Today we’re talking about a character from Street Fighter 4 who failed on all of these fronts so hard that he’s arguably the most hated character in franchise history.
That character was the big-bellied and even bigger-mouthed Rufus, Capcom’s off-putting amalgamation of some of the worst American stereotypes. But what exactly about the character made him so unlikable and does he really deserve the crap reputation he’s garnered?
Rufus’s initial design was actually nothing like what we ended up with. Starting out as a thin but muscular, bald, black man with a furred gi similar to Ryu and Ken’s, (they actually gave this costume to SF4 Ken as one of his alternate colors) his original name was King Cobra and he was meant to be a more acrobatic counterpart to the traditional shoto.
Cobra would incorporate break dancing into Kung Fu for a “breakung-fu” style that Capcom figured would resonate heavily with American audiences circa 2008. Unlike previous Street Fighter games, the development team for SF4 wanted to incorporate fan requests from outside Japan to create characters that would be more directly appealing to the cultures and countries they hailed from.
About halfway through the process of recording the character’s lines, however, one team member brought an idea out of left field to make King Cobra obese, which was green lit and sparked a series of alterations that completely transformed him. Then they made him a blonde, long-haired man with a fairly off-putting visual design that was now aimed to “freak people out” in a manner similar to Blanka amid the cast of Street Fighter 2.
Rufus’ story is wholly ineffectual to Street Fighter 4’s narrative. He doesn’t appear a single time in the Ties That Bind SF4 anime film, and only interacts with a few roster members in rather meaningless ways during arcade ladders.
It seems every time we see the character it’s only to highlight some part of his extremely off-putting personality but he never moves the plot forward, undergoes any kind of character evolution, or even hints at the idea that he might go through some kind of arc.
The entire Street Fighter universe is more or less apathetic to the bumbling joke of a character and thus, so are we as players.
Executive Producer Yoshinori Ono noted in an interview that he and his team made Rufus intentionally silly, likening him to an “American Dan.” Unlike Dan, the bumbling big boy has virtually no foundational story for his personality to root in and grow from, thus Rufus simply becomes the sum of a hodgepodge of surface level ideas that just don’t add up to much.
As such, Rufus is more of a joke on the audience as we’re constantly trolled by cringe comments and dumb decisions.
Dan also brought an interesting aspect of interaction to the table as he’s designed to obviously worse than his roster mates, and so players who win with him get some matter of fact extra gloating points; Rufus was notoriously good at winning in some of the worst ways.
Though he was never really regarded as a contender for being the best in the game, Rufus had some incredible tools that could make playing against him just as annoying as listening to him rant.
Despite his size and shape, Rufus retained the speed and agility of developers’ original intentions, and had a dive kick with no initial height restriction. He also had a move called the Messiah Kick, an invincible reversal that would seemingly beat any maneuver it clashed with, meaning users could and would often just toss it out haphazardly.
On top of all this, Rufus had seemingly endless ways of converting successful hits into his Space Opera Symphony Ultra 1, adding even more damage and frustration to the equation.
He was a somewhat prominent character in the competitive realm as players like Ricki Ortiz and Justin Wong used him to compete in and win many high profile tournaments.
Check out the full video below for more details on the ill-fated journey of Rufus and then let us know in the comments if you think Capcom should try to bring him back or if you never want to see him in another Street Fighter again.
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