We somewhat recently did a video on the main character of Street Fighter 4 and one of the most common responses we got was “I didn’t know Ryu wasn’t the main character of Street Fighter 4.” This is an easy mistake to make because Capcom uses Ryu in virtually all of their main marketing, tends to center the story around him, and has made him the unequivocal poster boy of the franchise for the last three and a half decades.
That said, he hasn’t been the franchise’s main character since the late 1990’s in Street Fighter Alpha 3. Instead Capcom has introduced a new protagonist in each of the numbered franchise entries since Alpha, including Street Fighters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Today we’ll be going through and showing you who took center spotlight in each game as well as whether they had much of an impact or not.
The franchise’s poster boy was indeed the central protagonist of the initial entries starting with 1987’s Street Fighter 1. Story was sparse here, as the best fighter in the world (Sagat) puts on a tournament to attract the globe’s strongest foes.
Street Fighter 2 is a somewhat refined approach to this world warrior tournament idea, this time with the much more conspicuously evil M. Bison taking over as main antagonist. Still story threads didn’t really weave together to form a full tapestry, but this is where the franchise caught enough fire to inspire a third entry: Street Fighter Alpha.
Alpha is where the story really comes together in a more meaningful way, and this would be Ryu’s third and thus far final appearance as the main character.
Bison uses the now vengeful Sagat to capture Ryu, but the Emperor of Muay Thai has a last second change of heart and thus a dramatic series of events play out that see Ryu and friends ultimately thwart Bison’s plans for global domination.
Much of Street Fighter’s ongoing lore was either established or further fleshed out in Alpha, but Capcom then decided to take things in an entirely new direction with their somewhat simultaneous release of Street Fighter 3.
With all new characters and an all new approach to the series, Capcom aimed to capture new demographics. One of the ways they aimed to do this was through a brand new main character, Alex, who was based on professional wrestling’s at the time red-hot Hulk Hogan.
While garnering a cult following over time, both Alex and Street Fighter 3 as a whole didn’t exactly resonate with audiences in the way their respective predecessors did. What’s more, Ryu was still in Street Fighter 3, and was featured prominently in the game’s marketing as the franchise’s continual poster boy.
Where Alex may have had a slow start, his successor in Street Fighter 4 was just never able to get off the ground. Capcom brought in yet another bulky, blonde-haired wrestler type to lead the charge for SF4 as Abel was the official main character of the game.
How do we know Abel is the main character? Mainly because he’s labeled as such, but that’s the extent of the tangible evidence. Developers clearly sidelined Abel from the game’s main story and, though he had his fans, the character was widely seen as bland and boring by the masses.
There’s a good bit more to Abel’s full story and what led him to arguably be Street Fighter’s single worst protagonist, but the gist seems to be that Capcom lost faith in their initial ideas and ultimately decided to re-elevate Ryu back to center stage.
The story continues into Street Fighter 5 and Street Fighter 6 as Capcom made another two attempts at making someone other than Ryu their main character, but both ultimately come across as lacking or bizarre in their execution of this idea.
We cover all the above in more detail and delve into the main characters of the latest Street Fighter games in the full video here:
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