Like I referred to off-handedly in my last post, I'm going to do some story summary posts, mostly for reference. I don't want to have to watch a twenty minute YouTube video narrated by a guy with a really strong accent, or read a wiki entry that is borderline incoherent either to understand the major storylines in the various series. I've created a new tag, and this post is the first to sport it, called STORY SUMMARIES where I'll summarize the storylines from the games. The reality is that although it's a little hard to perceive them sometimes, most of these games have crazy-insane comic book-like stories with genuine supervillains, super-technology, superheroes and more either trying to take over the world or stop someone else from taking over the world.
I've got high priority and low priority posts to make; the low priority ones might or might not actually get made. Also, I'll split both high and low priority lists into an SNK and a Capcom list.
I should point out, although maybe I already have, that my definition of karate supers is a bit less anime, and certainly is weaponless (with the exception of a few people who do have weapons occasionally, like Billy Kane or Rolento.) I've never really gotten into Samurai Shodown, for instance, because it's historical and uses weapons. I've never gotten into Guilty Gear or Blazblue or any of those kinds of games, because they're way too whack and anime to have universal appeal, and they also often use weapons. There's been a lot of attempts to cross properties, but I'll reiterate here again, that I'm only considering "in scope" games from the following series: Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Darkstalkers. I'd actually be OK including the Marvel Crossover games too, except that I don't really want to try and use Marvel characters here. The Capcom vs SNK games (and SNK vs Capcom: Chaos) mostly count too, although a few characters here and there stand out as not fitting very well, in my opinion. I'm not sure what order I'll do these in, but certainly the high priority ones will all be done before I worry about the low priority ones.
HIGH PRIORITY
Capcom
- Street Fighter II: while the story line here is actually fairly simplistic in most senses, this is kind of where it starts. The story started to develop as the series developed, mostly through character endings. It was obviously pretty simplistic in the first iteration, but as more iterations and more characters were added, it developed a bit more depth than you'd think. SF1 didn't really have any story at all, but it was kind of retroactively added by Street Fighter II. However, because of the bizarre time-hopping nature of the series, I'll do this out of order; Street Fighter II will be the second Street Fighter summary I attempt.
- Street Fighter Alpha: Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 don't have separate stories; Alpha 2 is basically considered a refined and upgraded version of Alpha 1. However, Alpha 3 has a separate story that takes place after Alpha 2. Because the Alpha games came out after Street Fighter II, but take place before them, I'll actually start here. I'll just add a brief summary of Street Fighter I's story here to set the scene for Alpha. However, regardless of when the stories take place, the order in which they were created matters, and of course, when these stories came out, Street Fighter II was already long finished.
- Street Fighter III: Another one that I'll probably do last of the higher priority ones. While this is still one of the earlier titles, in terms of release, it is the last one in terms of when it takes place. Sigh. It's also one of the most confusing of the titles. Exactly what the story is and what supposedly is the "canonical" version of what happened is hard to figure out.
- Street Fighter IV: We go back in time again, to about a year or so at most after Street Fighter 2 takes place. While some characters get relegated to just being silly, for the most part, Street Fighter IV is a pretty decent game storywise, with plenty going on, and it's less confusing than some. Partly this is because of how much it rehashes the plot of the Alpha and II games rather than because it's necessarily told so much better, admittedly.
- Street Fighter V: Now we're a few years after Street Fighter IV yet still before Street Fighter III. This one has the easiest story to follow of any Street Fighter title, because of... the story mode, which is optimized for attempting to tell stories! Each character has a little backstory vignette, and then the General Story mode, of course, actually tells the full story of the game.
- The Orochi Saga, which makes up the first several King of Fighters titles. 94, the first game, was kind of retroactively fit into this greater saga which otherwise takes place in games 95-97. 98 is the "dream match" capper to the series, which is all about gameplay.
- The NESTS saga, which makes up the next chunk of King of Fighters games: 99-01. 02 is the capper.
- The Ash Crimson saga, which is makes up the last phase of the King of Fighters storyline, including 2003-XIII (minus XII.) Yeah, yeah—I know that a fourth saga has started, but with only one game (of presumably three) released yet, it seems premature to attempt to summarize the story at all.
- Darkstalkers (all three.) While I see cameos or even major uses of a few Darkstalkers characters as part of my own Capcom-SNK crossover symbiosis, I don't think that summarizing the story of the series overall is nearly as important. But I'd like to get to it eventually.
- Fatal Fury. To be honest, the storyline for Fatal Fury isn't really all that complex, even if you get into the Real Bout games and the scrolls of immortality, or whatever exactly they were called. Besides, half of the games in the series are dream matches without an official story, and several of those that remain basically tell the exact same story, just with a slightly rotating cast of supporting characters. This becomes a bit of backstory for some of the King of Fighters characters, and to be honest, they're not the most important King of Fighters characters anyway, especially in terms of KOF story.
- Art of Fighting. Whatever is true for Fatal Fury is, if anything, even more true for Art of Fighting. Technically, Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury take place in the same timeline/continuity, while the King of Fighters games take place in an alternate continuity that just happened to have a lot of the same backstory beats, albeit compressed in time. If you imagine the situation similar to what Marvel was doing in the 00s, then the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury timeline could be seen as the "normal" lines of comic strips, while the King of Fighters was the Ultimate Imprint; same characters and basically the same stories, but retold in an updated and different fashion. Except while in Marvel's case the most recent Secret Wars ends the Ultimate Universe and folds some of its characters into the "main" universe, in SNK's case, the opposite happened, and the KOF timeline is the only one that's still active. This was largely, but not entirely, true even before SNK's bankruptcy. Of the original timeline, only the occasional Fatal Fury title still limped along next to the KOF timeline.
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