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maxwell-grant · 1 year

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Street Fighter 6: Issue #2 thoughts

Not at all a fan of this new art style especially for the women characters but I must say, I never thought Street Fighter of all franchises would make their geriatric Russian terrorist wizard villain look cute and not as an ironic thing.

Seriously though he looks WAY different than he does in-game, but I’m not complaining. I actually really like how Johann is drawn here, one of the highlights of this issue for me. The way he’s drawn here actually succeeds in making him look like he’s not a villain. He looks way more like someone you could buy as a deceiver, someone who’d trick you into giving your savings away to help poor starving children.

They scale him down hardcore from his game design in a way that would suck if this was meant to be in-game, but here? It works great. He has this breath of expression that you just don’t see in the usual villains of the series, because he is putting a lot of effort into pretending not to be one and actually succeeding! He gets sad and worried over hearing about the opposition, he reacts with convincing shock over the broadcast, he looks scared and distressed over the news reporters closing in, he even displays enough moments of genuine concern over his assistant without anyone looking. I know none of this is that groundbreaking but we never actually see fighting game villains in storylines putting in effort when it comes to this stuff, even the ones we’re supposed to buy as great deceivers or upstanding public figures. The art style really does a lot for him here.

In fact, JP in-game doesn’t act like this, he quite clearly embraces his villainy more openly in it, which means this is pointing to a neat little arc of sorts where we’re seeing Johann on the backfoot working the long game in terms of attaining power, versus in-game where he’s clearly not afraid of openly skewering and poisoning his opponents with Psycho Power and then making a point out of not crushing their heads beneath his heel when he’s through because they are that insignificant to him, and I really want to see that mask-off transition as it plays out.

Okay so for those viewers at home trying to keep track of the score so far: After last issue where Ken was almost assassinated with a car bomb in the midst of a political riot, this issue kicks off with him being framed by a terrorist hacker group of anti-capitalists dressed like plague doctors (a BANGER of a fitting design choice the more I think about it) who wish to “expose the agents of chaos to the world”, who seem to be using A.I deepfakes to frame Ken and claim he was both working with the Nayshall establishment as well as funding terrorists to manipulate the cryptocurrency market, and that they have seized these funds to be “an iron hammer, swung down upon the head of all capitalist exploiters”.

And this is part of a master plot to increase viral searches for Nayshall and the tournament, thus driving the crypto value up as well as bets related to it, which we know has to with a N.G.O oligarch and policy advisor’s personal project to secure military power and political stability for his nation through, among other things, viral popularity and weaponization of content and successfully scamming a billionaire into thoughtlessly tanking his country’s economy so he may rebuild it better than before.

...

I feel like I should clarify that Street Fighter and pretty much all fighting game have never really so much as acknowledged the word “capitalism” before, let alone made a plotline focused on it. And yeah the “anti-capitalist terrorist” is a loaded archetype to say the minimum in it’s own right, I’m certainly trying to keep expectations measured, but look, it is insane that this is happening at all, this is the franchise putting on big boy pants in regards to a storyline in a way it never really has before.

Street Fighter’s been dark enough allright, even too much, and it individually brushed past or even handled mature storylines from time and time, but it’s never remotely been this topical or even tried to be, it’s never made a conscious effort to go hard on being political, that’s just not what fighting games tend to do. Maybe they’ll botch it, maybe it’ll just be window dressing, but I’ve not been dissappointed so far and I think it’s very commendable that they’re actually giving it an effort here.

(Also calling it right now that Amnesia’s leader is JP’s assistant)

How long was this before the game? In this, Chun-Li’s still with Interpol and got promoted apparently, but in-game she’s clarified as an ex-agent. So how much time passed?

Chun-Li’s fairly boring in here visually and character-wise, I’m not happy to see her as a cop ever. I like them putting her in work clothes and putting the characters in different outfits in general, but I don’t like how generic she looks. I like her scene with Li-Fen though.

Completely forgot Li-Fen was put in SFV as a hacker prodigy because I forget most things about SFV on the regular, but I dig her being Chun’s “guy in the chair”. Some people got confused by it but I dig that Li-Fen calls Chun her older sister, that’s kind of a role Chun-Li’s played before with other characters and I like that it makes their dynamic more casual than if it was a mom - daughter kind of thing, gives them more room to bicker a little and I think it gives Li-Fen a little more independence in their dynamic.

I do like that Chun-Li clarifies she isn’t fooled one bit by the video and that she’s keeping Ken in custody for his own safety, because Ken turned into a worldwide-hunted criminal overnight and it’s the safest place for him to be on. I also like that they’re clearly not close and barely even recall meeting each other and so they don’t really talk things through, I like it because it acknowledges that these characters don’t all know or even like each other just because they’re on the same sides. Small thing I know, but the more recent games really homogenized the cast dynamics so I like anything that corrects that.

Oh man now THIS is great, Ken is so fucked. I need to talk about this guy.

This is deepfake A.I Ken, and if anything he looks way too convincing to be an A.I thing (but then again Street Fighter has enough sci-fi tech, I mean Seth was a thing years before this and so were the Illuminati shape-shifters), but putting all that aside, damn, this was kind of a revelation to me. I finally figured out why I just never liked Violent Ken as a concept and this is why: because he quite clearly should have always been THIS guy.

Violent Ken was designed as a counterpart to Evil Ryu, a Ryu who’s overtaken by the Satsui no Hadou and fully given in to his worst self, but because Ken doesn’t have the Dark Hadou, instead he’s based on the SF II film concept of Ken having been fully brainwashed by Bison’s Psycho Power. He’s not that terrible a concept or design, I think the SVC Chaos artwork is pretty cool, but he was never really worth much, not that much more interesting than if they did like, Evil Dan or Sakura (...well I guess they did do both at some point).

See, Evil Ryu as a character is not the best idea in the series by a long shot, but he works mainly because he’s Ryu designed around Akuma, which is not just cool but also works meaningfully, since Akuma was already designed to be Ryu’s darker opposite and ultimate enemy. Besides the fact that “hero becomes like their own worst enemy” is a time-tested cool idea with a lot of storytelling power and Akuma being an incredible all-timer design that is very clearly worth ripping off, Evil Ryu takes the shared traits they have, powerful martial artists who wander the world in pursuit of strong opponents to challenge them and to prove themselves the greatest among warriors, and twists Ryu into the fascimile of Akuma that he always dreaded becoming and was always in danger of becoming with or without supernatural bloodlust, changing very little about his motivation.

I’d argue Evil Ryu only really reached his potential as a character when brought back for IV, when they made him look like a monstrous and savage endgame for Ryu instead of just Ryu with a tan, and showed more thoroughly what would happen if Ryu was consumed by the Satsui. His already tattered gi is shredded beyond repair, he burns with overflowing uncontrolled power, and he is more animalistic and brutal than even Akuma because he has no control whatsoever over this power. Like Ryu, he lives for battle, he wanders the world with nothing on his back to seek out and fight the strongest warriors, but he has fully devolved into a fighting beast who fights and maims and kills wantonly, who finds no answer in the heart of battle because the heart isn’t there anymore and there’s only a volcanic gaping necrotic mark of shame and tragedy where it should have been.

Twisting Ryu to make him more like Akuma works because Akuma is Ryu’s nemesis, and because they have enough in common to have a middleground, something that Ryu cannot concede ground on (because the one time he did, he nearly killed the world’s strongest fighter with a cheap shot attack, over a fight he clearly lost). But twisting the other shotos to be more like Akuma always felt more tacked on than anything, because they just don’t have the same dynamic and motivation that Ryu has, and that’s kinda the major problem I have with Violent Ken: he’s an evil version of Ken who actually has nothing to do with Ken’s character, he’s just an imitation of Evil Ryu in Ken cosplay, and he doesn’t even get to fall in the dark side of his own accord since it’s Bison’s doing.

And so this is why I think this, this thing that shows up for like a couple of pages? This is what Evil/Violent Ken should have always looked like. A Ken who becomes the worst version of himself, who maintains his basic character and motivations but is wholly and completely stripped of humanity, isn’t going to be a fighting hobo in torn clothing and an obsession with pursuing strength, because that’s not what Ken is.

Ken is the upper class rival who has everything his rival does not, the champ who flaunts his strength and privilege and fights with flash and style, the “arrogant steward of globalized capitalism” as he’s called in the comic. Evil Ken isn’t going to be a battle berserker caked in blood and dirt, he’s going to be Dio Brando squeezed into an immaculate yuppie shitbag suit. He’s going to be the picture-perfect image of selfishness

I frankly really hope this design shows up again even past whatever else they have planned for this cover-up. I love this split-second idea of Evil Ken too much to never see it again. I really want Terrorist A.I Ken to be a thing they bring back.

#street fighter #sf6 #street fighter 6 #capcom #ken #ken masters #jp #johann petrovich #chun-li #li-fen #videogames #sf6 comic

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