Why Am I Doing This?

Like many folks, I'm a big fan of the Japanese 2-D anime style fighting games. Well, like many folks in the past, maybe I should say. There's no doubt that the whole little subgenre has shrunk to a niche market in the wake of a massive wave of 3-D games and the decline of the competitive arcade scene. Some of the series of which I am a big fan seem to have ended completely and irrevocably, and one of the main survivors is too "out there" for my taste.

So, the games I'm really talking about here are from the Street Fighter (SF) series (in all it's iterations) by Capcom and its main serious (and very similar) competitors by SNK: Fatal Fury (FF) and King of Fighters (KoF). Both of those series also had ten or eleven iterations each themselves. Art of Fighting probably also deserves at least a mention since it contributed so many characters and plot points to KoF.

These games must all take place in an alternate reality to our own that bears more than just a passing resemblance to your typical comic book reality. You've got heroes and villains that seem to operate largely above the law, seem to be immune to (or at least completely unconcerned with) conventional threats like people with guns, armies, etc. They seem to have superhuman powers and are primarily only concerned with the doings of other people in their same "superhero" caste. The supervillains operate on the same megalomaniacal, take-over-the-world-via-bizarre-plots mindset, and they have the same kind of super-/pseudo-scientific advances as comic books too: cloning, the harnessing of strange and ambiguous yet apparently limitless energy sources, robots, androids, and other things like that. The world is much more cosmopolitan than ours apparently; people from all over the world speak Japanese, and people who are culturally Japanese could have white skin, curly blond hair and blue eyes.

However, unlike American comic books, the characters seem to be a tad more accessible. They wear a bewildering array of clothes from traditional martial arts outfits to army uniforms, comfortable clothes like jeans and t-shirts, or even bizarre haut couture. But they never wear spandex or strange costumes, have secret identities, or fight small time crime as a matter of course. Rather, the goals of these characters seem to be to advance in mastery of their fighting skills, demonstrate the superiority of their style (and sometimes just so they can get more students and earn a few bucks) or to face off against a notorious villain or rival.

So, like for comic book characters, there's potentially some great stories to be told here. In fact, the games themselves suggest some pretty good stories with their win quotes, endings and whatnot. The characters are able to show quite a bit of personality. There are actually some pretty intricate and involved plot lines running through several of the games, when you can manage to piece them together. For example: Bison's efforts to capture and clone Ryu; Chun-Li, Charlie and Guile's ongoing attempt to bring down Shadaloo; Ryu's battle with the dark side of his art represented by Akuma, the original plot to unleash Orochi; Ash Crimson's attempts to steal the powers of the "three sacred treasures", the plot of the NESTS cartel to take over the world, Terry's quest for revenge against Geese, Geese's own quest for the scrolls of immortality, etc.

In fact, the roster of characters--each with their associated subplots--is already bewildering enough for a fan fiction writer looking to work with even a single game or series. For someone like me, who's looking to combine three large series with multiple games each, well over a hundred characters, several major plot arcs and dozens of minor subplots, the task seems downright impossible. And so it might well be; for that reason I've had to do the following to manage it all:
  1. I've had to greatly trim the point of view characters to only a handful of the most important or my personal favorites. Others might make important cameos or feature as antagonists, but many, many other characters will simply have to be ignored. I've made the choice on who to include based on purely subjective reasons based on how important they are to the various plots that the developers have already outlined, or even based on nothing more important than how much I like them. And there is definitely some disparity between my favorites and general fan favorites (I mean, heck--it's my intention to turn Alice Bogard into a major character, and she only showed up in the Fatal Fury pachinko game!) So, if your favorite character doesn't show up--sorry.
  2. Some consolidation, truncation and changes of both setting and plot have had to be made to accommodate the Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters continuities, which otherwise exist in isolation from each other. Metro City and Southtown are combined into a single entity (Southtown is the actual name; Metro City is the nickname. Sorta like how New York is called The Big Apple, or Detroit is called Motor City, etc.) Shadaloo and NESTS seem like very similar organizations; big time "take over the world" organized criminal organizations with (apparently) limitless funds to spend on crazy projects, an interest in cloning famous martial artists to harness their power, etc., so it's easy as pie to combine the two of them from a story standpoint. There will only be a single Orochi story line and it will almost certainly not have the New Faces team, because I think they're absurd--besides, the newer developing Ash Crimson story is so far a more open format story, making slipping other characters in much easier. After all, the whole point of this is to combine characters from the various franchises, so if I'm not adapting the story in ways that facilitate that goal, I'm missing the point entirely.
  3. A single massive epic story line is intimidating to write and it's too easy to lose track of individual characters and plot arcs. However, a series of loosely connected short stories is much more manageable. Pieced together, the larger plots that span more than one story can start to become apparent.
  4. Coming from a variety of different games, as the characters do, there are a variety of "game engines" at play. Some of them go through pretty radical changes in appearance and even moves as the games march on. My approach will be that all of those are actually simplified representations of reality. Characters don't have to literally fight on a two dimensional plane, of course, and if realistically a person could do something in a fight scene, his story counterpart will be able to also, instead of being limited to what the various games allow. Characters won't mysteriously gain and lose moves; if a character can do a certain move in any game in which he appears, he could be very likely to do it at some point in a story in which he appears. There won't be any kind of round structure to the fights either. Those are great from a game play point of view, but make considerably less sense from a narrative drama point of view. And finally, characters may not always appear exactly as they do in the game. Not only have many of the characters had more than one look in the game as it is, all of them have numerous alternate color palettes, user-defined color edits, etc. It's also absurd to assume that these people literally only have one thing to wear ever, especially--as is the case with several of them--when their in-game costume isn't something that makes much sense to wear for most occasions in the first place. You can pretty much always assume that a character will be wearing something appropriate for the situation in which he finds himself.
  5. Another notable distinction between the story and--well, then some of the games anyway--is that there won't be a tournament featuring prominently in the story. That's a great idea for a quick and dirty raison d'etre for a bunch of fights, but it's not so great for stories. And notably, not all of the games feature tournaments anyway: the Street Fighter Alpha games, for instance, Fatal Fury 3 and the Real Bout games, etc.
  6. Oh, and a final note before I start--if this isn't already obvious, I'm making numerous changes to the stories themselves. The core ideas and concepts will be the same, of course, but many of the details will be changed, not only to accommodate the blending of the SNK and Capcom story lines, but also for my own convenience. Think of the differences between the original comic book version of Spiderman, the reboot for Ultimate Spiderman, the animated show that was on Fox in the 90s and the more recent Hollywood movies. There are tons of changes and differences between all four of those versions, yet the spirit and core thrust of them all is the same. They story's just been re-imagined a bit and re-written to accommodate different time periods and media. The same will happen here. After all, the dramatic demands of a fighting video game and a series of short stories are going to be very different.
  7. I said the last note was my final one, but here's one more I thought of. For some reason, there's in inordinate amount of concern over the ages of the characters. Especially the SNK characters, who according to official data in some series, appear to have wildly varying dates, but who's sprites don't tend to age. Personally, I think the entire issue is kinda inane. I don't care about it. I'm already contemplating changes more significant than that anyway. As far as I'm concerned, the characters are all as old as they look to be in their game sprites, which is plenty vague, but good enough for me. It really only matters for the high school student aged characters anyway; for most of the rest of them, anywhere in the 20s to early 30s makes no difference.

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