. Street Fighter worked because there was some level of fantasy mixed in with very simple, cleanly designed characters. Fantasy in the ways that we could see their chi become fireballs and dragon punches but also fantasy in the way they looked. SF II character design was simple but set a standard that could not be topped. The purists would take it a step further and say that the icons themselves haven't changed since the advent of Karate Champ almost 25 years ago. There is certainly some truth to that perception. As the "red and white" karate guys have been battling for a long while.

One of the concept characters for SF II was the Masked Man, a wrestler that looked like Tiger Mask. They decided not to pursue that character when the roster was finalized. A couple of years later when the team was working on characters for SF III they sketched out a few concepts that stuck. Their new big guy, the new Zangief would be a Mexican. Rather than make him a luchador as 99% of the other designers out there would, and Capcom just a few years prior would have; they instead made him absolutely unique. T. Hawk was a member of the Thunder Foot band of natives that live in Mexico. He featured a great look that was not as racist as some people make out to be. He wasn't wearing a beaded vest, swinging a tomahawk and whooping it up with a headdress, like Killer Instinct's Chief Thunder. Instead T. Hawk sported a simple denim vest with some pants and boots, clean and to the point. It was his massive size that helped make him memorable. He fits in perfectly with SF because we can tell many things about him just by looking at his design.

The closest anyone else came to making a character as memorable would be in another contemporary fighter, Garou Mark of the Wolves. Tizoc the wrestler falls into the traps that developers following in the footsteps of SF II are want to do. Namely they made the Mexican a luchador. Although his costume was a great gimmick he was just another luchador. T. Hawk was Tizoc without the mask and more graceful moves. The best developers can get a character and game in the same vein but not quite replicate the SF formula 100%. T. Hawk and Tizoc are worth mentioning because they represent a great attempt at creating a memorable fighter that looks simple and realistic yet whose design has enough fantasy behind it to sell it to the audience. Now we return back to Abel and draw several comparisons between him and T. Hawk. 

Abel has a good appearance that requires some tweaks to make him a better visual fit in SF IV. Abel's costume should reflect some of his MMA background but his true hook lies within his scars. As a red headband sets off Ryu or giant metal bracelets capture the image of Chun-Li, so too should scars identify the player with Abel. Grossly scarred characters, like Kaoru Hanayama come up again and again in a contemporary fighting story Baki the Grappler. The series in both manga and anime shows that while there are some awesome fighters out there, the fights and fighters themselves can be very ugly. Kaoru is memorable for his fighting ability but more so for the patchwork of scars covering his body. In this way a tortured MMA character that brings in elements of real fighters and even a popular manga would fit better in Street Fighter context than just some strong guy in a blue gi and some oversized shin guards. Here is where the SF team has an uphill battle. Almost every possible character "look" has already been used. The best any developer can do is come up with a hybrid borrowing elements from other games, comics, manga or anime and put their own spin on it. As I stated a few paragraphs before the templates for Ken and Ryu could have come from Player 1 and Player 2 in Karate Champ. If I were to suggest what Abel should have looked then you could figure out where I drew the influences from. Look at the image out below as to what I'd say Abel should have looked like. Better, worse or the same from what has already been revealed? You tell me.

Now let's tackle the other element that is either hit or miss, I literally mean the moves. Street Fighter did not always focus on characters that could shoot fireballs. The original SF II cast was balanced in such a way as that those without projectile moves had an almost even chance against those that did. To do this some characters had strikes or grabs that hit before Ken, Ryu or Guile's fireball/sonic booms. Others had ways of dodging attacks entirely. Abel has some unique trapping and strike moves that fit with the archetypes Zangief and E. Honda. Those are characters that do well for some tournament players and undoubtedly Abel is going to be a quick study as well. He does seem to have a move that sticks out, seems odd even among the world of fireballs and dragon punches. To make my case I have to return to T. Hawk. As a character that towered over Sagat and Zangief you'd expect T. Hawk to be all power moves and no finesse. Instead the SF II team invented a fictional native martial art that looked like a combination of the eagle dance with open palm kung-fu. Even though he was massive, T. Hawk had a graceful, almost weightless way about him. His contemporaries Cammy, Dee Jay and Fei Long were also in the planning stages for SF III when they were instead added to a SF II update. Those four characters still had room to grow or possibly end up being cut altogether. Cammy and T. Hawk were furthest along in development and it shows. Their look and move selection worked well in the game whereas Dee Jay had too generic a design with zero range on his machine gun punch. Not to mention that Fei Long was a carbon copy of Bruce Lee rather than be more "inspired by" the dragon. The Mexican Typhoon, a power move assigned to T. Hawk was unbalanced and appeared far too simple for him to do. Even though he was the largest SF character to date it was absurd that he could effortlessly swing a 400 pound character around with one hand. Many players called shenanigans on it.

Here is where another piece of psychology comes into play. The willing suspension of disbelief is what allows us to enjoy a book, movie or videogame. It is what allows us to put ourselves in a giant robot on another planet, or as a soldier in Van'a'diel or as a professional basketball player in the playoffs. At least for a moment anyhow. Directors are careful to keep the illusion going as best they can with the music they choose, voice actors they hire, colors, lighting, animation and every other piece that goes into making the game. Even if the director is careful they might still inadvertently let something slip through. When we notice that something it breaks that illusion, the suspension of disbelief. For Street Fighter it is paramount not to break the illusion because the game is so straightforward. A fighting game is a glorified version of paper, rock and scissors. There are many avenues to approach it but infinitely more ways to mess it up, or break the illusion. In SF players routinely suspend their disbelief because the ground rules have been set as to what the characters can and can't do. We believe an Indian mystic can easily stretch his limbs, breathe fire and teleport or that a Brazilian wild man can be green-skinned and spark with electricity because they represent undiscovered or mystical fighters and fighting arts. We get taken out of the illusion when we see a character do something out of place. The Mexican Typhoon is one such move. Abel has a similar odd move, many of you on 1UP mentioned it when his first footage was revealed. You can see the questionable Tornado Throw about 2:10 into this video. 

So what is it about this move that throws us off? Why are we willing to believe in fireballs and other such things but not in ragdoll opponents? For this I compare the physics of SF to the physics featured in animation, specifically cartoons. Cartoons make the impossible seem possible. An object can appear to have it's own weight and volume even if it is only a 2-dimensional frame. The theory of animation holds this to be true; if animated properly a cartoon can make us believe in so-called cartoon physics. John K. explains to us what makes a cartoon. His mentor Eddie Fitzgerald not only knows art and animation but is also knowledgeable on the entire culture and history of film and theory as well. I learned by reading and listening to the masters of cartooning and observed how the artist can trick our mind. If you apply their lessons to SF you would find out how the Mexican Typhoon or the Tornado Throw breaks the illusion. 

The short answer is that it is too easy for Abel or T. Hawk to swing an opponent through the air. By comparison Darun Mister's Brahma Bomb, Hugo'sMoonsault Press and Zangief's spinning piledriver are more believable attacks because the characters appear to carry mass and weight behind their actions. Regardless of how big and strong they are drawn our mind tells us that it is impossible for them to swing a character at arms length easily. But SF is a game filled with fantastic moves, the big characters that don't have flashy fireballs need something equally impressive. Designers have to create a "catch all" power move that lookes great whether it is being used against someone as small as Sakura or as large as E. Honda. The power moves that looked best did so by keeping their opponents in close contact. Even if the character jumped into the air while performing the move our mind told us that they were strong enough to hold onto their opponent as long as they rotated along with them. Zangief, Hugo and Darun all have great moves because they rotate and flip along with their victim. On the opposite end of the spectrum T. Hawk and Abel's power move allows them to remain stiff while they hurtle their opponent weightlessly through the air.

So I've had the audacity to suggest changing Abel's appearance, how would I fix his signature move, or T. Hawk's for that matter? Every slam or throw for smaller characters has relied on the weight and mass of one character used against the other. These are the principles of judo throws. The larger the character the more they can get away with. One way of giving Abel or any big guy an awesome move without bogging it down with "realism" would be by learning from classic SF characters and even contemporary characters from other titles.

T. Hawk's Mexican Typhoon could have worked if he did a front flip while slamming his opponent's head into the ground. Or Capcom could have tried something even more outlandish, like an actual move inspired by nature. T. Hawk's moves were already based on the birds of prey. Did you know that the bald eagle has a particularly brutal way of fighting off competitors? In the middle of an aerial battle with another eagle they have been known to lock talons and hurtle themselves toward the ground, check out the death spin about a minute into this video. These were similar to the over-the-top moves featured in Capcom's wrestling game Super Muscle Bomber. T. Hawk could have jumped in the air and ridden his opponent into a death spin as well. It would have fit in context and not have looked out of place as his Typhoon did. 

As for Abel I wouldn't suggest the same sort of jumping, flipping destruction for his opponent. His moves, like his MMA origin are more ground-based. To see what looks good in 3D, something that could help design a power move for Abel we should study the competition. In a contemporary fighter Wolf Hawkfield's giant swing looks great, with enough balance between realism and fantasy. Plus it's a move that can also dominate opponents in the arcade. If you're not in the know a real world Giant Swing is possible too. In pro wrestling there are a few moves as impressive as Brock Lesnar's F5. If a performer can lift, spin and flip an opponent that weighs almost 500 pounds in real life then it wouldn't be much of a stretch to see Abel spin like a top with someone as massive as Zangief on his shoulders. In this way an MMA fighter with a background in amateur and pro wrestling is the perfect template for Abel. The Tornado Throw can be fixed if he didn't hold his opponent at arms length but instead put his them on his shoulders and spun with them until crashing them into the ground. This is how I'd fix his trademark move and prepare Abel for his big debut. What do you think about that?