Street Fighters, Young and Old

Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 has been out for more than two years now, and its third season is already underway with the recent release of Sagat as a playable character. Conveniently, Capcom have already told us in advance who else will be joining the roster (C Viper, Alex, and Ingrid) at later dates. I appreciate this practice for a lot of reasons, chief among them that it gives a much clearer picture of the direction the game is taking in the near future. What can we learn from these characters being added to the game?

(A quick note: I will be referring to several distinct releases as one game in some contexts, e.g. referring to Street Fighter II as one game when it was actually about five different games, but all based on the same foundation and representing a generation distinct from what came before and after. In today’s environment, Super Street Fighter II Turbo would have been DLC, whereas Street Fighter Alpha would be considered the sequel. I hope this makes sense.)

Let’s start from the beginning. At launch, all the way back in 2023, Street Fighter 6 launched with a modest roster of 18 characters. Of these, series mainstays Ryu and Ken both come from the very first Street Fighter, eight characters come from the various versions of Street Fighter II, Street Fighter IV and V are represented by one character each, and there are six new characters from Street Fighter 6. There are a few immediate observations we can make. First, newcomers make up a whole third of the roster. Second, characters from the first two generations of Street Fighter make up more than half of the roster. Lastly, Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III are entirely unrepresented.

The first season of DLC had the potential to alleviate the unbalanced representation (not really though, as the complete launch roster and first season of DLC leaked well in advance, but play along). Unfortunately, it ended up being two characters from Street Fighter V, one newcomer, and yet another character from Street Fighter II. Half of the roster still came from the first two games and there were still two entire games unrepresented.

Season 2 managed to pull out one more character from Street Fighter II along with the first representative of Street Fighter III while also including two characters as guests representing SNK’s Fatal Fury series. The fact that it took this long for anyone from III to show up indicates it’s not a priority, and Alpha is still missing in action. Furthermore, external guest characters are new territory for the series, although one could argue that a game like Capcom vs SNK 2 is very near to being a Street Fighter game in its mechanics and roster, just with the addition of some outside characters and mechanics. Regardless, Terry and Mai fit in reasonably well, so they aren’t bad inclusions on their own merits, but it’s a shame that they took priority over the vast assortment of characters that came between Street Fighter II and now.

Now we have Season 3, starting with a character from the very first Street Fighter and on-track to include another character from Street Fighter III, the first post-launch character from Street Fighter IV, and, most curiously, a character from Capcom Fighting Evolution, the enigmatic Ingrid. While she may come from a much-maligned game, Ingrid still has her fans who no doubt want to see her in a good game (she was in the PSP-exclusive Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max, but barring that, still nobody else from Alpha). Her inclusion tells us they aren’t afraid to get weird, but maybe Street Fighter Alpha isn’t weird enough.

In a vacuum, these numbers can only tell us so much. For comparison, let’s look back to Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter V to see what we can learn from their rosters. Street Fighter IV started out with only newcomers and returning characters from the first two games. The console release did add a few characters from Alpha, however. It’s plain to see that Capcom wanted to focus on the famous, recognizable characters after Street Fighter III underperformed in part due to the absence of many popular fighters (along with a lot of other reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this article). In fact, Street Fighter IV was written as a direct sequel to II, taking place before III, making it harder to include those characters and easier to keep the old ones around. Nevertheless, they did manage to incrementally add some with each successive update, eventually reaching seven characters from III, largely being characters that could easily be included without any narrative complications. As the game brought Street Fighter back into the spotlight after a long hiatus, they warmed up to acknowledging the less popular but still beloved entries.

With Street Fighter V, Capcom made the somewhat strange decision to yet again set the game before Street Fighter III. This meant, like before, no characters from Street Fighter III at launch. That’s not to say the roster was entirely safe; several long-absent characters from Street Fighter Alpha like Charlie, R Mika, and Karin were brought back, and some very popular characters like Guile, Akuma, Blanka, and Sagat were saved for later DLC. Much like IV, the roster over time started to incorporate characters from III. Unlike IV, however, these characters included the nominal new protagonist from III, Alex, as well as its villains, Urien and Gill. Whereas Street Fighter IV felt like a sequel to Street Fighter II, Street Fighter V started to feel like a prequel to Street Fighter III. The other interesting part of Street Fighter V’s roster is how many characters came from somewhat odd sources. Characters from Final Fight have long been part of Street Fighter, as far back as Street Fighter Alpha 2, but Street Fighter V added far more than ever before. In addition, the original character Zeku (technically a minor NPC previously) was introduced as a connection to both Final Fight and Strider, and Akira Kazama from Rival Schools was added to the roster as well. These are in addition to the multitude of new characters that were introduced otherwise. Despite these more radical inclusions, hardly any of the new characters from Street Fighter IV came back, with none being present at launch and only two (Juri and Seth) being added in later seasons.

You may have noticed a bit of a pattern emerging. When a new Street Fighter game comes, you can expect a lot of characters from the first two games, a decent number of new characters, and for anything in between, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. To illustrate, I’ve prepared the following table:

Note that this is without counting the Fatal Fury characters and Ingrid as newcomers inStreet Fighter 6, nor is Akira being counted as a newcomers in Street Fighter V (the Final Fight characters Lucia and Abigail are being counted as newcomers due to Street Fighter V being their first playable appearance in a fighting game).

As you can see, the “everyone else” category is consistently around one third of the roster. The problem with this, even aside from arguably being too low at face value, is that with each new entry, the “everyone else” category has one more game under its umbrella, and each individual game gets diluted. Aside from that, one gets the impression that newcomers are being introduced at an unsustainable rate. Here’s another table to that effect:

In other words, out of ten newcomers in IV, only two returned in V, and out of the whopping 14 newcomers in V, only three have returned so far in Street Fighter 6. When you also factor in that Street Fighter 6 is soon to get only the second addition from IV, it paints a disappointing picture. But the good news is that it’s not too late, as Street Fighter 6 is still going strong. So, what should be done?

The first problem would seem to be that past games have introduced too many new characters. The solution at present would be to not add any more. Seven is probably enough. Some of them are quite popular, like Jamie, and some much less so, like Lily, but the newcomers we already have are diverse enough that the time to focus on older characters is upon us. The next step is a bit harder. If we assume that, like Street Fighter V, Street Fighter 6 will have a total of five seasons, and that the current pace of four characters per season will continue, there will be eight more characters added to the roster. Of course, it’s also easy to imagine one more season beyond that, bringing the total to 42 characters, not far off from the 44 in Street Fighter IV and the 45 in Street Fighter V at the end of their respective lifespans. It’s a bit more of a stretch but within the realm of possibility to imagine yet another season to top out at 46 characters, but anything beyond that does not seem plausible. Therefore, there will be somewhere between eight and sixteen more characters added to the game. I have my preferences, but I’m not here to say who should be added and who shouldn’t. Rather, I believe there are to objectives that should be met by these characters.

First is the issue of how underrepresented Alpha and III are. These games are admittedly old, but so is Street Fighter II. It’s not healthy to act as though Street Fighter II is the entire foundation on which the series is built to the detriment of the other games that preceded the modern era of Street Fighter. Instead of treating the old World Warriors as the stalwarts and anything beyond them as optional, characters like Sakura, Rose, and Alex should be welcomed into the pantheon of the series to show just how important those games are.

The second issue is that characters from the relatively more recent games (I don’t like to think about how Street Fighter IV is nearly old enough to vote) shouldn’t be churned so heavily. Capcom have a problem of throwing a bunch of characters at the wall to see which ones stick. What’s done is done, we can’t redo those older games, but I believe this approach was a mistake. It’s better to make sure the characters are worthy of the series than to decide later that they aren’t worth bringing back. But the unfortunate consequence of this approach is that we don’t even always get a chance to let characters stick. Sure, Abel wasn’t all that popular back in his day. But beyond Street Fighter X Tekken, he hasn’t been given much of a chance to make a stronger impression. Meanwhile, E Honda has been given an abundance of chances and still isn’t popular. What does this tell us?

For all the things Street Fighter 6 did right at launch, from updating character movesets to introducing new system mechanics, it did so with a disappointing roster. Things are looking up, but it’s hard to say if there’s any underlying principles behind roster decisions. Only time will tell how it ends up, but hopefully we’ll finish with a roster that pays tribute to whole breadth of the series while also sowing the seeds for whatever comes next.