Ed is en route to Street Fighter 6 as the game’s next DLC character, and while much of the footage we’ve recently seen in his various SF6 trailers has been well-received by many on fighting game social media, the relatively new character still can’t seem to escape a reputation of being rather dull.
In our latest video essay we put Ed’s canonical history under the microscope in an effort to introduce him to players who joined the fray more recently as well as to sort of set the stage for his welcoming into SF6 on February 27.
Ed made his playable debut back in the second season of Street Fighter 5, though his very first appearance was in Balrog’s character story in Street Fighter 4.
As an apparent clone body for M. Bison, Ed was first shown as just a child escaping Bison’s labs as they exploded. Put under the tutelage of Balrog, he was to become a sort of Psycho Power-infused boxer who’d boast elements of Balrog, Bison, and perhaps Dudley.
We learned that Ed’s physical body ages extremely rapidly and so he grows into a full adult quite quickly, but fans weren’t aware of this fact at first and many of us supposed the character would be more on the scrawny side and rely on the aforementioned Psycho Power abilities to sustain himself in battle.
That’s not at all what we got when Ed actually joined the SF5 roster as developers saw him grow into a muscle-clad fighter, not unlike most every other standard Street Fighter.
The blonde haired, blue eyed character (there were a lot of these in SF5) didn’t much stand out for his appearance, but did pique interests because of his simplified “especially for beginners” design.
You can learn additional details on all this and more in the full video below. Give it a watch and let us know in the comments if (and how much) you’re excited for this latest version of Ed, and whether you think Capcom will make the character more enticing with whatever they do next with his story.