Game feature: Ultra Street Fighter IV

Now that I've had it for about six months--I didn't buy any version of SF4 until the Ultra version came out on Steam--it's past time that I did a game feature for it.  After all, it very quickly rocketed to the top of my preferences in the genre, to the point where I literally hardly play anything else in the genre anymore at all if I can't play this one.  I still mean to get more involved in King of Fighters XIII, but since I have to pick teams of three rather than focusing on one character at a time, as I prefer (and as most other KOF titles have allowed you to do if you chose, although it wasn't ever the default manner of play) it's unlikely to supplant my USF4 love anytime soon.

To me it still feels odd to play this on a non-console platform.  In fact, I don't have a decent laptop to play games on either, so it's loaded on my desktop.  I can't even plug this into my big ole 60" TV and watch the fights happen writ large with my sound bar and sub-woofer on; at least not until I decide to upgrade my older laptop to one with better graphics capability so that I can play Steam games on it.  That's the first thing that, to me at least, is odd.  But putting that aside, what do I think of the game?  Like I said, it's so good, that it basically invalidates the rest of the genre to me.  I almost don't have any interest in playing older games anymore.  It's that good.  It's clearly the best game in the Street Fighter series, and for my money, the best game in the genre overall.  I say this as a person who, for the last several years, had started to prefer King of Fighters games to Street Fighter games overall due to their variety and the quality of their later entries compared to the latest I had from Street Fighter.

Maybe I should take a small step back and reflect.  "Back in the day;" i.e., the mid-90s, I was a Street Fighter fan who played on occasion, but wasn't really into any of the SNK games at all.  It was more fair to say that I was kinda sorta vaguely aware of them rather than anything more intimate.  Of course, back then, we were still talking about plunking quarters into arcade machines.  There weren't even decent home conversions for any console that was available at this time; there were "decent" conversions to the PS1 and occasionally even the SNES for older games, but that was about it.  As my own console ownership improved to a PS1, a Dreamcast, and years later (although still very belatedly) to an Xbox and a PS2, I was finally able to start getting good conversions of more games.  I didn't play SF2 much anymore by this point; my favorite Capcom games were Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  To me, the Alpha series was where the Street Fighter series peaked, and the Street Fighter 3 series didn't do much more me at all.  In fact, I didn't like a number of aspects of it, including some of the gameplay, some of the character selection, and I thought that the music actively annoyed me almost all of the time, and the boss was really stupid.

Because Street Fighter itself as a title started to feel stuck in the late 90s--either they weren't making updates at all for much of the time since then, or they were making updates that I didn't much like, it wasn't until this point that I started migrating more towards SNK games and really belatedly rediscovered the King of Fighters and Fatal Fury series.  For a while; heck; even a year ago--I probably would have told you that my favorite games in the genre were the final PS2 editions of King of Fighters '98 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, while Capcom would come in, probably third and fourth respectively with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  I remember years ago thinking that I'd love to see a game come out that used 3-D graphics to get rid of the need for hand-drawn and animated sprites, but which resurrected a 2-D Street Fighter-esque game-play, and that I'd really want them to be Street Fighter characters, frankly.  Of course, shortly after having that dream or wish; SF4 was announced, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Of course, I didn't get it for a long time, because I lacked the hardware to play it, and maybe that's a good thing.  Other than a small bit of playing around here and there and seeing a few things on youtube, I wasn't really exposed to the game until it was extremely refined; Ultra Street Fighter IV has a broad and deep character selection, finely balanced game-play, a lot of the unique gameplay elements that the IV brings to the greater series have been refined, and in general most of the "kinks", if you will, of the game are fixed.  I probably enjoy it more because I never had to "suffer" through older versions of the game.

Street Fighter IV takes place after Street Fighter II, and prior to Street Fighter III, which it largely ignores completely, other than to take the more popular characters from that ill-fated game and integrate some of them.  SIN is the new villainous organization, which is characterized as a division of Shadaloo (Shadaloo Intimidation Network) focused on developing weapons and other new technology.  It has a feel very similar--in terms of story--to NESTS from King of Fighters of about 15 years or so ago, which isn't a bad thing.  Seth, the boss, is some kind of synthetic human grown as a replacement body for Bison which acquired sentience and autonomy following the fall of Shadaloo in Street Fighter II.

There are a few nods to SFIII in terms of game-play, most notably in the fact that you must select your Ultra move rather than simply being able to do them all.  Ultra Street Fighter IV allows you to do either of the two Ultra moves if you select Ultra Combo Double, but the cost for this flexibility is that they do less damage.  Each character also has only one Super Combo (with a few odd exceptions).  Curiously, this makes the game feel more old school, however--King of Fighters could learn a lesson or two in terms of stripping down and focusing on core gameplay rather than on highly technical gameplay with lots of moves, many of which will be difficult to pull off.  Not that some SFIV moves aren't difficult to pull off; charge-characters and grapplers are notoriously difficult with a regular USB control pad, for instance, but there's still a feel that this almost ignored the Alpha games and SFIII entirely and is really a sequel to SFII instead.  This isn't a bad thing, really.

Super Combos are done much as they always have been; you gain energy on a super combo bar by landing hits or being hit.  Ultra Combos on the other hand, only get charged up when you take damage.  If you play too well, you won't actually ever get the opportunity to use an Ultra combo.

There's a few other neat additions, like Focus Attacks which make you vulnerable for a short time, and might actually end up taking energy from your own bar if you don't play it right, but which in return are armor breakers that knock your opponent down and give you an opportunity, if you're quick, to get in a super or ultra combo without any chance of it being blocked.  Playing on Steam also means that you have access to online matches that run pretty smoothly; you can upload your matches directly to youtube from your game, and more.  But really; the appeal of SFIV, in any iteration but especially this one, is the ability to play very classic (yet updated and modern feeling) Street Fighter gameplay with beautiful presentation in terms of the characters, the rest of the graphics, the stages, etc.  It even has decent voice-acting, with both Japanese and American/English voice actors (you can toggle in the settings which you prefer to have and you can even toggle per character, just in case you want your Japanese characters to speak Japanese instead of English in game.)  And it also advances the mythology significantly.

By this I mean that certain things in the Street Fighter mythos are actually changed.  Whereas before we were told that M. Bison was killed when Akuma did a Shun Goku Satsu on him at the end of SFII, well---clearly he wasn't, because he appears in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Ryu and Ken's master was murdered by Akuma at about the same time-frame as SF1, well---clearly he wasn't either, because Gouken makes his first appearance in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Akuma was holding back and Shin Akuma; the same character with a slightly different set of moves, was him fighting at his potential, we now get a totally new version of the character with new graphics, new moves and even a new name: Oni, who is the true potential of Akuma.  There's even some confusing talk in some sources about Oni being a "dream" character (as Evil Ryu is); what would happen if Oni completely foreswore his humanity and became--basically--a demon, warped by the "dark Hado" or, the Dark Side of the Force... er, his Martial Art power source.  This, of course, is kind of silly, since Akuma is already representative of someone who foreswore his humanity in pursuit of power.  Whatever.  Because I like the shotokan characters (I guess that makes me a bit of a scrub) I don't mind having another option, and one that's significantly different, for that matter, from the others, and I don't mind the update to the mythos.  And I like the look of Oni quite a bit.

Another fun aspect of digitally rendered models (rather than hand-drawn sprites) is that you can alter the appearance of the characters quite dramatically by downloading costumes.  My purchase of Ultra Street Fighter IV came with all of the previously released costumes enabled and deployed, and then I also paid some money for the Vacation package of additional costumes.  I didn't buy the more recently released animal cosplay ones because I think the notion of spending money on costumes is lame, unless they're phenomenal and I'm really excited, plus I thought the idea of animal cosplay costumes was really dumb anyway.  Anyone who reads my blog knows that I get inordinately picky about the color palettes and whatnot in past games; here, I tend to find a costume and color combination that I really like, and I like that I have a lot of options available.  Some characters that I don't even necessarily much like the look of in their original costumes are really cool looking in alternate costumes, although of course, many alternate costumes are extraordinarily dumb.  I'm in particular not fond of some of the "really Japanese" costumes that fail their localization efforts; gigantic bows tied on the back of characters with gigantic ropes, and weird, billowy, semi-samurai-ish robes.  Eh; that's the price of variety.  For (almost) every character, there's at least one costume that I like.  For some, it's even the original.

The character selection is also really great.  Every single SF2 character is here, almost all of the SFA characters (I haven't lined up the rosters to systematically compare, but I think Sodom, Birdie, Juni and Juli are the only ones missing.  I think...) and about half of the SF3 characters (Dudley, Elena, Yun, Yang, Ibuki, and Makoto); certainly all of the ones that you'd care to see again.  There are also a number of all-new SF4 characters: Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Oni, Hakan, and Yuri.  There are, as always, too many shotokan characters: Ryu, Evil Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Oni, Dan, and even Gouken now, but they also all feel much more different from each other than they have in the past, so they don't feel too much like retreads of the same moves.

Street Fighter V

Holy crap, y'all!

http://www.streetfighter.com/us/sfv

2014 Summer Vacation DLC costume pack

Hard to image I'll find myself shelling out cash for DLC costumes going forward, but flush with excitement over the acquisition of USF4 in the first place, I sprung for the Summer Vacation costume pack.  For $20, you could get the entire set.  (The game itself costs $30 and includes all of the previous DLC costume packs.  The only costumes I'm missing are for the Ultra challengers if you have a Street Fighter x Tekken save game file.)

As is always the case, there are some pretty cool costumes, some that are kinda... "meh" and some that I can't stand.  All come in many colorful varieties, of course.  Here's what we've got, including some commentary.  Check out this link to see the actual images.

Cool costumes: Ryu, Ken, Abel, Honda, Zangief, Balrog, Sagat, Vega, Dhalsim, Guile (Doctrine Dark cosplay!!!), DeeJay, Dudley, Guy, Adon, Cody, Yun, Yang, Decapre, Poison, Rolento.  In fact, I think the Ryu, Guy, Dudley, Decapre, Yun, Yang, and possibly Rolento are my favorite costumes among those that they have available.

Meh costumes: Dan, Gouken (King Triton?  Weird enough to be too weird, but I admire their boldness), El Fuerte, Rufus, Abel, Bison, Gen, Blanka, Fei Long, Sakura, Rose, Chun-Li, Cammy, T. Hawk, Elena and Evil Ryu, Hakan, Hugo.

Dislike: Akuma, Seth, Crimson Viper, Makoto, Ibuki, Juri, Oni.

Some of them are just too Japanese, and globally, they just seem stupid (that's been the case for most of the DLC costume options, though--there are a few that are just two weird, too traditionally Japanese, for me to ever think that they look good.

Charge characters

I suppose I've forgotten how much time I spent practicing the fireball and dragon punch motions on a control pad when I first got Street Fighter 2 for the SNES.  It can't have been intuitive or automatic that I was able to transfer intellectual knowledge of the motion into actual implementation without some practice on an unfamiliar controller.

However, I have forgotten.  I have a vague memory of finding the motion difficult and doing it in Training Mode and elsewhere for quite a while before I got it down.  And then, once I had it down, I greatly preferred playing characters with Command style moves--as opposed to the other major alternative; charging characters, a la Guile.

Now, I liked Guile well enough in SF2.  Charge motions weren't that bad when it was merely Sonic Boom and Flash Kick.  Once super combos were added, however, charging characters became much more frustrating to me, if they had weird charging style super combo motions.  Realistically, of course, what I'd prefer is that the sonic boom were performed like a fireball, and the flash kick like a dragon punch with the kick instead of punch button.  The super and ultra combos could similarly be harmonized with a command style motion.  Or at least I'd be able to toggle to such a system.  Since Capcom is unlikely to offer customizeable commands for any characters, I've decided that I should probably try to learn the odd charge/delta motion of the Double Flash kick and Flash Explosion, and make Guile a part of my personal roster again.  This would also enable me to use other charge characters (like Chun-Li, for instance--or Vega, Honda, Blanka, etc.) instead of avoiding them, although the Sonic Hurricane is still an annoying motion to do on a control pad, and I'll probably most ignore it.

Part of the reason I continue to like this genre of games, long after foregoing most other video games, is the fact that I don't have to put much work into it, though.  I can sit down and play for an hour or so after months of not touching it, and have a reasonably good time.  So, the idea of learning a complicated and difficult move to expand my character roster may seem to be anathema, but I'm willing to give it a try and practice it for a while, largely because it will open up several new characters to me.  Plus, SF4 Guile, with some of his alternate "swat team" costumes, is just too cool to continue to ignore.

Target acquired...

Very belatedly, at least compared to the rest of the world, I just acquired some new titles.  Specifically, with the announcement of Ultra Street Fighter IV and its release on Steam, I realized that I 1) already have a Steam account, and 2) quite handily meet the system specs, now that I put my new graphics card in last year, and 3) could get King of Fighters XIII on Steam too.

So, with mere hours left until the pre-order expired (so I could get the extra 2014 Challengers costume pack--the rest of the DLC packs were already included) I got Ultra Street Fighter IV on Steam.  I got to play it for a few hours before promptly going out of town for nearly two weeks and just got back late last night.  So really... just today I've been playing it.  It cost $30.  I also, for $30 got King of Fighters XIII, although my first impression is that I can't figure out how to play any kind of decent Single character play, which is a major disappointment, since I pretty much always play all of the KOF games that way.  And I talked myself into buying the Summer Vacation complete costume pack for USF4, which will probably be the very last DLC that I'll be tempted to buy (unless they come up with one that actually adds characters to the game.)  By coincidence, while out of town, I got to also spend several hours playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with my brother-in-law for a while too.  Given the short time that I've had to play all of these titles, I'm giving only very early first impressions at this point.

Given that the game has been out in various slightly less evolved forms for a few years now, these first impressions are probably way too late to be of any interest to anyone but me.  But hey, it's my blog, and I'll talk about old news if I want to.

My initial impressions of the KOF title, the one I've played the least, is that it looks and feels pretty darn smooth.  If I can find a single player mode, it'll almost certainly be my favorite in the franchise, but if I can't, I'm not sure.  I do also appreciate the "back to basics" approach that the game sports.  The franchise is sometimes notorious for going off the rails into odd, overly technical gameplay that isn't likely to appeal to more casual fans like me (casual in the sense that I'm not really a very good technical player, that is.)

UMvC3, of course, also doesn't offer a single player mode (one of the several reasons that I've only been casual about this franchise... even relative to others in the genre.)  That said, the number of characters has been pared down, and most of the really silly ones have been eliminated (a few exceptions remain.)  I find myself especially happy to play the Marvel characters, whereas in its predecessor, I played a fair mix of Marvel and Capcom characters.  I also find that that makes the game feel just a tad more serious, when you're much less likely to see an awful lot of a "fighting attorney" or weird Megaman characters.  Some of the new additions, such as Thor, Hawkeye and others are a delightful addition to the game, and most of the costume colors end up being interesting Easter eggs, for those interested in exploring them.  I largely found that I was good with many of the same characters I had been good at in MvC2, although it wasn't as simple as picking up right where I left off.

One odd note: Mike Haggar makes his triumphant return to a Capcom game (and his first that I know of in a fighting game) here as well.  Although he'd be a better fit for a Street Fighter title, and because the character models already obviously exist, I'm a little bit surprised and disappointed that he wasn't added to the Ultra expansion to SF4.  Maybe the developers thought he treaded too much on Zangief's toes?

I've spent most of my time, however, with Ultra Street Fighter IV, and probably will continue to do so.  This game almost certainly will have a place at the very top of my list of best games in the genre.  Not only does it look and sound absolutely great, but it's got great back to basics gameplay, great balance, smooth play, great character selection, and basically has everything I could ever possibly want in a SF game.  SFA3 was my favorite in the series previously to this, as it had the best gameplay and the best presentation and the best character selection, but there were a few things that CvS2 did better.  USF4 beats them both in all possible metrics.

One interesting side effect of the presentation is that, while the characters do have their classic themes remixed for a modern sounding soundtrack (as well as new themes for the new characters) you don't actually hear them very often.  The BGM that normally plays is the one associated with the stage that you're on instead, which means that you don't get to hear much of the classic SF2 sounds updated for the 2010s.

I'm trying to think if there's anyone missing from the roster that I think should be on it, and I'm coming up blank.  Other than Mike Hagger, which I already mentioned, but that's more of a theoretical desire--I don't actually like playing grapplers all that much anyway.  All of the SF2 roster is here.  Most of the SFA3 roster.  Frankly, most of the SF3: Third Strike roster makes the cut by the time we get to the Ultra update.  There's a handful of new characters that are unique to SF4.  Most of them aren't that wonderful, in my opinion.  Perhaps the most interesting are, sadly, yet again shotokan variants; Gouken: Ryu and Ken's old master (who's supposed to be dead, but clearly isn't after all) and Oni, which is a new variant on the Shin Akuma idea; a more pumped up version of Akuma with a more variant movelist.  Decapre is a Cammy variant (so therefore, I suppose, steps on the toes of the Juli and Juni space).  I haven't really experimented much with El Fuerte, Rufus, Abel, Crimson Viper, Hakan, Seth, Poison or Juri--the other characters who are unique to the SF4 franchise.  I suspect only a few of them will stand the test to find themselves even half a memorable as the basic 12 characters of the original SF2 game (8 playable and 4 bosses.)

Anyway, no doubt I'll be posting a bit more about these games (especially USF4) over the next several weeks.  Needless to say, my somewhat slumbering love of the genre has lurched back to life now that I've acquired some new toys to play with...

Essay No. 3: On Continuity and Canon

(What happened to Essay No. 2 you may ask?  Nothing.  It was just kind of obsolete, so rather than port it from my old website, I just dropped it.  I might add it back in with new formatting... maybe.  But probably not.)

Because I think these types of games, their characters and their settings represent a foreign (namely, Japanese) interpretation of the modern superhero story line, I often make comparisons to superhero comic books. If you think of Ryu, Terry or Kyo as analogs to the X-men, or Spiderman, then they kinda work, and if you think of Rugal or Bison as Magneto or Dr. Doom, you can see striking and obvious parallels. If you think of the plot to take over the world by NESTS from King of Fighters '99 through King of Fighters 2001 by holding a martial arts tournament, gathering data from how the champions fight, and channeling that data into a clone army, you can easily see what I'm talking about in terms of "comic book" plots too. Heck, Heidern serves for the King of Fighters games (and Chun Li and Charlie/Guile's bosses for the Street Fighter games) almost like S.H.I.E.L.D.

However, I specifically want to talk about one issue and discuss it a little bit in relation to my story, and that is continuity and canon. Comic book fans the world over were excited when Sam Raimi filmed the first Spiderman movie with Toby MacGuire and Co., yet nobody expected it to be a faithful reproduction of the origin of Spiderman as originally written by Stan Lee in the early 1960s. For one thing, the media was completely different. For another, the audience was considerably more sophisticated. And for another, there've been too many changes in the world over the last forty years for that to still be even a little bit credible.

So what did Raimi do? He retold the story. The spider that bit Peter Parker wasn't radioactive, it was the result of genetic manipulation by Norm Osborn. Parker's look and powers changes slightly; Osborn changed even more significantly (the Halloweenish original Green Goblin wouldn't look anything other than extremely cheesy in a big budget action movie meant for a general audience, after all) and many of the details of the origin of Spiderman story, as well as the relationship between Spiderman and the Green Goblin were changed fairly significantly.

This of course, wasn't the first time this happened. Marvel Comics a few years back kicked off an extremely popular line of comics called the Ultimate comics where popular characters and series were "rebooted" and restarted, the stories retold and the character redesigned, with a more modern and sophisticated audience in mind, and without all the baggage of forty years of accumulated back story. There are some very significant differences between "regular" Spiderman and "ultimate" Spiderman, which in turn are quite different from "movie" Spiderman. If you keep in mind that there are at least five animated series of Spiderman, each also with their own separate "canon" of continuity and details of how the stories were told and the characters developed, you can see that some major changes were made to accommodate different media and different audiences.

What does that have to do with me and this story? Well, frankly, I'm doing the same thing. I'm referencing the "original" canon when it works for me, I'm even giving a nod here and there to the UDON comic books, because they had some great ideas, but I'm retelling these stories my way to make it work for me. I have a few more significant challenges than most others who've tried to write fan fictions about these games; I'm combining incompatible plot lines from several different games with well over a hundred potential characters, and setting a goal of meeting as many of those characters as reasonably possible without it feeling forced or fake. This means, of course, that I'm going to have to make a fair number of changes to plot points as well as character description and development.

One way in which this will happen is in the arena of romantic entanglements. Maybe I'm just a bit of a softie, but a good romantic relationship makes any story better. Sadly, most of the interesting prospects from SNK at least are already tied up with other characters. This is problematic; for many reasons, cross-source material pairings are more interesting than in-game pairings. I've also decided to make some rather major consolidations and changes to, again, further facilitate the mingling of various story lines. With three story lines from King of Fighters to contend with, one from Fatal Fury, a few from Street Fighter and even some nods towards Darkstalkers, anything else would be a confused mess. If you don't like to see established video game canon changed like this, I can only suggest that you avoid this story, then, and read the paragraphs above; my changes aren't any more significant than having Spiderman date Shadowcat from the X-men, for example. To make the story tell-able, I had to make changes, and I'm creating this note specifically to justify them to the fans.

On a slightly less serious note, exactly what stories am I retelling, and which stories are being relegated to the background? That's a good question.

I'm going to assume for the time being that the plots of the original Street Fighter and Fatal Fury video games happened more or less exactly as described, in the "distant" (i.e., at least a year or two ago) past, while the events of the Street Fighter Alpha series and the original Rugal headed King of Fighters games ('94 and '95) happened in the very recent past (i.e., just a month or two tops before the stories start.) Geese Howard is missing and presumed dead (cf. the Fatal Fury ending), as is M. Bison after the explosion of his Shadowloo headquarters in Thailand (cf. Cammy, Chun Li, Charlie, Ken, Sagat, Ryu and Sakura's endings from Street Fighter Alpha 3) and even Rugal is presumed dead after the crash of the Black Noah (cf. Kyo's team ending for King of Fighters '95.)

The story lines that I intend to weave together, with a fair amount of changes to fit them all together, are:

1. The later Fatal Fury games (although these stories tend to repeat themselves over and over again; Geese falls from his tower no less than three times before finally being declared "officially" dead, so the Fatal Fury story lines are an amalgam of Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury. The other two Real Bout titles are "dream matches."
2. The "NESTS" story line from mid-era King of Fighters games.
3. The "Sacred Treasures" story line from current King of Fighters games (although granted; since the resolution isn't yet out, this story line is a bit confused at the moment. When King of Fighters XII is released, hopefully it will make more sense. Of course, by then, it'll no doubt invalidate what I've written. NOTE: Since this is an Orochi based story line, I'm dropping the original Orochi story line and telling this one instead. It could feature characters from the Original Orochi story line re-imagined here (i.e., Leopold Goenitz and possibly others. But not the New Faces team; I think those guys are incredibly cheesy.)
4. The Street Fighter 2 story line.
5. Possibly a few ideas from the Street Fighter III, Final Fight or Darkstalkers story lines as well.

As you can hopefully see, this is a bewildering tangle to try and unwind and remake into anything that's coherent or interesting, so a little patience and forbearance if you see changes that are obviously "wrong" from the canon is requested here.

Essay No. 1: On the Nature of Setting

What does it take to adapt the actual, modern, real world to make room for games like Street Fighter, Fatal Fury or King of Fighters to actually exist? This essay attempts to analyze some of the things that are necessary for them to all fit together.

The first goal is to mostly minimize the changes. There's no reason to make very big, sweeping changes to the "real world" setting if I'm not forced to. At the same time, though, some changes, some of them actually fairly broad and sweeping, do certainly facilitate the genre. But I'm going to try to be as conservative as possible. I'm also going to point to actual in-game situations or scenarios to justify changes. Overall, though, the changes aren't too big a deal; no more than is necessary to incorporate superheroes into the modern world, as Marvel and DC Comics have done, for instance. Anyway, here's a list, with discussion:

• Very few of the characters look Asian, despite the fact that many of them are. Large, round eyes, fairly light brown hair, and relatively white skin are all very common. A lot of this can be attributed to art style, but not all of it; characters like Karin Kanzuki or Benimaru Nikaido are clearly born and raised Japanese, yet have curly blond hair, blue eyes, and other hallmarks that point to a classic Caucasian; even Nordic, physical type. Iori Yagami is similar; with his bright red hair, for instance. The best explanation for this is simple: the fictional world of superhero martial arts games (and many anime too, for that matter) is a much more racially cosmopolitan and mixed society than we currently have. If so, it's totally possible for a Japanese born and bred girl like Karin to be blond, blue-eyed and Caucasian in features, and not attract too much undue notice. Many of the other Asian characters are also at least partially Caucasian in their features too, I'd think, if the high frequency of Caucasian coloration and physical features seen in character artwork is any guide.

• Along those same lines, there are also physical types that we currently don't have. Of course, it's always possible that a girl with blue or purple hair or eyes is wearing a wig, dye, contacts, etc., but I think it's pretty implicit in the characterizations that that's not really what's going on. Some variations that are rare in the world at large, but not too uncommon in games include purple/lavender hair, green or greenish hair, blue hair, and a type of towhead coloration that is literally white or silver, but on young people. If the default colors for the characters isn't enough to convince you, check out some of the alternate colors for some real wildness. Or just look at characters like Blanka. It's possible that the chi that powers these metahumans also kinda evolves or mutates them sometimes, causing new physical times to spontaneously arise, but I don't know that it's strictly necessary to say anything like that.

• Governments around the world seem to be more lax and hands-off than in the real world, for the most part. Characters don't think twice about traveling around the world, often penniless, to participate in martial arts tournaments. Not only are borders not that open in the real world, but martial arts tournaments of the type being held in these games are generally illegal in almost any country in the world today. These tournaments aren't usually taking place in controlled environments either if the stages are any guide; in front of famous landmarks, in the middle of the street, in restaurants and bars, or in the more conventionial boxing ring type of environment all seem to feature, and apparently governments are not cracking down on these activities--some of them are even very official and formal and broadcast around the world like the Olympics, i.e. King of Fighters of the Orochi time-period. Apparently, the governments are also unperturbed by the fact that minors participate in these tournaments from time to time; there are plenty of teenage characters, and even a few like Bao seem to be pre-teens. Another example of laid-back governance is the fact that Southtown can be literally taken over by a criminal syndicate, and seriously talk of seceding from whatever nation it belongs to (presumably the U.S.?) which in the real world are both quite impossible. Criminal organizations aren't just like the Mafia; they can actually set up small rogue nation-states, and do so relatively unopposed by the rest of the world, i.e ., Shadaloo in the Golden Triangle and Brazil.

• Along with the rather hands-off government, a lot of the real-world conflict that makes travel to many areas of the world dangerous for some people seems to be completely glossed over. My preference to resolve this conflict with the real world is that almost all of the world's governments are small, and relatively centralized. If you imagine all of the world running more or less like the American West of the later 1800's; territorial governors manning vast stretches of land with a skeleton crew bureaucracy, then it works. Have all of the world's nations hand over a fair amount of their sovereignty to a world governing body helps too; imagine if all the world belonged to an organization somewhat similar to the E.U., for instance, and you've got the right idea. For a story, I don't think this needs to really be dwelt on, though--government interference can simply fade into the background, i.e., the government doesn't really actually ever make an appearance except as a plot device.

• The final point that needs some addressing is the question of--if we have all these superhuman warriors running around, what changes does that have on society and history? And this one, more than any other, I want to gloss over without changing the real world any more than necessary. So, first of all, they have had an impact on history; but it's the same impact other famous warriors and whatnot have had. In other words, historical figures like Alexander the Great, Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, etc. most probably were metahumans. Legendary figures like Hercules, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, etc. are almost certainly all based on metahuman prototypes as well. But, they've always been very rare; one that really has the ability to change world history doesn't even come along once every few hundred years.

• However, given the cast of characters in even one company's roster (say, SNK) to say nothing of combining them (adding in Capcom, for instance) makes you wonder about that; there are over 100 characters in the King of Fighters series alone, about fifty or so in the Street Fighter games, and many more if you start adding in other series that have popped up over the years and are clearly related, such as Rival Schools, Final Fight, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, etc., then we've got a lot of characters, and there's no indication that these characters are so unique that there aren't many more in the setting that simply haven't been in the games yet. One way around this is that the proliferation of some modern technology has accelerated the growth of these techniques. With fast, safe and easy global travel, finding a martial arts master to teach you has never been easier. With the sharing of techniques and knowledge over the Internet, or by global post, even, the spread has been even faster. Many characters, such as Shadaloo's Dolls, or the Ikari Warriors, or the N.E.S.T.S. agents, literally have had their powers scientifically and/or genetically engineered for them. Populations themselves are much higher around the globe; why not just assume there's been a sharp rise in the numbers of metahumans over the last generation or two? Is this sharp rise explained by all the factors I just listed? I don't know, but I actually think it's intriguing to say that no, it's not. Something else is going on too, but what could it be exactly? Is Mother Destiny stepping in and preparing the world for something big that's coming; spinning out more potential heroes than normal? Hmmm...