SF Story

I had to uninstall SFV from the PS4 to make room for some games my daughter got, which is fine. I've been playing a bunch of other stuff anyway (Star Wars: The Old Republic, mostly) and haven't really cared too much about Street Fighter lately, although because I love them and always have, I'll come back at some point. And I do want to pick up the Season 5 stuff eventually. The remainder of the new characters have been announced, and while I'm not really all that excited about any of them (except, curiously, I kinda want to see what they do with Oro), it's Street Fighter. How can I not eventually get around to it? That's sort of like saying that I won't eventually get around to watching a Star Wars movie, even though Star Wars movies suck nowadays and are obviously made by people who hate me and spite me on principle. 

Anyway, what I'd like to talk about is the metastory of the Street Fighter franchise. It's a little hard to figure out, because the game treats everyone's endings as if they were canon; you have to sift through them, see how they connect, look for patterns, and even then, go find statements, interviews and whatnot from Capcom that helps clear it up. But let me do my best to lay out the chronology of the Street Fighter story, which I think takes place over the course of about a dozen years. We're told in biographical stuff what Ryu's birthday is, but I don't think we're meant to "believe" that exactly; rather, I think that like Marvel superheroes, there's a sliding scale. I.e., time doesn't  move as quickly in game as it does in real life. If Ryu was meant to be 23 when Street Fighter was first released back in 1987, which was 34 years ago now, he's not meant to be pushing 60 years old now. Plus, the games have not been released chronologically; the game that's the "most recent" in terms of in-game chronology is Street Fighter III: Third Strike. It was released in 1999, and given that that's about 12 years after the original Street Fighter, that was probably more or less OK when it was released. But now even that was over twenty years ago, and we're still getting new Street Fighter content. In none of it does Ryu look over mid-30s in age. 

Anyway, like I said, we know for sure that Ryu was supposed to be 23 when Street Fighter came out in 1987. Let's divorce that age from the year, and just talk about the chronology of the series from that anchor point of Ryu's age in the first game. We'll call that Year 23 since that was Ryu's age. It's the first thing that happened in the Street Fighter chronology. My advancement is somewhat arbitrary; there's only a handful of anchor points that are official, like Capcom stating outright that two years takes place betwen Street Fighter Alpha 1/2 and Alpha 3, the general order of the subseries, and dead reckoning by estimating how old characters like, say, Mel are based on their size (I've had four kids, and my wife has babysitted a great deal more than that. I'm pretty good at estimating kids' ages.)

• Year 23: Street Fighter. There's no mention of Shadaloo or any of the supervillainous organizations; there's just Sagat who's a martial arts champion and all-around mean guy. Ryu and Ken, feeling that their training has advanced to the point where they can consider themselves "graduates" want to go out and test their skills in the world, so they enter the tournament. Ryu wins, Sagat is defeated, etc. 
• Year 24: Street Fighter Alpha and Alpha 2. Although not released until 1995; eight years after Street Fighter and four years after Street Fighter II basically invented the fighting game genre as we know it, this is the next one from an in-game chronology, and takes place not too long after Street Fighter. I'm rounding it up to a year, but it's feasible that it takes place even considerably sooner than that; maybe even only a few months at most after the first game. 1996's Street Fighter Alpha 2 isn't actually a sequel to this game, rather it's a rewrite; Alpha can be considered almost a first draft that was perfected in Alpha 2. Ryu comes home from the tournament he won to find that his master's brother, Akuma, has murdered his master. There's other stuff going on too; Shadaloo and Bison are introduced. Of course, they were actually introduced in 1991's Street Fighter, but this is their first appearance in the in-game chronology. Curiously, while Shadaloo was played up as a kind of gangster enterprise in Street Fighter II, here they're shown more like a rogue state almost; a kind of supervillainic organization that is directly analogous and in fact almost identical in scope and scale to HYDRA as shown in the Captain America movies, or Cobra Command from the old GI Joe stuff. The Alpha series has a lot of Final Fight characters in it, although they make their biggest bunch of appearances in the next game. I'm not exactly sure when the Final Fight's are supposed to take place, but I think it's pretty clear that they take place before Street Fighter Alpha 3. I tend to think it likely that they are in this range between Year 23 and Year 25 or so.
• Year 26: Street Fighter Alpha 3. One of the few anchor points we have in the chronology is that Capcom have told us that two years takes place between Alpha 1 and 2 (which, again, was the same storypoint, just perfected in a better version of the game) and Alpha 3. Alpha 3 was not another rewrite of Alpha 1, but a genuine sequel. Capcom have retconned a few things; Ryu now didn't actually beat Sagat, he actually lost to him, but then he drew on the Dark Side of the Force to sucker punch Sagat after already losing and scar Sagat, for instance. Ryu now seems more concerned with figuring out his fatalistic relationship with the Dark Side of the Force than anything else. Ken meets Eliza in this game. Or maybe that's Eliza in his ending in Street Fighter Alpha 2, although if so, they never mention it. Bison is HUGE in this game, and plays a major role in everybody's story, just about. But Bison is pretty much meant to have been killed and his psycho drive destroyed. Which is odd, because this is a prequel game to Street Fighter II where, of course, Bison is the boss character and he mentions the psycho drive. Based on the appearances of some of the Final Fight characters, especially Cody, we know that the Final Fight games have already taken place by now, too. Mad Gear is broken up, and some of the Mad Gear bosses like Rolento, Sodom (or Katana), etc., are out trying to figure out what to do with their lives, while Cody is in prison for his vigilante fighting, which supposedly went out of control at some point after Final Fight. Although he's arrested by Edi E. who was a corrupt cop on the payroll of the Mad Gear Gang, so it's entirely possible that the whole arrest and felony conviction are not justified. That might explain how he's in prison in Alpha 3 and even Street Fighter IV, but he's the new mayor of Metro City already by Street Fighter V.
• Year 27: Street Fighter II (all versions.) We don't know how much time passed between Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 2, but there are reasons to assume that it isn't too long. I'm going to round to a year. Those reasons include a lot of the information in the stories of characters like Chun-Li, Guile, T. Hawk, etc. who are clearly continuing efforts that were detailed in Alpha (again; they were detailed in SF2 first.) Given the general lack of progress that Guile has had in finding Charlie, Chun-Li in finding her father, or T. Hawk in finding Julia. This one is a bit speculative, but it works out well, and there's not much reason to assume more than a year's passage here. (on the other hand, Cammy developing from being a brainwashed teenaged girl Killer Bee in Alpha 3 and having already had a history as a Delta Red agent at the end of II seems awfully compressed.) However, we do have some more relative anchors put into place here. For one, it does seem likely that if Street Fighter, which was released in 1987 was supposed to have taken place in 1987, then Street Fighter II, which was released in 1991, was also supposed to have taken place in 1991. This was before prequels and timeline bending became normal, as well as before the plot got complicated, so this assumption seems likely to have been true at the time, and it also seems like Capcom have kind of worked around it. In fact, there's a vague timeline Capcom once published in Japan, and although I don't read Japanese, it's clear that only two dates are clearly given, 1987 and 1991. Ken and Eliza get married at the end (in Ken's ending) which also provides a useful anchor of sorts. Although Udon Comics had Eliza get married partly because she was already pregnant, that actually seems unlikely to have been Capcom's intention. This means that we can peg the timing between Street Fighter II's ending and Street Fighter IV's ending, when Mel is born, to have been unlikely to have been much shorter than a year. It could have been a little longer, but there's not much reason to assume that it should have been. Also; all of the versions of Street Fighter II are just iterations on the same story. None of them is a sequel to any other version of Street Fighter II.
• Year 28: Street Fighter IV (all versions). There's some vaguish comments from Capcom that Street Fighter II was supposed to take place in 1991; the year that the first version of it came out, and that Street Fighter IV, the next once chronologically, takes place in 1994. I don't know if this is really meant to be true or not in a literal sense, or even that it's accurate. I've only heard it second hand. Or more likely third or more hand. Street Fighter IV takes place at least a year after Street Fighter II, as mentioned above, but it could be three years. That gives Shadaloo, which was more thoroughly destroyed this time than it was after Alpha 3, time to regroup into SIN under new leadership, and it means that Mel isn't quite the honeymoon baby that he otherwise would have been. Keep in mind that this timeline originally had the final Street Fighter III game taking place in 1999, or "year 35." I'm trying to make the timeline fit that paradigm still. I should point out that the manual for Street Fighter IV suggests that it takes place "a short time" after Street Fighter II. I like rounding to one year instead of three years as "a short time", so I'm tentatively putting this at Year 28 rather than Year 30. Realistically, though, there's not a lot of reason to favor one over the other; you've simply got two potentially conflicting offhand comments from someone allegedly at Capcom, subject to translation, second and third hand distortion, and interpretation of what exactly "a short time" means, though.
• Year 32-33: Street Fighter V (all versions). Based mostly on Mel's appearance (although all characters are notably aged at least a little bit; Mel's is the best for dead reckoning, because going from newborn to a kid of 4-5 is a much easier thing to dead-reckon on physical appearance than going from late twenties to early thirties, this is about where I think the Street Fighter V games take place. This game also has the most clearly defined story, as well as finally tying the Shadaloo focused games to the Illuminati focused SF3 titles. There are decent reasons to assume that this doesn't take place too long prior to the first SF3 game. Most of the characters have about the same appearance, for instance. Mel seems to be a little bigger, but no more than a year or so.
• Year 34: Street Fighter III: New Generation and 2nd Impact. As with the Alpha series, III originally game out in it's first version, but was then "rewritten" and replaced with the second iteration of the series. Although, like with Alpha, the third game in the sub-series is a sequel to the first/second. For whatever reason, the storytelling really fell apart in this game, too. While there's lots of vague hints of stuff, it's almost impossible to actually determine what is supposed to have happened. And because Street Fighter III had very little to no mainstream appeal, only being popular with the competitive technical set, I suppose Capcom just decided that they didn't really care about clarifying anything going on in the story anyway. 
• Year 35: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Ryu actually looks older (especially in his bearded "hot Ryu" alternate) in SFV than he does in SF3, which is probably a good clue that they can't really be posited to take place too far apart from each other. We know that 3rd Strike takes place after 2nd Impact. When there's a "short time" between iterations, I'm rounding that up to a year, because there's never any reason to assume that it has to be less. There are good reasons to stretch the game out some too; Cammy for instance has a pretty intricate story and backstory that needs some time to develop. She can't go from being a brainwashed teenager Killer Bee assassin to a valued member of Delta Red who has a history and personal ties with her team in just a couple of months, after all. There needs to be some time for that type of story to develop. Of course, that is in contrast to what I said above that there are good reasons to presume that Alpha 3 and SF2 aren't that far apart. If there needs to be some stretch in the timeline, I'd put another year or two between those titles

How well did I do? So far announced are four of the five new characters, and Dan, Oro and Rose are among them, as well as a character from Rival Schools (a game I never played and didn't know.) The fifth new character they're holding back on announcing for the time being. I figured Dan was likely, I thought Oro was one I wanted to see and thought the fact that he'd made several cameos made him more likely than I would have thought. Rose was one that I thought they'd pass on this time around, and I didn't see a Rival Schools character coming at all. 

There's several SF3 characters and at least one SF4 character that I thought were likely shoe-ins, although obviously there were too many for me to have expected them all to come in. I did expect to see Yun or Yang, Makoto and Dudley, or at least one of them, make the cut. And I really expected C. Viper to make the cut. I'd be very surprised if the 5th character isn't one of those.

I also expected at least one of the missing SF2 characters to pop in, but then again, maybe I should have been so surprised. The fact that they were missing this long clearly means that Capcom doesn't think that they're essential anymore. This will be the first major title to have not had all of the SF2 characters, though.

New Season V characters

I haven't done anything here in forever, but... now that I've got my new desktop, and my own office to use it in that used to be my son's room before he grew up and left home, I've reinstalled Steam, I've put Street Fighter V Champion Edition on my PS4 (technically that belongs to my youngest two boys too; but like I said, one of them is out of the house for at least another year and half, and then he'll leave again after that for college out of state. And the younger one is kinda over video games and doens't care anymore. I'm the only one left that's regularly using it, which is weird, because I didn't touch it for a long time when we got it; not until one of my sons bought Red Dead Redemption II, actually.) So, I'm back in the saddle after a lengthy hiatus where I rarely if ever played one of these types of games, because I didn't have access to SFIV for a time, and I never liked SFV until I got it recently in its more fixed and updated form with enough content to not be embarrassing.

Anyway, although SFV was considered a fairly dead or done game, the Champion Edition was sufficiently well received that Capcom decided to issue a final and fifth (Vth?) season and announced that there would be five (V) new characters added to the game still. While it's certainly possible that a new character will be among them, I think it's much more likely that we'll see the return of some characters that've already part of the Capcom roster. If we get anyone "new" it'll be one of the dolls; maybe one that hasn't ever been playable before. (We do know that most of them are in the game as opponents already, since we fight a number of them in story mode. That would be a quick and easy way to bring a character to the game without having to do too much work on it; you've already got a model and moves, they just need to be made playable. Which I don't want to underestimate the workload involved in doing that, but still--a fair chunk of the work has been done.)

Anyway, the purpose of this post isn't to talk about who I think is likely to be brought in, but who I'd wish to see, and who I'd pick if I was in charge. Before I do, let me at least spell out who some of the potentially obvious adds are, just because. Then I can contrast (and a bit of compare, but it'll mostly be contrast) those obvious adds with my own wishlist. Street Fighter V is the first game since Super Street Fighter II that doesn't feature all of the characters from Super Street Fighter, at least in its final, fully fleshed out form. So, some obvious adds would be the three missing New Challengers: T. Hawk, Fei Long and Dee Jay. Yeah, yeah... those are the least popular of the New Challengers, I'm sure, but still, it's odd that they're missing. But I also doubt that they'd make three of the five be those characters. Probably at least one of them, though. Some of the more popular Street Fighter III characters also seem like shoe-ins. We have less Street Fighter III characters in V than in IV. Dudley, Yang and/or Yun and possibly Makoto. I hear a lot of calls from the fanbase for the latter, in particular, although I've never liked her as a character at all. Of the Alpha characters, I doubt that Rose or Guy will come back as we have Menat and Zeku to kind of represent them. It's the first game not to have Dan, though, so he'd be a kind of obvious addition too. Even if the joke is long past played out by this point. Of the IV characters, I was surprised that C. Viper wasn't already included; she does make a cameo in the story, at least. The same is kind of true for Abel, although he was a much less memorable addition to IV than Juri and Viper. So, that list of "obvious" candidates is obviously twice as long as it needs to be, but I wouldn't be surprised to see at least four of the five pulled from that list, if not all five.

Who would I most want to see return? My list might be a little esoteric, but what the hey?

• Geki. Of all of the non-playable characters from the first Street Fighter game, he's the one who seems to have picked up the most mystique. I'd argue that he's probably more popular than SFI characters that we have had added to subsequent games like Birdie, Gen and Adon. Of course, I don't have much to back up that assertion other than his use in stuff like the Udon comics and whatnot, but I'd really like to see him updated. I know, I know, there are a number of ninja-esque characters in the game already, like Ibuki and Guy and Zeku. But they don't really fit the classic trope of the Shinobi that was super popular in the late 80s and early 90s when these games came out, and the little that we do know about Geki's potential moves is already very different than either of them, with throwing stars and teleportation, etc.
• Edi. E. (I don't know why he has a period in his name after Edi, but that's correct.) The only Final Fight boss (other than Belger himself, and a character in a wheelchair probably isn't feasible) to not make an appearance makes him a good candidate in my opinion. Not only would his rivalry with Cody make for a better story reason to include him than say, Abigail or Hugo, both of which have made appearances, but he'd be a significantly different type of character than any we've seen before, given that he always uses a pistol and a night stick. He'd probably be Zangief-sized too, which would be interesting, as we could always use another bigger character while we're at it. Maybe this time he's the one in a convict uniform, since after he framed Cody and sent him to prison, now that Cody is mayor, maybe he's been drummed out for corruption finally. Yet another reason to have an even more bitter rivalry!
• Mike Haggar. I know, I know. I'm probably leaning too much into the older games, but I'm an older guy, and I like my nostalgia. To be honest, I'd rather have seen Mike make an appearance with his Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 model in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and leave him off the roster for V, but since he didn't ever make it to IV, putting him in V is a must. He's the iconic character from Final Fight, and he's had a bit of a comeback since his appearance in the MvC series. He's primed for a re-appearance.
• Oro. A Street Fighter III character that never seems to get any love, although maybe that's because he's kinda dumb like Twelve or Necro, I dunno. At least he has more character, in my opinion, and he does make a number of cameos in Street Fighter V already, where it's shown that he's pretty good friends with Dhalsim. I think he could turn out pretty cool and interesting, especially if he gets some decent alternative costumes. It can also start to point towards his appearance in Street Fighter III; the inclusion of a bunch of Illuminati characters already starts that, as well as Sean's cameo since his sister is a playable character. 
• C. Viper. Just because she's an obvious one doesn't mean that it's not one that I wouldn't like to see! I kind of like C. Viper, although I think she's a little bit underpowered in IV, and could stand a bit of minor updating. She's obviously kicking around, having made a number of small cameos in the Story mode, but as kinda the new protagonist specifically for the IV game, leaving her out is a little bit insulting. She's also a kind of rival to Juri, and picking up Juri but leaving C. Viper out seems incomplete. It'd be like having Ken in the game but not Ryu. Well, not quite, as those are the protagonist and deuteragonist for the entire franchise, but still, you get the picture. 
• Honorable Mention. Oni should come back, not as a new character, but as a skin for Akuma. Akuma looks so terrible in this game, and only his "nostalgia" skin actually looks any good. Giving him an Oni skin would be perfect. I think it would actually be interesting to bring Gouken back too, although again, maybe as a skin or "cosplay" for either Akuma or Ryu is better than bringing him back as a complete character. For that matter, maybe that's a better way to bring Dan back than as a character; have someone dress as him in cosplay. Although, to be fair, he already dresses an awful lot like classic Ryu and Ken anyway, and just has a different head. I would have thought the same thing about it being fun to bring some Darkstalkers characters into the game, but given that most of the ones I'd want to see are already skins for someone or other in the game as is, it's probably fine as is.

All SF characters

According to my count, there are 77 total characters that have appeared in a Street Fighter game (as a playable character) so far.  This is, needless to day, a lot of characters, and even if you look at titles like Ultra Street Fighter IV that have well over 40 playable characters, barely passes up the halfway mark.  Let's go through them very quickly alphabetically and I'll give some brief background on each.

• Abel a Frenchish judo fighter that appears so far only in Street Fighter IV, Abel's story is that he was a body intended for Bison's use; a kind of male doll program, except cloned rather than kidnapped.  For whatever reason, he went rogue and sentient and became Abel.
• Abigail I have no idea why Abigail is a man, but he was originally one of the later appearing bosses in Final Fight, and was added as a Season 2 download to Street Fighter V.  He's absolutely huge; bigger even than Hugo, and reminds me of the Marvel mutant character Strong Guy.  He's also a pretty stereotypical dumb jock
• Adon Originally the next to last boss in the original Street Fighter, Adon was Sagat's pupil.  He later appeared in the Alpha series and Street Fighter IV, now rebelling against Sagat, and being a general nuisance.
• Akuma Originally appearing as a super secret character in the last version of Street Fighter 2, Akuma has become one of the most popular characters, and has appeared in just about every Capcom fighter since then.  He's meant to be the dark mirror image of Ryu's old master, and a rival to Ryu himself—he eventually grew to become one of the most iconic villains of the series.
• Alex Originally meant to be the protagonist of the ill-fated Street Fighter III, Alex did finally come back in Street Fighter V.  He's a kind of rock-headed wrestler type with really strange, gay suspenders and stuff.  He struggles to find a place as a protagonist because he's not a very interesting character from a moves, personality, or plot perspective.
• Balrog Discounting the name-swaps between the US and Japanese versions of the game, Balrog was based on Mike Tyson, and was the first boss of the SF2 game.  He's appeared in the Alpha, IV and V games as well.
• Birdie originally a character from the first Street Fighter, Birdie was revived for the Alpha series, and then later for V, getting progressively sillier as time goes on, for whatever reason.  
• Blanka one of the original (and weirdest) of the World Warriors from SF2, Blanka has appeared in every series since except III.  His connection to the rest of the cast is rather tenuous, so they've tried to imply that he was friends with Dan, and Sakura and others.
• Cammy originally an agent type with amnesia who was supposed to have been Bison's lover, Cammy later developed a much more complicated backstory as the lead doll agent from Shadaloo.  She appeared in an update to SF2, and has been in every game series (except III again) ever since, and has become one of the more recognizable characters from the series, as well as having more plot importance than most.
• Charlie (Nash) originally merely a backstory element to Guile, Charlie (also called Nash; later determined that his full name was Charlie Nash) appeared in the Alpha series, and then as a weird Frankenstein character "rebuilt" and resurrected by Shadaloo in SF V.
• Chun-Li Chun-Li is one of the few characters to have appeared in III from the earlier series, and is an original SF2 World Warrior.  Ironically, her plot importance has often faded over time.
• Cody one of the main protagonists of the Final Fight series, he was brought into Alpha—how as a psychotic convict imprisoned for being unable to ever stop fighting.  He appeared again in IV.  He has no plot importance beyond Final Fight, but is tied to a great many characters in the game.
• Crimson Viper a IV and V character; one of the few that seems to not be ridiculous.  She's a secret agent with a battle suit that gives her super powers, making her a similar concept to Black Widow—although for some odd reason, it was decided that secret agents in SFverse can be 20 year old single mothers (!?)  She's undercover, pretending to work with S.I.N. but really serving the CIA.
• Dan the infamous joke character that riffs off of Robert and especially Ryo by SNK in Art of Fighting.  He appeared in Alpha, IV and there are brief references to him (although no actual appearance) in V.  
• Decapre a IV representation of the doll agents.  In this sense, she kind of replaces Juli and Juni from the Alpha series.
• Dee Jay a late appearing SF2 expansion character, who also appears in Alpha and IV.  Like many of the original World Warriors, he actually has surprisingly little plot importance; I suspect that that is something that was developed later, and new characters were developed often with a plot imperative behind them; while other characters already existing, Capcom didn't quite know what to do with.
• Dhalsim an original World Warrior who appears in every series except III.  He often plays a Yoda like mentor role, but originally he was just supposed to be a colorful Indian rubber man archetype
• Dudley the British posh boxer who first appeared in III and later became popular enough to migrate to IV as well.  He's supposedly Balrog's rival and antipode
• E. Honda an original World Warrior that's appeared also in Alpha and IV.  Like many ancillary World Warriors, his plot importance is negligible
• Eagle originally a SF 1 character who was revived as a sprite for a spin-off title, and was later added to a handheld version of the final Alpha game.  There's not much to tell about him, really.
• Ed appearing in a IV ending, he was later brought forward as a V expansion character, and another Shadaloo cloning experiment gone somewhat awry.  As a boxer of sorts, he's been one of the few characters tied to Balrog.
• El Fuerte this guy's a loon, from IV.  He's too crazy to have caught on with anyone, really
• Elena a strange, "cute" character from III that was also in IV.  She has a weird "Storm" (from the X-men) vibe, but for some unexplainable reason, fights in a Brazilian style.  She's relatively non-serious, and Capcom has even joked that she became friends with Akuma.  Probably to establish clearly the fact that she's a silly character, not to be taken seriously.
• Evil Ryu technically, this is an alternate character; a "dream" character, not a real one; a what-if.  Appearing in Alpha, then IV, Evil Ryu has undergone a fair bit of development to his moves and appearance over time, to the point where he much more resembles an original character.  Technically, however, he's not.
• F.A.N.G. a V character, designed to be one of the sub-bosses (and therefore important to the plot, and one who appears a lot), but he's pretty silly.  I'm trying to think of what Hong Kong action movies he's clearly drawn from, and his poison abilities are kind of unique.  He's really too stupid and caricaturish for my taste, though.
• Fei Long an expansion character from SF2 that is obviously the ersatz Bruce Lee.  He's appeared in Alpha, IV makes a brief cameo in V.  There have been some half-hearted efforts to tie Fei Long to more characters, but he's still ancillary to the plots of the games.
• Geki a claw-wielding, star-throwing, and teleporting ninja from the very first game, who represents the then-current supernatural ninja craze.  He never appeared in any other game since, although there are hints that 1) Vega is a protege of some sort, and 2) a Geki II character may be in the works.
• Gen one of the few SF1 antagonists who got a fair bit of development, appearing in Alpha and IV, and being made out as fairly significant in the backstories of several characters, including Akuma himself.  In fact, he makes a brief cameo appearance in Akuma's story, where its implied that he finally dies for real.
• Gill the boss of III, and therefore largely unconnected to anything else—although as V starts to take the 2, Alpha and IV stories and lead them to III, characters that relate to him and his organization start to take more shape.
• Gouken although he's supposed to have been dead all along, Gouken was brought back as a playable character in SF4 and makes a cameo in V.  He's Ryu and Ken's master, and Akuma's brother.
• Guile an original World Warrior, who's been in every game except III (although he was a late appearing expansion for Alpha, where Charlie was supposed to have replaced him) who has been made significantly important in the Shadaloo story.
• Guy an alternate protagonist from Final Fight who's also been in Alpha, IV, and in cameo form in V.  Like Geki, he's a stereotypical 80s/90s supernatural ninja, except the good guy version.
• Hakan a IV character who's another rather silly one.  Partly because of this, he's been somewhat tied to some of the other sillier characters, like E. Honda.  He's also meant to be about as exotic as Blanka or Dhalsim... which he is.
• Hugo (Andore) although under a slightly different name, Hugo is actually a Final Fight character who was ported into III and then appeared later in IV.  Until the appearance of Abigail, he was by far the largest SF character, and is quite dumb.
• Ibuki a teenaged girl ninja; a weird Japanese cultural affectation.  She appeared in III and then IV and V because she was relatively popular.  She's got a little bit of that Spider-man "fighting crime incognito while also dealing with school" vibe to her, but honestly, I've also found her too culturally Japanese to really get.
• Ingrid a character from another game who was thrown into the final, handheld version of Alpha 3, because she could be, Ingrid has no ties to anyone else in SFverse, and is kinda weird.  She's actually got a strange anime and/or SNK vibe to her in my opinion.
• Joe a completely forgettable fighter who only ever appeared in SF1.
• Juli one of the dolls, made playable briefly in the final version of Alpha.  I'm considering all of the other Dolls as background characters, even though some of them can be fought as antagonists in SFV.
• Juni same as Juli; although her sprites and moves are slightly different
• Juri a villainous character from IV and V—one of the few IV characters who, like C. Vyper, is memorable enough to have moved on
• Karin an Alpha 3 character who later becomes an important plot character in V.  At first, she's just a throwaway rival to Sakura, but she later becomes more like a more serious female analog to Ken.  Not in terms of moves, just in terms of plot positioning.
• Ken the very second SF character ever developed; originally a red-clothed, American copy of Ryu, but one who later developed his own personality, moves and style.  Sometimes he's treated seriously, but occasionally he veers into silliness (his Roy Rogers alternate costume in IV, for instance, or his III story)
• Kolin a V only character; an undercover agent for Gill
• Laura supposedly the sister of Sean, this V only character plays more like Elena
• Lee a completely forgettable 1 only appearance.  He's been retroactively tied—tenuously—to some other Chinese characters, like Yun, Yang and Chun-Li
• M. Bison the boss of SF2, and a character in every single game since except III.  He's still the most iconic SF villain, and replacing him with the strange Gill for III was probably part of it's failure to grab the audience
• Maki a Final Fight character who only appears in the hand-held Alpha 3 game, she's quite tall for a lady, and has ties to Guy and Cody and some of the other Final Fight guys.  
• Makoto a III character who later appeared also in IV.  She has, like many III characters, no connection to anyone else, and appears to be (although this is officially unconfirmed) to have been inspired by the Akane Tendo character from Ranma ½.
• Menat the very newest (so far) V character, she is an apprentice to Rose and has an Egyptian vibe to her (including an alternate costume where she's wrapped like a mummy.)  Just in case you thought what Rose needed was a cute, teenaged apprentice girl.  
• Mike a forgettable SF1 character who may have been a prototype version of Balrog, although Capcom tries to say, no, there's just two characters built on the exact same archetype.
• Necalli a strange V only Aztec demon-god character, who has a Darkstalkers vibe to him, or something.  He could have been developed as a peer, if you will, of Akuma, but Capcom didn't really seem to know what to do with him from a storytelling perspective
• Necro a III character (with a cameo in V) who looks very bizarre, likes to sing opera in falsetto when he wins, and has Dhalsim's Indian rubber man stretchiness as well as Blanka's electricity.  He's supposed to be a runaway experiment of the Illuminati, although why both the Illuminati and Shadaloo were so caught up in cloning/superhero experimentation I don't know.  It does tend to make both organizations run together.
• Oni this is a dream version of Akuma in the same way that Evil Ryu is a dream version of Ryu.  From IV only
• Oro a very strange III only character; an ancient man who wants to date Ibuki, and he looks about as freaky as Blanka or Dhalsim.
• Poison another Final Fight character who finally became playable in IV.  She's also cameoing along with Hugo in III.  There were some weird ideas floating around for a while that Poison might have been a cross dresser or even a post-op fake woman.  
• Q a completely mysterious III only character, about which we know very little except that he looks like the Invisible Man
• R. Mika a rather dumb expansion Alpha and V character who is a groupie to Zangief.  She's one of the silliest characters (non-III) in the series
• Rashid a swashbuckling V character who has been made out to be a semi-protagonist of that game
• Remy one of the latest appearing III characters; a skinny, androgynous, emo Guile clone.  Blegh.  He belongs in a King of Fighters game
• Retsu a disposable Japanese monk character from SF1
• Rolento originally a boss in Final Fight, Rolento has since appeared in the Alpha and IV games.  Like many Final Fight characters, he really only connects plotwise to other Final Fight characters.
• Rose an Alpha and IV character who has strange ties to Bison.  Unlike many of the female characters, she actually appears to be mature and composed rather than "cute" and kind of spastic.
• Rufus another one of the undeniably stupidest characters in the game, Rufus is a IV only character who supposedly has a rivalry with Ken.  He's loosely based on Chris Farley's Beverly Hills Ninja, but dressed like a basketball stuck in Bruce Lee's Game of Death outfit.
• Ryu the protagonist of the game and series, the mascot for Capcom overall (along with, maybe, Megaman) and one of the few characters (only Ken joins him here) to appear in every single SF series.
• Sagat the boss of SF1, the sub boss of SF2, and a powerful figure in every SF game except III, and (curiously) V, where he is supposedly kind of retired.  He has evolved over time from being an outright villain into being more of a respectful rival to Ryu.
• Sakura a popular Alpha creation who also appears in IV and V (as cameo); Sakura is a "cute" teenaged girl who idolizes and copies Ryu.
• Sean Ken's apprentice from III; an otherwise completely forgettable character who plays to Ken in some ways the same way Sakura does to Ryu
• Seth the boss of IV; a Bison clone who went rogue and became significantly inhuman
• Shin Akuma a "dream" version of Akuma; supposedly Akuma not holding himself back.  In this, he differs from Oni, which is a future-state version of Akuma.  He appears in the Alpha games, the version of Akuma from SSF2 Turbo was retroactively called Shin Akuma, and he's a secret boss in one of the of the III games.
• Sodom (Katana) another Final Fight boss that appeared in Alpha, and has (so far) never been moved from there.  He's weird; an American obsessed with Japan, or something like that.  Not very memorable.
• T. Hawk a SF2 expansion character who also appears in Alpha, IV and has an interesting story tie to Bison and the Dolls, actually.
• Twelve another dumb experiment from SF3; Twelve has no personality; no nothing.  He's a shapeshifting android or something that can copy the moves of other characters
• Urien Gill's more human-like brother, a resentfull sub boss type character.  While he was kind of a stupid foil in III, he's been made a more serious and significant villain in V
• Vega the spanish "ninja" sub boss from SF2, who's been in every series since (technically, he hasn't "appeared" in V yet, but his upcoming presence was already confirmed.)  As such, he's got a lot of story ties to a lot of characters, including all of the Shadaloo ones, and Chun-Li especially. Ties to Cammy and Juri have been invented as well.
• Yang a popular Chinese teenager from III who has been brought into IV.  Other than ties to his twin brother Yun, he seems to also know Chun-Li (because everyone from China knows each other or something) and otherwise has few ties to the storyline at all.
• Yun see Yang above
• Zangief an original SF2 world warrior who continues to appear in the game, but has devolved into silly comic relief.  It's curious that most of the world warriors, who were seen as antagonists if not actual villains at first, have gradually become supporting protagonists and "heroes"—at least if the SF5 story is any guide.  In spite of this, Zangief's probably biggest claim to fame is his cameo appearance in the Disney movie Wreck-It Ralf as a villain.

Season 2

Street Fighter V hasn't really grabbed me yet, although as it's been picking up more steam, I've become more interested.  The first of the "Season 2" content just came out, it appears, although there is considerably more to come.  By 2020, it's supposed to have the largest roster of any Street Fighter title... but for now, it's still a little on the skimpy side.

I kind of really want SFV to have something like a simple "normal" arcade mode as opposed to those incredibly abbreviated and scripted story modes.  I also really have enjoyed SFIV's ability to have vs CPU for when I just want to play around with the game (by far this is the mode I play most.)  Although it's seen by its developers as a competitive head to head game, I've rarely played much Street Fighter of any series that way; back in the arcades in the old days, we'd usually play through against the CPU and somewhat rarely challenge each other.  Then, of course, I had tons of console games, usually by myself, on older consoles with no internet connection.  Because of that, I've rarely gotten involved in competitive battles, even though SFIV offers them.  Nor am I particularly good at them, for that matter.  I play Street Fighter to unwind, not to challenge myself with a really difficult challenge.

SFV, on the other hand, offers relatively little to the player like me who mostly avoids 2 player games and requires a good single player mode that actually offers some good replayability.  Sigh.  So, eventually I'll pick it up.  It could be years yet before I bother, though.  That said, I still check in every few months to see what's going on with it, and try and get caught up on the SF world, and although I'm not nearly as good at this as I should like to be, I did manage to catch a whiff of season 2 and what's coming down the pike in 2017.

First, let's set the groundwork.  Although this wasn't obvious to me at first when I rented this title a few months ago, SFV is a sequel to IV (obviously) but a prequel to III—which remains the chronologically most advanced game of the series still.  In other words; this is the order in which the series came out—and I've left off the EX series as a spin-off unrelated directly to the others:

1. Street Fighter
2. Street Fighter 2
3. Street Fighter Alpha
4. Street Fighter 3
5. Street Fighter 4
6. Street Fighter 5

But this is the order that they take place in chronologically:

1. Street Fighter
2. Street Fighter Alpha
3. Street Fighter 2
4. Street Fighter 4
5. Street Fighter 5
6. Street Fighter 3

Street Fighter V is the game that starts to (meaningfully) introduce characters and concepts from Street Fighter 3 into the game.  IV was, on the other hand, most definitely a direct sequel to II.  Of course, IV and even V had plenty of Alpha characters making appearances too.

We'll see how it shakes out when all is said and done, but what I'm surprised by is the character selection. The original Street Fighter obviously had only one (two, if you're being generous) selectable characters: Ryu (and Ken as 2-player alternate.)  Part of the secret of Street Fighter II's massive success was the selection of the original 8 World Warriors: none of whom (except Ryu and Ken) came from the first game.  Even later, when the bosses were added as playable characters, that only gave us Sagat from the first game.  The fact that the roster of characters (both playable and not) had so little overlap between the first and second games has always kind of fascinated me.  Since then, of course, Capcom has not really had the same degree of success, and they've never done a Street Fighter game that didn't dip fairly deeply into existing characters since (except for the ill-fated Street Fighter III series, which did actually eventually get a couple more classic characters, but which was also no doubt seen as a commercial disappointment in many ways.

The Alpha series deliberately brought back a fair number of the otherwise neglected original Street Fighter characters, as well as characters from Final Fight; a side-scrolling game that was originally developed to be a sequel to Street Fighter, but following the success of Double Dragon (by Technos/Taito) it changed it's focus.  That said, the two were clearly occurring in the same "continuity" given the large number of Final Fight characters that eventually made their way into Street Fighter titles.  

By the time the series reached their "final" chapter, both Street Fighter Alpha and IV had added every single one of the characters who ever appeared in any Street Fighter II game, and Alpha had four Street Fighter I characters (IV had two) and five Final Fight characters (IV had four.)  Alpha also added a pretty fair number of characters that made their first appearance in this series: ten in all.  III had sixteen characters that were new to it.  IV and so far V have made generous use of many of these characters, although I wonder how many of the III characters that haven't already made an appearance in IV we're likely to see in V, given that they're often just too weird to really have picked up a fan following.  IV had four of the Alpha characters while so far V has three; but there's no overlap on which ones are in each.  IV ended up picking up seven of the III characters; probably almost all of them that are worth preserving, although V has rounded that out just a bit with three (again; so far) only one of which was in IV.  V also has very few of the ten IV unique characters (only one so far).

I expect that we'll eventually see all of the rest of the original Street Fighter II characters make their way into V.  I expect that a few stand-out Alpha and IV characters (especially Sakura, Crimson Viper maybe) are also inevitable, and it's curious that the III characters that have been added so far don't include many of the more obviously popular ones (like Yun, Yang and maybe Dudley.)  They'll almost certainly make it eventually, but the rumors for five new characters through 2017 are all new V characters that if they've shown up at all, it's never been as a playable character before.  And there seems to be a lot of the Dolls of various types in the game, although they're not playable as yet.

I also expect—or maybe this is just wishful thinking and I hope for it—that some more game modes are forthcoming before all is said and done.

By the way, the first of the Season 2 characters is Akuma, now with a bizarre lion-flower hair style (although there's a skin that recreates his classic appearance, more or less.)

Today

It's been a long time since I've posted a new post on this blog.  I haven't picked up Street Fighter V, and I'm not likely to until it's been more thoroughly updated.  I did rent it and play it a bit, but it didn't grab me the way SFIV did when it was new.  Part of that was certainly the fact that there isn't tons of content on it yet, but the format and modes actually seemed to make it even harder to access the content that was there.  Once updated versions of SFV are out, I may wade in then.

In the meantime, although I've been pretty happy with the Ultra Street Fighter IV version on Steam, I'm seriously considering buying the PS4 downloadable port, just because I'd rather play it on the big TV on the Playstation, honestly.  I have never really taken to King of Fighters XIII although I have that on Steam too.  I'd like to rent XIV in the relatively short term, though, even though it's got some very, very odd entries in it (that guy in a dinosaur costume.  And what's with SNK always trying to stick Nakoruru in every title?  Augh! Blech!)  And Alice is now a playable character!  I guess I was ahead of the curve there, although she's been slightly redesigned (is now wearing a big over-sized t-shirt over her—admittedly rather immodest—traditional outfit.  They may have changed her last name on me too, and decided to make her "half Japanese."  Considering that she's still blond and blue-eyed, that's pretty absurd, but not unexpected, I suppose.

I haven't actually been playing all that much lately, although I've gotten back into SFIV just a bit as I've freed up enough time to be able to play just a bit here and there.  I've also broken out my PS2 on occasion and played some Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 and a few other titles here and there.  I don't know that any of this means that I'm resuscitating this particular hobby or just dabbling with some nostalgia.

Am I ever going to write the fan fiction that I started?  I dunno.  Probably not.  I'm not very motivated, and I don't actually know where I'm going with it; I just got caught up in excitement about the characters, as I have done before.  But you never know.

More new characters

Dhalsim is added (since my last post) to the starting roster, but the other interesting thing is that apparently, there are going to be at least six new characters added to the game after launch but before the calendar year in which it launches ends.  Here's some discussion about who some of them might be.