The world of Street Fighter includes no shortage of villains and evil factions out to foil Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken and the like, but it appears some new actors are getting set to hit the stage.
Udon Entertainment recently teased a brand new line of Street Fighter comics that are connected to Street Fighter 6 and may indicate a different threat on the horizon in the future.
Street Fighter Prime is set to kick off in 2025 with a special #0 prelude issue written by Matt Moylan dropping in January with some interesting implications for the world and potentially game.
Chief among them is a new set of villains shrouded in the shadows.
Their name is Vortex.
We can garner a few details from the group from the official cover teaser and comic description:
“The next era of Street Fighter comics begins here! Zangief and Marisa make an ominous discovery in Italy! Brother-in-laws Guile and Ken come to blows! And Chun-li investigates the mysterious organization known as Vortex!”
According to the image, there’s likely five main members of Vortex, and they appear to be new characters entirely — though the one on the right almost looks like Ken’s Outfit 3 from the silhouette.
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What’s probably even more intriguing than their apparent shared interest in big hair, however, is Vortex’s armaments.
At least three members seem to be armed with weapons or instruments that they’ll presumably use in battle over their bare hands.
The guy crouching up front is holding what looks like two long batons, so perhaps he’ll have a similar style to Eagle.
And then there’s the person on the right putting what may be an ax over their shoulder and the girl on the right is holding what appears to be a guitar (but grabbing it by the body with the neck facing downwards).
Maybe the guitar and sticks indicate the group is influenced by music, which could be a cool twist for Street Fighter.
While long, blunt instruments have become more commonplace in the series lately with JP and Falke, sharp / bladed weapons are still rarer for main cast members outside of Cody, Ibuki and Sodom.
And since we’ve already seen guitars used the likes of Guilty Gear’s I-No, Darkstalkers’ Lord Raptor and Dante in Marvel vs. Capcom, a new character jamming out against the world warriors would be a welcome addition.
The cover art featuring Vortex is labeled as top secret, however, and won’t be revealed until release, so there’s not much else to know about them since the group isn’t featured on any of the other covers either.
As things stand right now in the Street Fighter 6 story, we’ve seen a multitude of factions including the Mad Gear Gang, Amnesia and Neo Shadaloo along with the remnants of Shadaloo.
Despite that, most of them haven’t really been up to anything relevant lately besides Shadaloo, so there would seemingly be room for a new group of baddies in town.
We also have some hope that Vortex will not have any concrete ties to the other evildoers because outside of Necalli and potentially G, all of the Street Fighter villains have basically been connected to Shadaloo, the Secret Society or Mad Gear in some significant way.
All of this is very interesting to think about, but we also don’t know if Vortex will ever show up in the Street Fighter games.
Udon of course doesn’t confirm whether Prime is canon to Street Fighter 6 or not in the brief description and teaser, but it does appear to at least be connected since they’re using the new characters like Marisa and modern designs for the returning cast.
Although much of their content remains fairly standalone, Udon has contributed to the main story as recently as the Street Fighter 6: Days of the Eclipse run from just last year, which served as basically a prelude to the events of World Tour in the game.
There was also Street Fighter 5: The Life and Death(s) of Charlie Nash, which set up the resurrection of the titular character before the main story.
So Prime may help set up the next directions SF6 could take after Season 2.
If any particular Vortex member or the whole group end up being a hit among fans, we would likely see them added to the games at some point.
Unless Udon and Capcom have been working closely together for some time now on Vortex, however, we probably still wouldn’t see any of them as actual DLC characters for likely at least two years considering how far out the developers have to plan additions now.
The group could also end up as part of the Street Fighter canon without making a full game appearance too since we still haven’t seen the other Neo Shadaloo main members like Baba Mwalimu, Cypher, Doberman, Amrita and Goliath outside of artwork.
Many of us would probably like to see what the heck happened with G next, but this could be interesting too.
It seems we’ll be learning more by the time January rolls around.
Via Bleeding Cool.