It’s been established by Capcom for a very, very long time that Rival Schools and Street Fighter take place in the same universe. In fact, it was established in the very first game in the Rival Schools franchise way back in 1997 when Street Fighter’s Sakura Kasugano appeared in that title as a hidden character.
Now, you could always make the argument that maybe she was just a bonus character for fun, but she actually interacted with the characters storyline-wise and was established to be long-time friends with Rival Schools alumni Hinata Wakaba and Natsu Ayuhara. Despite this, it took a long time for Rival Schools to actually have any kind of impact on Street Fighter.
It wasn’t until Street Fighter 5 that we’d see the favor be reciprocated, originally just with Rival Schools characters appearing in the background of the Kanzuki Beach, where Hinata Wakaba and Tiffany Lords are featured in the background playing on the beach.
Given that Sakura is friends with the Rival Schools girls, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that Karin had also befriended them, so it was a nice little nod.
Of course, a few years later we would see a much more substantial crossover between Rival Schools and Street Fighter and indeed the first actual Rival Schools content for over 20 years.
This was when Akira Kazama was revealed for Street Fighter 5’s final season. The reveal of her inclusion was in August of 2020 and she’d eventually join the roster a year later in August of 2021.
Along with Akira, many other Rival Schools easter eggs followed. The biggest one, of course, was the inclusion of her older brother Daigo Kazama as her V-Trigger ability, where he’d come in to protect his little sister.
She also launched with a stage Rival Riverside which, similarly to the classic Street Fighter 4 stage Overpass, had you battling under a bridge close to the riverbed in Japan.
Rival Riverside also featured cameos from Akira’s teammates, who were Daigo’s closest friends in the Rival Schools game, Gan and Edge. So with Akira’s inclusion, we saw a big move towards Rival Schools being legitimatized as a part of Street Fighter’s universe.
Last week, I already talked about Akira’s own chances in a story about returning Street Fighter 5 characters and given her extremely warm reception, I think she’s very likely to join Street Fighter 6’s roster eventually.
To make it even more topical, we just recently got a Rival Schools Battle Pass announced for Street Fighter 6. But what about other cast members from Rival Schools? Well, let’s have a look at some of them I think would be nice additions.
The easiest choice by far is Hinata Wakaba since she already has a pre-established connection, being the childhood friend of Sakura and all. Though… well, you’d probably need to have Sakura in first before adding her, but still.
Hinata is actually pretty similar to Sakura herself, though not entirely identical. She does similar moves to Sakura’s Shououken and Shunpukyaku, but she only has funny moves such as kicking her shoe off of her foot.
The funny part of this is that she doesn’t pick her shoe up but can still do the move, so she essentially has infinite shoes at her disposal… pretty nifty.
While she may not be the most exciting pick available, she is a Rival Schools staple and already is connected to Street Fighter so she just kind of makes sense.
Generally viewed as the main protagonist of the franchise, Batsu Ichimonji is a character who may initially come off as a bad guy due to his rudeness and rough vocabulary, but he’s actually a very motivated guy with a strong sense of justice — fitting for a protagonist.
Basically the archetypal Japanese shonen manga protagonist, which is a perfect fit for a school-based setting in a fighting game, Batsu fights for what he believes in and then fights some more.
As you’d expect from a fighting game main character, he’s essentially an all-rounder character who’s decent at everything but doesn’t necessarily excel at anything in particular.
He has a standard projectile, actually comes equipped with a dive kick — though it’s extremely unsafe on block, contrary to what you’d normally see in Street Fighter — so it’s normally used as a combo ender if anything, since Rival Schools has a very high emphasis on launching opponents into air combos, which Akira also brought with her to Street Fighter 5.
Much like Hinata, he may not be the most exciting choice but he is a character who sticks out as recognizable simply because he’s one of the faces of the franchise.
He also already got adapted to 2D mechanics, though not quite Street Fighter itself, when he appeared in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, so there’s some inspiration to be taken from there if he were to be included.
Okay, I’ll admit it — there might be some slight bias here. From the time I spent with Rival Schools, Tiffany Lords is easily my personal favorite character (unlikely to be surprising to anyone who’s followed my fighting game mains since the vast majority of them are blonde).
Unlike most characters in Rival Schools who are Japanese (makes sense, it takes place in a Japanese school after all), Tiffany is actually American and is a transfer student… kind of explains the blonde hair, huh.
Similarly to most characters from the franchise, though, she embodies a sport or extracurricular activity in her moveset, in her case cheerleading. This gets mixed with a variety of kickboxing moves to make up her fighting style.
Since she’s based on cheerleading, Tiffany does a lot of spinning and flipping which would be really cool to see with modern animations and I feel like out of the Rival Schools cast, she’d probably be one of the most fun characters for developers to make and modernize the moves of.
As for her personality, she’s a peppy and fairly stereotypical teenage girl, Tiffany transfers together with Roy Bromwell (another American character) who she’s in love with and quickly embraces the fighting-centered mantra among the high schools in the game’s setting.
Tiffany has a slight in due to her already appearing in the Kanzuki Beach stage alongside Hinata Wakaba,. While I wouldn’t say that really increases her chances notably, it at least shows that she was at the forefront of Capcom’s designer’s minds when they decided to work Rival Schools more into Street Fighter itself.
She’s definitely not a character with any particular story relevance, but I find it hard to imagine that any of Rival Schools’ story beats would carry over into the Street Fighter mainline series anyway… so since she has a good design and is a fun character to play, I’d love to see Tiffany get some more mainstream screen time.
One of relatively few adult characters who appear in the franchise, Hayato Nekketsu is a hot-blooded teacher (his last name literally means hot-blooded, so it’s pretty on the nose) who is the Physical Education teacher at Taiyo Academy, the school which Hinata and Batsu are enrolled in.
Generally seen walking around with a bamboo sword, Hayato believes in corporal punishment to discipline his students which… would be a big no-no in real life, but given it’s a franchise based around everyone beating the crap out of each other on school grounds, we can probably let this one slide.
Interestingly, Hayato has some issues with any potential implementation that other characters don’t have where he was designed by an outside source, a manga author named Kazuhiko Shimamoto, which led to him not being included in certain art books for the franchise citing legal issues with the rights to the character.
Since then, however, he has appeared in art for Street Fighter 5 around the time of Akira’s inclusion, so it’s likely that any rights issues are somewhat manageable if Capcom wanted to include him.
Zaki is one of the few characters who actually did not appear in the original Rival Schools game but was introduced in the sequel.
Originally the leader of a massive girls-only delinquent gang, her parents enrolled her in Seijyun Girls’ High School to set her straight… that’s right, one of the several schools where everyone beats the crap out of each other. Good plan.
Based on a stereotypical female delinquent type design, she is a fairly antisocial person who doesn’t like other people, though she gradually warms up to others after spending time with Akira and their third teammate, Yurika, in the second game.
While she has normal up-close moves as well, she uses a chain in her moveset to fight opponents from a distance and many of her moves are chargeable but leave her open to attack during the charge, making her a tricky character who can bait her opponents into moving incorrectly and punish them for it.
Given that Street Fighter 6 is currently fairly low on zoning characters, if Capcom decided to dig more into the Rival Schools roster Zaki could be a very interesting choice from a gameplay perspective. It also doesn’t hurt if they add Akira to the game since Zaki is one of her closest friends.
If you were to adapt her to a Street Fighter scenario, she could basically be a stance character where she either wields her chain or fights up-close which would be an interesting dynamic.
I think she’s not a bad choice if implemented, but she’s also a bit more obscure than most of Rival Schools’ cast, so potentially not being as recognizable as some others might be to her detriment… though, to be honest, Rival Schools has been on ice for so long that most of them are probably around the same level of unknown in today’s day and age.
Daigo Kazama is the older brother of Akira Kazama and definitely has the biggest in for a Street Fighter inclusion since we already saw him as a major part in Street Fighter 5.
While he wasn’t playable, he was actually part of Akira’s moveset as her V-Trigger where he comes in to help his sister beat her foes.
In the Rival Schools universe, he enrolled in Gedo High School which was a chaotic school but Daigo, through his power, managed to get all the students under his command and became known as their overall leader.
Generally nothing more than a pawn in the Rival Schools game, Daigo appears as one of the strongest characters but gets brainwashed by the main villains in both games, meaning that Daigo himself doesn’t have much agency in the story.
Nevertheless, he is established as one of the most powerful students in the game’s setting and is the catalyst for Akira to fight at all since she wants to find her brother and figure out what happened to him.
Because of his status power-wise he feels like a fairly natural fit for being a character who can actually go toe-to-toe with the martial arts masters of Street Fighter, so it would be interesting to see how Capcom handled Daigo if they brought him to Street Fighter, transferring him from his “big fish in a small pond” status to a full-fledged world warrior.
Of course, there are many more characters in the Rival Schools franchise and while I tried to avoid some of the more goofy ones or too sport-oriented ones (such as Nagare Namikawa, a swimmer who… swims mid-air to make his moveset work), Rival Schools truly does shine due to its bizarre cast members.
I feel like any of these characters would be apt inclusions to join the Street Fighter universe, but what about you? Any characters from Rival Schools that you’d rather see? Let us know in the comments.
