Roster reviews, Street Fighter series part 1

This is just me noodling around with the rosters and discussing how much I like (or don't like) the various characters and why. Not sure how this will play out. I suspect I'll get the first Street Fighter game done. As we get further along, the rosters get significantly bigger, but they also feature significantly more repeat characters that I won't have to redress again and again. Chances are I'll be able to get two games in most posts at some point. When I'm done, I'll switch to either Fatal Fury or King of Fighters and do the same thing.

I. Street Fighter I introduced us to the original playable characters, Ryu and Ken (and for years, we pronounced it RAI yoo like Ryan with a different second syllable, in this and other games that used the same name, before spergy, weeaboo nerds and beta nitpickers had to try and "correct" us by saying REE oo or ree YOO or however exactly they pronounce it. Which is equally incorrect from a Japanese standpoint, I'll note, but I don't care—I don't speak Japanese, nor do I care to. In English, it was always RAI yoo, and it will remain so to me.) In retrospect, they don't seem like the most auspicious of characters, but when you're pioneering an entire genre, you can get away with fairly vanilla designs, because they haven't been done before. When the fourth or fifth game in a row tries to make copycat Ryu and Ken characters, that's lame, but when the first one does it, they become icons.

None of the other characters were playable, of course, so in some sense they don't count. However, many of them have become playable over time, so they're worth bringing up. When playing you must pick either Japan or the USA as your first country to go to. If you go to Japan, you face Retsu and Geki. Retsu is the iconic cloistered monk martial artist, which is a stereotype that dates back to early Hong Kong cinema movies of the 70s at least, if not even earlier. He's never appeared in anything else, doesn't even have any special moves that I can remember, and is pretty non-memorable, even given the context in which he appeared. They've tried to link him to various characters in the backstory by saying he was friends with Gouken or Oro or Dhalsim, and that he was excommunicated from his temple (which is curious, since that's his stage) but none of those appear in the game, and they feel like much later after the fact desperate attempts to make him interesting. Geki appeared on the shores of a lake or bay with Mt. Fuji in the background at sunset, and was a pretty classic 80s ninja, with throwing stars and everything. Today, the 80s is far enough away that it probably feels like a foreign country to people who didn't live through it, so you'll have to take my word for it that the 80s and ninjas had some major mojo together, which always made Geki mysterious and cool. It's a bit of a shame that he's never really made any other appearance except in non-canonical comic books and mangas, etc. Not only did he throw stars, but he had a claw-like weapon (less dangerous looking than Vega's, though) and could teleport very short distances. All part of the Shinobi mystique of the 80s. And maybe that's why he hasn't reappeared. He's kind of a dated, frozen piece of 80s pop culture, even in Japan, I suspect.

If you picked the US, on the other hand, you fought Joe and Mike. Joe was extremely anonymous; he's a blond spiky haired guy, like a potato-faced Billy Idol. He's got red pants and sneakers, and is shirtless. It's believed that he's based on Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, who was a popular competitive martial artist. Joe features Benny's real life signature move, a spinning reverse kick, as his only special move. He may also be based on the kickboxing legend Joe Lewis, who was supposed to appear with Bruce Lee instead of Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon, but couldn't due to a scheduling conflict. (He actually beat Norris in at least one championship. He's considered the father of martial arts in the West.) But all that backstory aside, and we certainly didn't know any of that in 1987, he's just kind of a boring character. Mike was clearly based on Mike Tyson, although he just wears a red t-shirt and faded blue-jeans with tennis shoes. Although his story and appearance are almost identical to that of Balrog, Capcom have always insisted that he is not the same character. However, in SFV, one of the alternate costumes for Balrog is called "Mike-like" and he looks just like him. If you play the SFI version of arcade mode, he's one of the characters you could face as well.

After beating both of those countries, you have to pick again between China or Britain. If you go to China, you face Lee, a character who's never appeared again. While probably based on Hong Kong cinema characters like Li Shuwen or Beggar So, he comes across as just a generic Chinese guy to Western audiences. Again, Capcom have referred to him obliquely here and there in the backgrounds of almost every other Chinese character (apparently only about half a dozen people live in China, and they all know each other or are related) but this comes across as special pleading. Gen is the other character you fight after him, and this is the same Gen as appears in the Alpha series and Street Fighter IV and a brief cameo in Street Fighter V. His design is based on a very popular martial arts movie character (in turn based on a historical figure, but his interpretation here is much more informed by the movies) from several movies from Hong Kong, Bak Mei. Of course, he's developed more on his own within the Street Fighter franchise, but he's always hewed close to his source material in many ways. His pressure points Fist of the North Star type kung fu is also heavily influenced by cinema and manga, making him a bit of a classic of Oriental entertainment. Granted, you don't see a lot of that in the first game; it comes out more in the Alpha series. In typical "lost in translation" fashion, the fact that he's a serial killer and gang member doesn't mean that he's not a hero to Oriental audiences, something which Udon has occasionally struggled to reconcile in their comic book interpretation of the story, in which he had to be a criminal "in remission" who Chun-Li berates for his criminal past. No such vibe was present in the original, because hey! Surprise, surprise: diversity means actual difference and Oriental audiences have a different moral compass by which to judge his actions than Western audiences.

If you go to England, on the other hand (or after you've defeated China, when you have to go to England) you'll face Birdie and Eagle (no idea if the avian theme was on purpose or not. Or maybe it's a reference to golf.) Birdie has appeared in three subseries, and changed his appearance drastically in that time. In the first game, he's a white guy; a pretty typical punk from the English punk rocker scene from the late 70s or early 80s; tall, muscular, clad in leather and and with a blond mohawk. For some reason when he appears in the Alpha games, he's been race-swapped and is now a thick-lipped black or maybe high yellow man with a super-exaggerated and physically impossible mohawk with a hole in the middle of it, and bizarre mutton-chops. His signature move gradually becomes throwing out chains and grabbing you with them and slamming you around, while in the first game he only uses them sparingly in a single grab and squeeze move. By the time SFV rolls around, he's become extremely overweight and gross and is played for grotesque comic relief in a way that is typical for Asian entertainment, but which doesn't translate very well to the West. Eagle, on the other hand, is a butler who uses two nightsticks, or side-handled batons. Sometimes they're called escrima or tonfas, but in nitpicky fashion, those are not all exactly the same thing (although very similar) and given his British background in the 80s, I think the nightsticks make the most sense (although given that Capcom is a Japanese company, maybe the tonfas do.) He was originally intended to be an homage to a bodyguard character from Fist of Fury, but he seems to have migrated with his minor appearances in CvS2 and the handheld SFA3 game to being more clearly based on Freddie Mercury. Sort of. His more elegant dress and appearance is supposed to be a counterpoint to Birdie's cockney punk appearance. Either way, the Japanese interpretation of the English doesn't seem particularly flattering.

Finally, if you beat all eight fighters at all four of the countries, you travel to Thailand, where you face the final two: Adon and Sagat. Both are fairly well known; Adon also appeared in the Alpha games and SFIV, although he looks pretty different, and Sagat appears in every SF series except III (and, as far as we know, VI, although that's not out yet at the time of this writing.) Both are meant to be Thai Muay Thai boxers. However, it's worth noting that neither one of them look very much like an ethnic Thai. Adon would be abnormally large for a Thai; he's bigger than Ryu and has spikey red hair. He dresses like a traditional Muay Thai boxer; shorts, wrapped wrists and ankles, no shirt, and with  a headband. In later appearances, this spiky hair turns into a bizarre flattop that looks like an ironing board, but it remains red, or even more orange-ginger like the Weasleys. If Adon is big, red-headed and white-skinned for a Thai, Sagat is even more freakish. At supposedly 7'5" and quite lean, muscular and healthy (i.e., doesn't exhibit the side effects of gigantism), he's a freak of nature for any population group, especially the notoriously short and slight Thais. Although normally bald and somewhat brown-skinned, there are some alternative costumes that show Sagat with reddish-brown hair. I'm not sure what to make of all of that other than that Capcom and/or the Japanese in general don't really care about ethnicity at all, or their art style just kind of ignores it. Sagat also has solid white eyes in most appearances. Or eye, rather; he has a patch over one eye, of course. Sagat's an interesting character; he went from being a pretty one-dimensional "I just want to be the strongest" boss in SF1 to becoming an angry mobster who wants revenge in SF2, to gradually becoming a more honorable rival to Ryu, who felt really pushed by Ryu's own skill to becoming much better himself in later games (even Alpha, which is a later game than SF2, but which takes place earlier.) By SFV he's ended his association entirely with Shadaloo, and his place as one of the three lieutenants to Bison is taken by F.A.N.G. instead. This was good character development for Sagat, but of course, F.A.N.G. is literally one of the worst characters ever developed for SF, so we lose otherwise. The rehabilitation of Sagat is a curious one, because it seems that with Street Fighter in general, over time, they are reluctant to make any character too evil. Even Akuma has some redeeming moments. Bison seems to be the only one immune to this treatment, but a lot of other former villains end up being simply rivals over time. SNK has done something similar with a number of Fatal Fury and King of Fighters characters; Billy Kane being a notable example, or even Iori Yagami.

For the most part, the characters that never really left the SFI realm: Joe, Mike, Retsu, Geki, Lee, and Eagle belong in that left behind pile and its probably good that they looked for more inspiration elsewhere. Eagle maybe had some potential, and Geki is one that I've always had a little bit of interest in, being a much more iconic shinobi character that anyone else in the series, including even Ibuki and Guy. They could have maybe gone somewhere, but didn't. Sagat is a total winner as a character; there's nothing not to like about him. Adon and Gen are... OK although it really took Gen's strange rivalry with Akuma to make him pop. And, of course, Ryu and Ken are iconic and over time have developed into really interesting characters with the time and attention they've gotten over the years. Birdie started off fairly generic, and actually got worse with time, to the point that I actively dislike the character now, and feel kind of irritated with what they've done to him, especially in the jump from Alpha to V.

SF6 reveals and series retrospective

Over the last few days, Capcom released a Street Fighter 6 trailer. Almost immediately after, a bunch of character design, and probably the majority of the launch roster was "leaked." I say "leaked" in scare quotes, because both Capcom's and the access media's reaction to the "leaks" don't seem consistent with a leak, but rather with a planned promotional stunt. That's obviously very circumstantial, but I think it's more likely. We'll see. Maybe they'll admit to it down the line. In any case, the leaks have been confirmed, pretty much, by Capcom themselves as being real, and they did so without any hint of regret or even "aw, shucks." I think we can count on them. And the access media would never have posted the details of, or even talked about, the leaks if they were genuine leaks that Capcom wanted to suppress in any way. The only other explanation, and I think it's less likely, is that Capcom just decided to roll with the leak and accept it immediately, and even use it promotionally the best that they could. In my experience, there's hardly a company in existence with judgement that good or that quick, and Capcom themselves have demonstrated repeatedly that they don't have it. I still think the "leak" was a planned promotional supplement to the official trailer is the most likely explanation.

In any case, before I talk about the content that we now know of for SF6, let me give a real quick summary of each of the SF subseries, how they were supported, and what they mean in relation to the new material. This will give us some context. I'll even hit SF1, even though it's not very relevant anymore.

Street Fighter [1] The first Street Fighter game, released in 1987, set the stage for what the game series would be in terms of 1x1 martial arts competitions and traveling around the world. It also introduced the main characters, Ryu and Ken--initial main antagonist Sagat, as well as their basic special moves, like dragon punch, fireball and hurricane kick.

Street Fighter II However, it wasn't really until the release of Street Fighter II in 1991 that the series hit high gear. I'll only briefly mention this, because it's kind of obvious by now, but Street Fighter II's building off of the foundation of SF1 is what defined the entire fighting game genre. Multiple characters, with multiple playstyles, an arcade ladder through a progression of characters, and then bosses (or at least a boss. Street Fighter II has three sub bosses, and later in its life-cycle, a secret extra boss too), snappy trash talk between matches, and the brief story endings that actually gave each character some... well, some character development and personality other than just as a collection of moves or as a tactical set of options. SFII was obviously a huge hit; it's credited with, like I said, creating the fighting game genre almost overnight, with saving the arcade business model for at least a few more years, and it sold over 6 million copies on the SNES alone during the 90s. By any standard whatsoever, SFII was a significant success.

While iterative patches and additions seem to be more closely associated with computer games at the time, which you would buy and then also buy expansion packs and expect patches of broken things, SFII tried to pioneer a similar strategy in arcades, releasing iterative updates to the game, starting with Champion Edition which added a second color so you could play two player matches with the same character, as well as making the four bosses playable, increasing the available character selection count by 50%. I suspect an unintended side effect of this was the paradigm at Capcom that they didn't have to get it right the first time; every Street Fighter subseries afterwards, except IV, seemed to have varying degrees of botchedness to their roll-out. 

Street Fighter Alpha You'd expect SFIII to follow SFII, but actually it didn't. The Street Fighter Alpha series followed SFII, on the same hardware as the latest SFII iterations, and in the same style as new (at the time) comic book style or anime-like games such as Darkstalkers and X-Men and Marvel Superheroes, which Capcom also made as SF-like fighting games starting in the mid-90s. The first Alpha game was released in 1995. Although super moves had technically debuted (at least on Capcom games; SNK games had developed them first) in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the Alpha games made them more integral to the experience and were built around the concept that expected you'd use them. A "cool play budget" of sorts was created wherein you'd charge up your super meter, and then spend it on either alpha counters or super moves, depending on what you thought you needed and what made for a cooler play at the time. The first game in the series was pretty bare-bones, but Street Fighter Alpha 2 was meant to "replace" that in the canon, and it perfected the mechanics as well as bulked out the character select roster to an acceptable level. (It also had greatly improved stages.) Street Fighter Alpha 3 added a number of other characters, and did a fairly radical tear-up of many of the Alpha 2 mechanics. Some fans consider this a step-backwards, as they quite enjoyed the Alpha 2 gameplay, while other fans (myself included) consider Alpha 3 as by far the best of the Alpha subseries and possibly the best of the entire Street Fighter series, at least to date when it was new. (Curiously, many people also consider Capcom vs SNK 2 one of the best games of this general era, and it played very similarly to SFA3.)

Another interesting aside is that the Alpha series, which was a prequel to Street Fighter II, brought in a number of both Street Fighter I characters and Final Fight characters, as well as a number of stages that represent Final Fights setting of Metro City, clearly establishing that both games take place in the same continuity. It also had a number of unique new characters that were Alpha only characters added, like Karin or R. Mika, for instance.

Street Fighter EX in 1996, game company Arika, under license from Capcom, created some 3-D polygon games for the arcade, but especially geared towards porting to the PS1, which was the most popular game console in the world at the time (actually, that's still true today.) Frankly, I think the polygon-based fighters from this era are really ugly and haven't aged well, but SFEX never seemed to really catch on at all, when games like Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Soul Edge did. But even those are ugly in their early iterations. This is probably best viewed as a strange dead-end spin-off rather than a part of the series overall. The characters that were unique to the EX series do not belong to Capcom anymore, and have popped up more recently in Arika-produced games like Fighting EX Layer.

Crossover Titles In 1996, Capcom also released X-men vs Street Fighter, which combined sprites from the X-men game with those from the Alpha games, but which ramped up "superhero-like" mechanics, including much flashier super moves, super jumps, and character tag-teams. This series, or perhaps family of related series, continued for some time and likely distracted Capcom from its core Street Fighter titles. There were four games in a vs. Marvel crossover titles, and two in a vs SNK series. While the vs SNK titles retained a very Street Fighter like feel, tone and roster of characters, with Capcom vs SNK 2 in particular playing very much like Street Fighter Alpha 3 in many ways but with better graphics and many redrawn sprites, the vs Marvel games always had a very different feel and honestly gradually migrated away from Street Fighter in many ways, instead adding tons of characters from other Capcom games.

This sub series, after lying fallow for the better part of a decade, was rebooted after the successful launch of SFIV, including three more Marvel games, vs. Tekken games, and more. Of course, by now, character crossovers are pretty commonplace. Ryu appeared in Super Smash Brothers. Terry Bogard seems to be making the rounds all over the place, appearing in Fighting EX Layer, another Super Smash Brothers iteration, and more. There's even a girl version of Terry who popped up in weird spin-off SNK game. 

Street Fighter III Talk about a botched launch! In 1997, Capcom put out the first Street Fighter III game. In a YouTube video I made a year or two ago, I pointed out that while Street Fighter II sold over 2 million copies to home consoles, SFIII only sold 100,000 across its home console release (which was limited to the Dreamcast.) It has since, especially in its third iteration, Third Strike, had a bit of a renaissance, selling in decent (although unknown) numbers since in compilations and in other "retro" guises, and it has some fans, certainly. I do not however, believe that it has pulled in casuals; I think the community of fans around Third Strike are more competitive and online players, and I think the numbers are still woefully behind what II and IV sold. There's a number of reasons for III's relative failure: 1) crappy characters that nobody liked, and the elimination of almost all classic characters. Even in Third Strike, we only had four legacy characters, and of the III unique characters, only a few have managed to stand out as keepers from all three iterations of the game: Dudley, maybe Yun and Yang, and maybe Elena and Makoto and Ibuki. 2) the villain/boss was absurd, and is nothing at all like the classic iconic-ness of M. Bison. True; M. Bison has been used enough that he needs to be retired, but Gill was a joke. 3) the game play was quite technical and focused on fundamentals relative to Alpha 3. While I can understand why its fans think this is a good thing, even they, if they're honest, have to admit that that's poison to casuals and broad appeal. One of the greatest features of SFII was that anyone could sit down and play it and do... OK, at least, even with no experience at all. Capcom focusing on the hyper-fan and the competitive "fighting games community" is a major mistake. I've seen guys make the sensible point that using trophies as proxy for data, we can infer that ~85-90% of people who've bought the game do not play any online or competitive content. That was a vast mistake on the part of Capcom to assume that that's where the customers were, and they've made that mistake more than once (see below.) 4) The look and feel of the game is very dated. Now, personally, I like 2-D animation, and I'm glad to see that it's made a come-back. There's a kind of timeless quality to good animated 2-D games that polygon 3-D games (especially from the mid to late 90s and early 00s) simply do not have. Nowadays Tekken 2 or 3 looks incredibly dated, while Streets of Rage 4, which is even more cartoony than SFIII, admittedly, looks amazing, but Streets of Rage could, with a little bit more pixelation, have been made 25 years ago. I think there's now an appreciation of some of what SFIII did visually, although at the time, I think it was under-rated and under-appreciated. Certainly by games journalists and professional reviewers, if not necessarily by the fans. But the fans probably did too (I think Tekken leapt to the top of the popularity charts for the genre because of its accessibility to new players more than its graphics, though.) But, 5) presentation-wise the rest of SFIII isn't very good either. The colors aren't nearly as bright and often look strangely muted or grayed out and the music is absolutely terrible. Not only did it sound terribly dated almost as soon as it was released, but it only appealed to a niche market even in the mid/late 90s.

To me, the poster child of the mistakes of this sub-series is the parry. While there's nothing wrong with the idea on its face, the reality is that there was a fairly steep learning curve to figuring out how to be any good with a parry, and it was designed to be a move the converted fights of the more traditional mold into something that resembled a fast-paced chess match. Again, I can see why people who love it do so, but I don't know if the people who love it can see how it reduced the gameplay to something that only a relatively tiny niche were ever going to find very intriguing. But it did. And both Capcom and this niche exist sometimes in a bit of an echo chamber, where Capcom caters to that niche, and only hears their voices, and then wonders why the vast majority of their would-be customers are getting turned off and put off. 

I'm very concerned that with SFV and (possibly) SFVI, Capcom seems to be reliving the same mistakes that they made with SFIII. With SFV, they kinda/sorta fixed it, but also not really.

Street Fighter IV After SF3 had a botched launch, the Marvel license expired so the popular Marvel vs games had to end, and SNK went bankrupt so that the SNK vs games also had to end, Capcom seemed to put very little effort or attention into fighting games, which of course meant that their early 00s efforts after those series were poorly received because they were poorly made. The entire genre, at least with Capcom, went dormant for a number of years until one passionate middle management employee's personal crusade came true and he was put in charge of developing a sequel. This was 2008's SFIV, which is widely credited with reigniting the entire genre again. Coming out on the PS3/XBox 360 generation, the games used 3-D models (much improved from the early Tekken or Virtua Fighter days) but with a very traditional 2-D Street Fighter-esque gameplay. SFIV eschewed the overly technical gameplay of SFIII and feels much more like a spiritual successor to the Alpha series, although I don't mean to imply that it played exactly like them, of course. In addition to many other improvements, it had pretty cool remixed "techno" versions of classic musical themes, it had much more colorful and "Streets of Rage 4" like looks to the characters and their stages, there were quite flashy additions to the special and super moves to make them really look like they had some weight, but not the crazy spastic feel of the Marvel vs. games. Some of this was very stylized, like the appearance of brush ink-strokes or splashes in the air briefly when certain moves are performed. And the roster! Admittedly, because I missed the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, I only picked this game up relatively late when it was on Steam with almost the final update already available, so I've only known it with a roster in the mid-40s or more, but even at launch, it had a decent amount of characters available. Many characters were new to this iteration, and while those were pretty hit and miss (El Fuerte and Rufus being the biggest misses; Juri and C. Viper being probably the biggest hits--unless you count the Oni and Evil Ryu versions from this game, which were significantly different than what we'd seen before), and I think every iteration needs to stretch out beyond the classics and try to add something new.

In short, SFIV was familiar to old hands, and yet fresh and new. It was accessible to new players as well as offering depth to returning players. It was everything a SF game should be, and its sales numbers attest to that. It was a resounding success, it kicked off an entirely new generation of fighting games in its wake, both within and without Capcom. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best SF game of the entire series.

Street Fighter V Even with the best of intentions a launch can be botched. 2016's SFV was a game that seems to have been botched not because Capcom had a bunch of bad ideas (although it did have some) but because they simply weren't able to meet their timeline. SFV launched without any real single player content, with an impoverished roster, and with a gameplay that was more of a spiritual successor to SFIII than to Alpha or IV. Even now, I feel like it gets too caught up in wondering what the "fighting game community" is doing while forgetting that roughly 85-90% of sales go to people who don't belong to any such community. With a defensive "watch your opponent for an opening" flat gameplay that's more technical than IV, while being different yet again from III, it took many iterations and several years before Capcom had a game that would have any appeal to the big market of SFIV players, and by that point, they'd probably already lost most of them. As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and three years later is way beyond that chance.

In addition to a botched launch with almost no meaningful content and a focus on only a small niche of their potential market, SFV had other problems as well. The migration of console generations should have ushered in a much better-looking product, and yet in most respects, the game is considerably uglier than its predecessor. Some of this is technical; extremely plastic-looking models and really bad clipping and janking issues with hair and clothing in particular, but most of it was simply art direction and style. The characters looked like strange clay-shaped caricatures or cartoon characters rather than the rather attractive and cool looking comic-bookish look at SFIV had had. Some of the designs almost looked like the designers hated the character and hoped to sink him into obscurity (Ken, Alex, Akuma, etc.) They also rolled out, although later than it should have been rolled out, a fairly lengthy story mode, and while the idea was actually a really good one, the dialogue, plots and "acting" were so stupid as to be embarrassing, and the game focused on characters that often were not fan favorites and yet we were subjected to long, long stretches of being exposed to them. I've seen enough of Karin after a few playthroughs to last me a lifetime. 

SFV also significantly tweaked the roster, and some popular characters never made a reappearance, while other new characters were questionable additions, at best (F.A.N.G. being the most absurdly egregious here.)

While I kinda sorta made my peace with SFV (as I did with SFIII) after a time, it's not my favorite SF by a long shot, and I consider it mostly a very rough and ill-advised step backwards from SFIV.

Street Fighter VI It's too early to see what Street Fighter VI will be like, although just based on my gut-feel from watching the trailer video, I'd say that it looks more like SFIV, including using stylized "paint" spray which looks a lot like the ink from SFIV. The "drive engine" subsystem may or may not be too complicated, and looks to add a variety of stuff that you can do, including bringing back parrying in a different form. Because of this, some others have thought it looked an awful lot like SFIII, which I hope is not to be the case, because if they can't pull in casuals and make the game accessible to the non-hardcore "fighting game community" then it's going to flop harder than SFV did. 

There seems to be some belief that maybe a good portion of the game takes place within Metro City (instead of all over the world, as they usually have been) although this is kind of speculative and may not be true. It does seem to finally take place chronologically after SFIII, and makes no reference to Gill or any of his ridiculous group, or to Bison and Shadaloo, which has been defeated at least three times now, and it'd be nice if they stayed defeated for a while. Some "leaked" (see above) artwork purports to show most of the launch roster. It is pretty heavy on the original World Warriors—none of the bosses are there, but otherwise the entire group makes a return. Although they have new, improved looks for the most part; reminiscent of their original look in many cases, but improved. Ryu, for example, takes after his popular "hot Ryu" alternate costume, and Ken looks like he's trying to imitate Terry Bogard.

Dhalsim also looks older (although he did in SFV too) and Chun-Li looks... maybe not older, but more mature, if that makes sense, while the rest of them seem to mostly just be sporting costume changes. Given that starting with IV, alternate costumes have been commonplace, that's not so shocking anymore at this point.

The next wave is a collection of classic characters, but not quite as classic as the original eight world warriors as well as some newer characters that seem to have been among the possible keepers from IV and V. As you can see, it includes Cammy, Dee Jay, Rashid, Juri, Ed and Akuma. Cammy's redesign is pretty cool, while Akuma's seems to undo the damage done by "dandelion" SFV Akuma while still keeping true to the spirit of that hairier redesign. I don't know how popular Rashid really is, but I think because the Middle East is a growing market for this kind of game, they probably feel they need him for regional appeal. I'm sure he's popular in Arabian countries, at least, even if I don't really see the appeal in him.

Dee Jay looks a little bit insane, but otherwise, this isn't a bad collection of redesigns. 

This last group is the collection (so far) of new characters, although the first one, Luke, was actually released recently as a season 6 character for SFV, although it was clear even then that it was a "pull-ahead" sneak peak at SFVI character.

After Luke we have the absolutely masculine unit Marisa, from Italy, which might be an OK design if it were a man, but is super off-putting as a woman, Jamie from Hong Kong, which looks like a slightly "streeted up" remix of the Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves character Gato, Mimi from France, who has very strange pink hair with a short cut but insane sideburns, who looks like a modern bizarre King of Fighters character more than a more down-to-earth Street Fighter character. Lilly is a little Mexican girl, and for some reason, going back to T. Hawk, Capcom thinks that Mexicans are identical to American Injuns. Mysterious and aristocratic-looking JP is from Russia (as well as somewhere else based on the mystery flag), Kimberly, the little black girl with an old-fashioned Walkman, who on first glance looks like she's likely to be very annoying, but I'll withhold final judgement for the time being. If Capcom were an American company, I'd suggest that she's the super annoying "diversity" inclusion that they'll really drop the ball on designing and then call the fans racist when they don't like her, but being a Japanese company, I have no idea what to make of her. Probably a Japanese interpretation of what American "street" culture is like, so highly caricaturized.  A.K.I. is the last one, and allegedly she's Chinese. If so, the best thing I can say about her so far is that at least she's not F.A.N.G.

Art styles

For Capcom, you can see various "generations" of artistic styling on their fighting games, i.e. mostly Street Fighter.

1. Street Fighter I was made in 1987 on very primitive hardware by the standards of what was to come. The art looked really good for the year that it came out, but it looks primitive by 90s standards, with stiff, non-fluid animation and relatively little detail.
2. Street Fighter II was the same style as the earlier game, but the hardware was improved, and everything looked better. The character animation was both more fluid and more detailed, the backgrounds had a great deal more detail and animation, etc.
3. The Street Fighter Alpha games used the same style as both the Marvel and Darkstalkers game, and looked less like a video game and more like an animated movie, by design. The hardware was improved (CPS1 to CPS2 board). Everything was again improved; the backgrounds look wonderful, the characters look pretty good, although they're still the same size/resolution as the earlier style--but artistically they were very different. I'm not 100% sure that the frame rate or fluidity increased. The F/X stuff looked tons better too. This artistic style actually carried forward for quite some time, and overlapped with the next generation of art.
4. The Street Fighter III games were on improved hardware, the CPS3 boards. There were some graphical improvements associated with this, including a greatly increased framerate. The 2-D backgrounds from this era look really good; some of the best ever made, in fact, to this point. The size and resolution of the characters still look the same, although the art style was revised. It's still animated movie-like, however. The vs games were also on this same hardware, although they usually used Alpha-generation sprites, or newly drawn Marvel/SNK sprites that were the same style, more or less. This is also where some 3-D backgrounds started to pop up in the latest versions of the Marvel vs and the vs SNK games, although they do not, in my opinion, look as good as the 2-D backgrounds of the same era.
5. Although chronologically out of order, I think this belongs here; the high resolution UDON drawn sprites and backgrounds of the Turbo HD Remix and the Switch-released Ultra Street Fighter II game. This stuff looks absolutely FANTASTIC. I actually think I prefer this style of art to any that I've otherwise seen, although some other franchises have very similar style art.
6. Street Fighter IV is the first 3D Street Fighter game (I'm obviously not counting the EX games) although that's just the graphics, not the gameplay, which remains solidly 2D regular "Street Fighter-like." I think this game looks fantastic, mostly, but I admit to preferring the animated 2D style of generation 5. The only thing that makes this better than 2D is the ability to have alternate costumes as 3D modules.
7. Moving from the PS3 (and Xbox 360) to the PS4 allowed for higher quality 3D animation, but the reality is that Street Fighter V doesn't actually (necessarily) look better than Street Fighter IV. The art style is often more caricaturized, there are really bad clipping issues (especially in the story mode cut scenes) and a number of characters have really badly designed new looks. 

In general, I'd say that of the Capcom art style generations, I like the Alpha stuff quite a bit, although I also admit that it looks dated now. I also like the SFIV 3D models, but the UDON high quality 2D animation is my favorite Street Fighter art style. 

Because I've started talking a bit about the beat em up tangent to fighting games, its worth pointing out that beat em ups at Capcom never really advanced out of the SF2 style regardless of what hardware they were on. Maybe Captain Commando has a bit more of an Alpha feel, but I don't think so. That said, a number of beat em up (and other) Capcom characters were remade in different styles because of crossover games, including loads of Final Fight characters that came to Street Fighter or Marvel vs games. The Alpha series, and SF's IV and V have about a fourth to a third each--roughly--of Final Fight characters in them. Street Fighter III even had one.

Capcom's biggest competitor in the fighting games genre was SNK. Even other competitors who made Street Fighter II clones often did so on MVS hardware, like World Heroes by ADK, Breakers by Visco, or the Fighters History games by Data East, so I won't mention them specifically (most of them never advanced beyond Street Fighter II-like anyway.) SNK used the same hardware for the better part of two decades, so they never really increased their technical capability until they finally abandoned it after the turn of the millennium. However, that doesn't mean that every game used the same style of artwork, and different series had more or less attention to detail, realism vs cartoonishness, etc. I'm going to call all of this a single generation, although there are some notable things to point out as brackets within that generation.

1. MVS generation. A lot of different graphical "tricks" were tried, even fairly early on, like Art of Fighting's zoom feature. Fatal Fury itself has the most primitive graphics of the series, although it's not really much less primitive than Street Fighter II. However, after the release of Street Fighter II, the art style was done more in open imitation of SF2's style, and games like Fatal Fury 2/Special, for instance, look like SF2 clones in terms of style. While always somewhat stylized and comic book like, or animation-like in style, it's fair to say that most of the games of this era approached a semi-realistic look within the animation gamut. A notable exception here is the direction that the Real Bout games went for Special and 2, where they had a much more stylized, cartoon-like appearance that (I believe) was probably done in deliberate imitation of the Alpha style of Street Fighter games. Unlike Capcom, SNK didn't just reuse aging sprites, but constantly updated them and often made them better-looking over time without really changing the style over much itself. If you look at an early King of Fighters game, like 94 or 95, for instance, and compare it to a late MVS (or even Atomiswave) titles like King of Fighters 2002, 2003 or XI, or Mark of the Wolves, you'll probably notice that from a technical standpoint and a stylistic standpoint, they all look quite similar, but you'll also (I believe) quite easily note that the later titles look "better"; the artists just got better over more time and practice with the system, and were able to put out better looking works. That said, the home ports did employ some additional graphical "improvements" including 3D backgrounds (not always better than the 2D ones, but sometimes they were) and pixelation smoothing of the sprites. There was also very notable and noteworthy improvement of the character portraits after matches, during menu selection, etc. as a more comic bookish or anime approach was adopted. Anime is more than one style, however--the anime style that SNK adopted is one that is closest in appearance to western art and animation, while still having an eastern "anime" edge to it. It's less Sailor Moon and more Jim Lee, if you will. This is maybe a little hard to describe as western comic book art and animation and Japanese manga and anime art have cross-pollinated each other to such a degree that its often not easy to say what western animation looks like anymore, other than it certainly excludes the more cartoonish giant-eyes anime and bizarre emotional overreaction cues. But hopefully you can follow what I mean here.
2. After SNK's bankruptcy, all of their titles except King of Fighters basically shut down. XII and XIII were the last 2D fighters, but they feature greatly improved graphics in much higher resolution. I'd say that in most respects, they are comparable to the UDON graphics of Ultra Street Fighter II, but a bit more anime and caricaturish on occasion in style.
3. They didn't stick with that style for very long, for whatever reason (probably because somebody figured out that 3D was cheaper and faster and more flexible.) For XIV and the upcoming XV, they've switched to 3D models. These models are much better than anything Capcom have used, in my opinion; although they are still more "realistic" "western" anime in style.

Given what I thought about Capcom's styles, you'd think that generation 2 would be my favorite, and you'd probably be right. However, I think that SNK did their 3D animation (after they got the Maximum Impact series out of their hair) better than Capcom did in general, and it's hard to fault their 3D animation. With one exception. SNK has always been known as being "stylish" compared to Capcom. Stylish in this regard is a very Japanese thing, though, taking a lot of inspiration from "Japanese Street Fashion". I suppose there's nothing to call that other than "stylish" compared to Capcom, but whereas stylish would seem like a compliment, here it isn't. Japanese street fashion, to western eyes, looks like what a horde of flaming gay people would wear if they all decided that they were really nerdy and wanted to go to Comicon via some kind of goth/steampunk niche. These character and costume designs that SNK comes up with are not cool. They're not good. They're bizarre. SNK has always had that reputation, but it's gotten orders of magnitude worse in the last few titles compared to what it used to be during the "glory days" of mainline King of Fighters titles. 

Luckily, enough characters have enough history that they can't deviate too much from their look without upsetting the fans, so this mostly applies to the new characters that they keep adding rather than the older ones that they're still picking up because they're perennial favorites. This limits the amount of damage this bizarre aesthetic can wreak on the series, but as time goes on, it's probably going to get worse.

As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the King of Fighters XIII cast was one of the most conservative, traditional ones done in many years, which also limited the ability of the "SNK aesthetic" from being very prominent in that game. Yet another reason to like generation 2.

For beat em ups, Sega's Streets of Rage was obviously the main competitor to Final Fight. Those two are usually considered the epitome of the beat em up genre. Normally, I wouldn't think a comparison here would be necessary. Streets of Rage was sub-generation 1 in comparison to Capcom, while 2 and 3 were comparable to Final Fantasy and therefore to Street Fighter II in graphics.

However, in recent years, an indie publisher convinced Sega to let them publish Streets of Rage 4 out of France of all places, and they've done a fabulous job with it. I highly recommend watching a youtube video of a playthrough of it. While the art style is sometimes quite anime, at other times, it's more reminiscent of western comic book or Disney style art. In any case, at all points, it looks absolutely fantastic, at least as good as Capcom's generation 5 or SNK's generation 2, and similar in many respects to both... but probably actually better. Capcom's generation 5 still tried to just upgrade technically while copying faithfully their generation 2 designs, and SNK's generation 2 was a little too out there with caricaturish anime stylings. Streets of Rage 4 does everything that those do, except without the weaknesses. 

If I could see fighting games done the way I'd most like to see them done, then the lizardcube style from Streets of Rage 4 would be it. The ONLY thing that I can complain about with Streets of Rage 4, and I'm not 100% sure that I'm willing to complain about it until it gets even worse, is its bizarre Diversity, Inc. cast with way too many women acting like men and way too many bizarre ethnic groups. Why is the one guy a Maori? Do you know how many Maoris I've seen in America in nearly fifty years of living here? Other than a handful of students at BYU Hawaii, absolutely ZERO. Anyway, I think it's on the cusp of being a problem without quite managing to become one yet at its current state.

Anyway, I've posted this before, but here's a mockup that the lizardcube guys did of a Mark of the Wolves 2 done in their Streets of Rage 4 style. I'd love to see some fighting games get this treatment. Absolutely.

Beat em ups

Although I haven't really talked much about beat em ups except as a kind of aside, since so many Final Fight characters made their way over the years into Street Fighter, that's probably not really fair. Beat em ups came out about the same time as fighting games; maybe just a bit earlier, and their origins and development are inextricably entangled with that of fighting games too. If fighting games have a number of "fallow" years in the early 00s, the beat em up genre experienced a much longer fallow years blight; from the mid-90s until just a few years ago, honestly. Right now there's a fairly good scene for beat em ups, although to be fair, many of the titles are kind of indie and you may not have heard of them, but the revival of Streets of Rage in its belated fourth entry, brought the revival into the mainstream; it's available on pretty much every major platform right now, and has sold over two and a half million copies (that number is as of six months ago, and before the release of its DLC. It's probably significantly higher now.)

Because beat em ups were popular prior to the arrival of fighting games as we really know them, I was a huge fan of them prior to playing fighting games. While the narrative is that beat em ups suffered in popularity following the release of Street Fighter II, the reality is that probably the most popular and often considered the best one was released after Street Fighter II, and took deliberate inspiration from it. Beat em ups and fighting games followed a lot of parallel development in terms of how they should play, which admittedly could only go so far because of the fact that one is focused on 1x1 martial arts fist fighting in a duel-like environment, while the other is focused on beating up wave after wave of much weaker enemies (except the bosses) on a belt-scrolling stage. I think people stopped playing them because they weren't available anymore in arcades rather than because people didn't want them. I mean, when semi tongue in cheek fan project Beats of Rage gets a million downloads with only word of mouth, that strongly suggests that there was a market for good games of this type all along.

I already mentioned how the environment and enemies is a major difference between fighting games. The belt-scrolling stages where you fight wave after wave of arguably weaker opponents to end the stage against a boss that's comparable to you, if not stronger is the major distinction, but other things are significant too. The potential for cooperative play between more than one player is another key element, as is the use of disposable weapons like the knives, metal pipes and other things that you pick up and use for a little while before they disappear. The most iconic titles are fist-fighting martial arts games, like the most iconic fighting games, but the moves are much simpler, usually focusing on only two or three buttons. Over time, this has changed somewhat in cross-pollination with fighting games; more complex combos and special--even super moves--have entered the lexicon of beat em ups. But the originals didn't really have too many of them. Despite the fact that there were only a few buttons, there were combinations of things that you could do with them that led to more moves being available than merely two or three, of course--but the classic beat em up is a simpler game to play than the classic fighting game, at least in terms of player character moves.

From a story and setting perspective, there have been lots of different types, but the classic involves fighting street gangs in a setting of urban decay and chaos, often to go rescue one of the characters girlfriends. The first game that is usually called a beat em up in the traditional sense, although it still lacked the cooperative play feature, is "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio" which was translated into the West as Renegade. It wasn't just translated, though--it was graphically remade, and the whole rescue the girlfriend story was added. Rather than being a Japanese high school delinquent protecting his nerdy friend from being picked on by gangs from school, it was loosely based on the cult film The Warriors, released in 1979, which I don't think much of anyone saw at the time, but which has been referenced by creative types in multiple genres over and over and over again. (The music video for Shake It by Metrostation, for instance, is also based on it. K-Traxx and other EDM artists have sampled vocals from it in many places, and Renegade, among other video games, lifted the look and concepts straight from that movie too.) Renegade is an insanely influential game, but the beat em up as we all know it really was created the next year (1987) with the same creators building on both the Japanese and Western versions of the game to create Double Dragon. Curiously, the same year as the initial release of Street Fighter, which although a different kind of game, was obviously influenced by the success of Renegade in its title and concept.

Double Dragon was originally going to be the actual sequel to Kunio/Renegade, but the decision was made to give it a different cast, setting and make it its own thing, which was probably a good move. This is where the genre really finally came into its own; Double Dragon introduced the cooperative play, the continuous side-scrolling, the disposable weapons, etc. It also utilized the Western Renegade type setting and plot, including some cut scenes, and it went even further. Rather than simple urban decay as in The Warriors, Double Dragon takes place in an almost post-apocalyptic urban setting, heavily influenced by the Mad Max movies and Fist of the North Star. Much of these tropes would be copied by most of the other subsequent beat em ups. Heck, even such esoteric details as an enemy female character who dresses like a stripper and uses a whip were carried over at least into both Final Fight and Streets of Rage from Double Dragon.

Double Dragon was wildly successful; in America it was the highest selling arcade game for two years in a row, 1988 and 1989 after its initial release. By 1989, two rival franchises became probably the most successful in the genre, Sega's Golden Axe, which took the concept of the Double Dragon beat em up, wedded it to the developers love of the Arnie Conan movies, and the concept of special moves that Capcom had introduced in Street Fighter I. This game was hugely successful and spawned several sequels and spin-offs. I personally probably played more of it than I did Double Dragon, although I played a fair bit of Double Dragon in arcades in 87-88 or so. This type of game was even better served, I think, when Capcom got a hold of the Dungeons & Dragons license and created Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara in the mid-90s, using big, Final Fight-like sprites. 

Capcom, in fact, had a large run of beat em ups. Not only the D&D games, which are fantastic, by the way, but the weird post apocalyptic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Alien vs Predator, and futuristic superhero Captain Commando. The D&D games themselves probably came about because of Capcom's own King of Dragons and Knights of the Round. But probably the most famous, and later a contender for the top series of the genre was Final Fight. Originally conceived as Street Fighter II, albeit a totally different kind of game more closely based on Renegade and Double Dragon, Final Fight brought much better graphics, smoother gameplay and much more character than any game in the genre had heretofore delivered. The arcade version is a great game, but unfortunately, it got a SNES exclusive conversion that was hacked in many ways, and pretty disappointing. It's readily available now in modern systems; you can buy the arcade version on the Capcom Classics Collection (PS2 era) or the Capcom Beat em Up Bundle on Steam, PS4 Nintendo Switch, etc. (It's interesting, isn't it, to see this classic era of video gaming make a resurgence as gamers are discovering that the direction the market went was not actually in the direction of games that were necessarily more fun. Stuff that's now twenty or even thirty years old is being rediscovered and it turns out that it's considered good design even still.)

Final Fight was enormously successful; it was the most successful video game in arcades in 1990 (it's release date is late 1989--around Thanksgiving) and the second most successful arcade game in 1991, behind Street Fighter II. It also was one of Capcom's best-selling games on the SNES, in spite of the poor conversion. It epitomized the genre in almost every respect; the urban decay, the go beat up gangsters to rescue a girlfriend, the roster of characters which includes (admittedly somewhat generic) Cody, the boyfriend, but also the girl's father, Mike Haggar, who was also mayor, and Cody's best friend Guy, a Japanese ninja who was hanging around town for whatever reason.

Final Fight characters had so much character, in fact, that they've had a somewhat startling level of longevity. Even relatively "faceless" mooks have gone on to become Street Fighter characters (Hugo and Poison, in particular) while many of the bosses have as well (Rolento, Abigail, Sodom) and both Cody and Guy have appeared in multiple Street Fighter roles. Even some characters from the sequels (Maki, Lucia) eventually made their way into Street Fighter. Also extremely curiously, Mike Haggar has never made an appearance as a playable character, even though he did so in Marvel vs Capcom 3 Ultimate. Why they didn't port him to Street Fighter IV's later updates is still a frustrating mystery to me.

Although they are significant in Street Fighter as playable characters, they also don't really contribute in any way to Street Fighter's story, however. In fact, in the General Story mode of Street Fighter IV, I'm pretty sure that not a single Final Fight character makes so much as an appearance, even. They're part of the same continuity, but somehow part of a completely parallel existence.

Final Fight was also caught up in the console wars between Nintendo and Sega of the 16-bit generation. As I said above, Final Fight got a SNES exclusive port, although it had to make significant sacrifices from the arcade version to be ported to the SNES. While it was successful as a seller on the platform, I suspect most gamers were disappointed in it. Sega, seeing an opportunity here, took their Golden Axe engine and made an urban Final Fight copycat game which was exclusive to their console, the Sega Genesis, called Streets of Rage. While graphically it doesn't really compare to Final Fight, in most other respects, it is a better game than the SNES port, if not the arcade version, of Final Fight.

You'll notice that many fighting games from the early years followed exactly the same tropes as Final Fight and other beat em ups. Art of Fighting has the exact same plot. Fatal Fury has Geese knocked off of a skyscraper, just like Belger, the boss from Final Fight. Street Fighter Alpha 2 foregoes the fighting championship, and has characters moving around not unlike a beat em up in nature. 

Final Fight 2 and 3 were SNES exclusives, not arcade games, and "fixed" a number of issues that the SNES Final Fight game had had, but Sega was not resting on their laurels either, and Streets of Rage 2 and 3 are considered by many fans to be the absolute best games in the beat em up genre; Streets of Rage 2 in particular. (3 is often seen as good, but offering little than 2 didn't already offer.) In fact, the game is often considered one of the best video games of all time period, which is really saying something. It continues more of the cross pollination that was happening with fighting games by introducing more moves and more variety for playable characters, something directly inspired by Street Fighter II and its success. One designer even said that having the same kind of combo rhythm as Street Fighter II was a key design attribute that they wanted to corner. Streets of Rage 2 also had greatly improved graphics over its predecessor, comparable to Street Fighter II's in most respects. In addition to this, Streets of Rage had what was considered at the time--and maybe even still--one of the greatest original soundtracks ever bundled with a video game. (Personally I still greatly prefer Star Wars the Old Republic's.)

It's curious to me that Capcom's big rival in the beat em up was Sega, while their big rival in the fighting game was SNK. SNK also had a Final Fight-esque beat em up called Burning Fight, which is capable enough, but which lacks a lot of the character that made Final Fight or Streets of Rage so memorable. Still, it was relatively successful in Japanese arcades, at least, when launched in 1991. I'm a little surprised that a King of Fighters '94 team wasn't made of the three selectable characters, to stand next to the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters. Not that the USA Sports Team doesn't have its fans, but I think this would have been a better use of that team's slot.

Burning Fight has two American policemen from NYC come to Japan in pursuit of a Yakuza criminal gang that was causing trouble at home. They meet up with a Japanese detective and the three of them are the selectable characters. Among other things, if they had used these characters, King of Fighters would have it's own character named Ryu, although he would have looked and probably moved much more like Guy.

Game Feature: King of Fighters '98

I haven't done a game feature post in quite a while, and the obvious one to do that I haven't yet is King of Fighters '98. For many, many years, the KOF was done on the same MVS hardware, and even when it briefly migrated to the Atomiswave hardware, it was still done with the same graphics. Only when we get to King of Fighters XII and XIII do we actually get improved graphics and only when when we move to KOF XIV and XV (out February) do we get fully 3-D graphics (although still with traditional 2-D play.) All of the Orochi Saga games can be "summed up" if you will in King of Fighters '98, and all of the NESTS saga games can be summed up with King of Fighters 2002. If you're not actually interested in playing the "story" of the games, you can get all of the action you want from the entire saga in the "summary" games; King of Fighters '98 has everything you can get in any Orochi Saga game, and then some. This is especially true for the "Ultimate Match" version, which added all of the (very few) characters who had appeared in an Orochi Saga game but hadn't yet appeared in '98, like the remaining bosses, Eiji Kisaragi, and a handful of others.

I have a handful of versions of this game, although to be fair, only the Ultimate Match is one that I'd ever feel compelled to come back to at this point. The first version I got was when I got my old Dreamcast, and it had the odd title of King of Fighters Dream Match 1999. I suppose SNK were a little self-conscious at feeling out of date with the title, which I suppose is a fair problem. For the PS2, I have the Ultimate Match version of the game, which also includes the original Neo Geo version of the game. And finally, I have the Neo Geo version of the game also on the Orochi Saga compilation for the PS2. There is one more final update, called Final Version, or something like that, which is what was available on Steam or now Good Old Games. It's relatively cheap, but it doesn't add anything new to Ultimate Match, just a few subtle tweaks to gameplay.

The whole point of '98 was to be a "Dream Match", i.e., there's no story to it, but it brings back all of the "greatest hits" of the Orochi Saga in one game, including teams that only made an appearance in the first game, like the USA Sports Team, or the Boss team of 96, or creating new teams out of "retired" master characters like Heidern or Saisyu Kusanagi and Takuma Sakazaki, etc. Although from a story perspective, Rugal was only the boss of the first two games, and was therefore just the taste of things to come, the developers also wisely realized that in most respects he was the most iconic King of Fighters boss, and brought him back as the boss of this game as well. Of course, for Ultimate Match, all of the bosses of the Orochi Saga made reappearances, even the mid-bosses like Riot of the Blood Leona, etc. Of course, the reality is that most of those bosses were kind of underwhelming anyway. Rugal was so good that they even brought him back for the next dream match in 2002, ignoring all of the NESTS saga bosses. In both cases, he was the supered out "Omega Rugal", complete with stripper shirt and everything.

A good case can be made that especially once 2002 got "remade" as Unlimited Match, a kind of upgrade very similar to the Ultimate Match upgrade to this game, that there was no longer any reason to play any King of Fighters game that had preceded it, unless you wanted to see the specific story cut scenes associated with one game, or something like that. I don't think that that's completely true; there are a number of things in particular that are unique to the Orochi Saga. Sometimes these are little things, like Terry Bogard's moveset, for instance, which is a bit different in the NESTS games, and other times its more in the vibe, presentation and "feel" of the game, and harder to put your finger on. 

While I can certainly see and actually probably agree with that perspective to some degree, I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to '98 over 2002 and in many ways still prefer it, especially in its Ultimate Match version. The game presents to you the two basic different "systems" that the prior King of Fighters games used; EX, which is similar to '94 and '95's manual charging of super movies, dashes, etc. and "Advanced" which was similar to '96 and '97s super stocks, rolls and other items. The Ultimate Match version also allows you to play an Ultimate Mode, where you can pick and choose elements from EX or Advanced, although honestly, I just prefer to use Advanced. Not surprisingly, it's the most like A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3, or the C-groove from the Capcom vs SNK games of the options presented, which is my favorite system.

You can play in teams, or you can play single player, which is more "Street Fighter" like in terms of how it plays. I usually prefer the latter, of course. The fact that there aren't any story endings means that team composition doesn't matter; the only endings are a bunch of joke animations from the characters during the credits.

The player select menus are, in my opinion, extraordinarily ugly, as are the character portraits. They are improved somewhat for the Ultimate Match, but the character portraits and end-match art/quotes are the same in every version. Shinkiro is the artist, who's normally quite a talented fella, but this is not his best work. That said, once you get playing, this matters very little. The Dreamcast version has the same menus as the Neo Geo or arcade, with the exception of course, of a very bare bones "text only" menu of console specific modes and options, which are all pretty basic. 

I've talked before about the shift to 3-D backgrounds that was happening right about at the turn of the millennium in these kinds of games, and it came for KOF'98 too. The Dreamcast version has the backgrounds redone in 3-D, although it's relatively low-res 3-D, and mostly just looks almost exactly the same as the 2-D backgrounds for most of them. (Oddly, the Osaka street scene outside of the SNK headquarters is an exception here; there are variants in the 2-D version that are not done in 3-D.) The Ultimate Match version gives us redone 3-D backgrounds, including more variants. In particular, it seems that the developers were very enamored this year of adding a bluish, washed out haze to make the backgrounds look like they take place early in the morning in the minutes right before the sun comes up but the light is still relatively strong. Almost every stage has a variant that looks like this. It also adds a bunch of new stages to the mix that hadn't yet ever been seen.

In fact, most of the stages are new to this game, even in the old Neo Geo version. A handful are from other games in the Orochi Saga series, like the '96 boss stage, or the Orochi boss stages, but most are not. In my personal opinion, this is a bit of a missed opportunity; the Ultimate Match didn't need new stages added when it could have brought forward the older stages from the games that had come before, redrawn if necessary. I think that there were some really beautiful stages that I miss not having in a game that I'm actually likely to still play anymore. The Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting team stages from '96 are in particular to be highlighted here. Sigh. In this game, stages are no longer associated with specific teams, except for the boss stages, and tend to come up randomly.

Curiously, the 3D stages, especially in the Dreamcast version, but even in the Ultimate Match version, are not necessarily better than the older 2D stages. Although in the case of most of them, it doesn't actually make much noticeable difference. The Japan Street set of stages are better in 2D. The Korea ones are noticeably different, but neither is better than the other, in my opinion. A few stages have slightly different lighting details between the 3D and 2D versions, which I think is very unusual. The characters themselves offer a smoothness indicator that can be modified, to give them a less pixelated appearance, so that they match the backgrounds a little better and don't look so old-school and clunky.

All in all, King of Fighters '98 is the best King of Fighters game, or at least it was when it came out, and remains so probably at least until 2002, although even then that's a question of opinion, not objectivity. In 1998 when it came out, it was side by side with Street Fighter Alpha 3, and that was probably the best game in the Street Fighter series up to that point. This was part of the genesis of the Capcom vs SNK series in the first place; with two of the best titles from the two most important series by each company out at the same time, it begged the question of what it would be like to have them really duking it out head to head. Although the Capcom vs SNK games are pretty good, I think that there's still definitely a kind of desire and demand to see this question answered more definitively still. And no, MUGEN doesn't really count.

But of the grade of games that precede the major graphical upgrades of the very late 00s and 10s years, King of Fighters '98 has to stand out as one of the best representatives, and one of the better games in the entire genre overall no matter how you slice it.

Alts

So, when I fired up Steam a month or so ago for the first time in several months and started playing around with USFIV again, one of the things that I finally broke down and did was figure out how to swap out some of the alternative character costumes with fan-made ones. EVERY character has at least one, if not multiple, alternate costumes that are super whack. Some of my favorite characters only had one or two costume that I even liked at all. So it was fun to rehabilitate the "style" of some of them by swapping out something else. Ken's bathrobe and cowboy outfits were probably the very first to go, for instance, but I've got lots of alternatives on lots of characters, with more waiting in the queue for me to get around to. Maybe. (I've already gone pretty deep on the bench with characters that I'm likely to play, for instance.) I also found another app that allows you to "turn off" certain elements of character costume models. So, for instance, Akuma's first alternative costume, which is pretty cool except for one thing; a gigantic bow made of super thick rope on his back, which looks insanely ridiculous. I took that off. Now that costume is... well, it's not necessarily great, but it doesn't offend me with its silliness anymore either.

So now I've started on a project of playing through all of the costumes. I'm doing vs CPU, and going through every color of every costume for a character, vs a random com character on a random stage, and then when I'm done, I'll play through the arcade mode with that character, and then move on to the next. This will take some time, and I'm not doing this for every character, just for "my" characters. I've done Ryu and Ken so far, and I've started Akuma. Evil Ryu and Oni are next, followed by Sagat and Sakura. We'll see if I still have mental stamina left to pursue this project after that, or if I need to walk away from it, but I do have lower tier characters that I still sometimes play beyond that. Probably nearly a dozen more. And then maybe another dozen after that that I don't really consider my characters, but which I sometimes play. And then at least another dozen after that of characters that I've never really dived into in USFIV, but which I have in other games like the Alpha series, or something, so I've always kinda wanted to.

I've talked before about it being important to think that the character you're playing is cool in some way. The alternate costume idea was a great one in that regard, because it could turn a mediocre or even poor design into a good one. Being able to mod them even further helped with this, because honestly, the designers costumes were sometimes really, really bad.

Even before we had 3D models where alternate costumes were easy to implement, a lot of home console ports did have color palette editors which did a little bit of the same thing, although not as well. Sometimes characters just changed their look and evolved from game to game to game. On the SNK side, Athena is famous for having a different outfit in every single King of Fighters game, and Kyo has a different outfit every single major series--so he's on his fourth now.

Anyways, it's just one more reminder that whomever that complete and total tool who tried to tell us that people didn't care about Magneto being in Marvel vs Capcom Infinity, because Magneto wasn't actually a character, he was just a mechanical function, is a complete moron. He's not a normal person. He's some kind of spergy, lizard simulacrum of a human, like Mark Zuckerberg. People like their characters because they're characters, and they identify with some aspect of them, and they want to see them represented in a way that they can identify with.

What's wrong with SFV?

I just finished again playing the General Story earlier today. I had a lot of costume customizations, and it had been a while, so it was reasonably fun to go through it again. It reminded me of a lot of reasons why SFV will never be one of the best games in the series, though. In fact, it seems like it's the odd numbered ones that have struggled the most, finding cult followings among the super competitive set, maybe, but otherwise being rather unremarkable in their performance in the marketplace. This assumes for the sake of argument that the "zero/alpha" sub-series is an even number, of course.

A few technical things first. Why the devil are load times sooooOOOoooo bad on the PS4? The game is native to that console, fer cryin' out loud. I don't know if its better or not on a good gaming PC with the Steam version, but the load times for SFV on the PS4 are embarrassingly bad. Just absolutely terrible. Worst in the series. SFA2 on the SNES was better.

I deleted the from my PS4 for months and then redownloaded it again. For some reason, since I've gotten it back, I've had a hard time staying logged into the server for more than about half an hour or so before I get booted and have to get back on it. And for some extremely stupid and inexplicable reason, the game wants you to be online even in totally single player experiences. Getting booted out of the general story mode because you lost your connection to the Capcom server is beyond stupid and really, really annoying. I NEVER play any online modes; if I'm not playing a story mode, I'm playing arcade. I should never EVER have to connect to the server unless I'm browsing the DLCs. This doesn't happen with any other game, it doesn't happen when I'm streaming movies, or using other devices, etc. To be fair, I do occasionally (although much less often than in SFV) get have hiccups in our video conferencing software at work too, though. I can't completely and totally rule out that my own internet service is causing the problem, although the likelihood of that being the case is extremely low since everything else works like a charm. Even so... why do I even need to be online at all?

The story mode is also pretty embarrassing, although I admit to liking some aspects of it. The plot, though... gah. Who wrote this, a fifth grader? And the dialog... Look, I know it's probably translated directly from the Japanese, but why do Japanese anime and other storytelling formats always tend to sound like a bunch of pretentious blowhards reading out of context fortune cookies at each other in an attempt to sound like somebody has some depth to them? The "comic relief" such as it is, is so cringy that it makes me feel like I need to go to the gym just to recover from the beta that's all over it. The live-action Street Fighter movie with Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made that got a wide release, but that comes across as a masterpiece of craftsmanship compared to this story mode storytelling.

SFV is also a shockingly ugly game most of the time, although it isn't consistently so; sometimes it actually looks really good. Sometimes the ugly is technical, like the incredibly plastic looking models, and the really bad clipping and crazy spastic behavior of hair and clothes. But sometimes its just the art design. Somebody really hated Ken and Akuma, for instance, and went out of their way to make them look absolutely retarded. Meanwhile, Ryu and (most alternates of) Chun-Li look quite good. The "hot Ryu" redesign is so good that it is up there with the Mark of the Wolves Terry Bogard as a kind of "this should have been his design in the first place" kind of redesign. Recent DLC character Akira looks tremendously good. Alex looks like he has a broken leg in his normal standing stance. It's really kind of all over the map, but when you compare SFV to some of its PS4 generation contemporaries like Fighting EX Layer, King of Fighters XIV, SNK Heroines, Tekken 7, etc. it really stands out as a mostly tremendously ugly game.

Character selection and prominence was quite weird. Did Karin go and become a fan favorite sometime when I wasn't looking? She was in one game as a totally forgettable rival; she is to Sakura what Ken is to Ryu, except that Sakura isn't as iconic as Ryu and she doesn't really need a Ken. Even the UDON folks completely ignored her other than an off-hand reference that Sakura's friend from school makes. And they LOVED pulling obscure characters out and finding ways to use them for something. There are plenty of fan favorites and original world warriors that don't show up, yet we also get a lot of kind of obscure and odd characters. Even very prominent characters from the last game don't show up except as cameos. Really? No Crimson Vyper? But we get Seth come back as a girl? Seth the boss that nobody really liked, and who was one of the weakest parts of SFIV? (To be fair, not very many of the SFIV original characters are very good. Rufus? El Fuerte? Somebody should have been fired over those two.)

I will say that at least at this point in the game's lifecycle, the gameplay itself is pretty solid. Not the most exciting SF gameplay I've ever seen, but it's not overly simplistic, it's not overly spastic, and its not overly technical. It does kind of hit a sweet spot that the best Alpha and SFIV iterations did. But given that almost everything else about this game is mediocre, disappointing, or otherwise fails to live up to the promise that it should and could have, and those other games with equally compelling gameplay are still around and can be played quite easily, it's a little weird to expect us to get very excited about this title still.