There’s a good chance you don’t even know it because Capcom doesn’t tend to highlight them as much as they could, but Ryu isn’t the “main character” of each Street Fighter game. He was back in the early games, but after Alpha 3 developers decided to anchor their story threads around other newcomers (while still widely keeping Ryu as the face of the franchise).
The protagonists of each game have seen varying levels of appreciation and success, but perhaps the most interesting instance comes from the least interesting protagonist: Street Fighter 4’s Abel.
Capcom followed a similar path with Abel to their extremely successful Cammy (introduced in Street Fighter 2) as he was a clone made as a potential replacement body for M. Bison who had amnesia and blonde hair. Unlike Cammy, however, Abel seemed to have next to nothing for personality.
His interactions with others were muted, dry, and confused as he seemed aloof in most of his in-game story appearances. What’s more, Capcom set Abel up with a decent canvas on which to illustrate a decent story, but seemed to refuse to paint anything.
Virtually none of the mysteries surrounding the character were answered by the end of Street Fighter 4, nor were they explained in his non-playable side appearance during the events of Street Fighter 5. In the Street Fighter 4 animated film, The Ties That Bind, Ryu is the central focus and Abel is relegated to having a non-speaking, six second cameo right at the end.
The French mixed martial artists didn’t even appear on any of the main box art designs for any of the SF4 evolutions (there were four) and so it really seems as though Capcom decided to retract everything about Abel’s main protagonist status save for the title.
In fact, the more we look into it the more we find that plans for Abel were apparently and drastically changed more than once during his development and beyond. The character was initially going to be a younger, androgynous-looking boy before becoming the hulking figure that resembles Russian fighter Fedor Emelianenko.
The alteration here may have been in service to the story thread that sees Abel as part of the line of Shadaloo clones that would eventually churn out Seth, Street Fighter 4’s main antagonist. Seth was originally to be named Cain, setting us up for an obvious reference to the dense biblical story of warring brothers Cain and Abel.
Seth’s name was changed later in development, (Seth is the third brother who is a kind of replacement for Cain) and the two hardly have much in the way of interactions in SF4 as the mega popular Juri winds up being the one to take out the big baddie.
Abel’s story does get a bit interesting when he meets up with Guile as there’s allusion to the idea that Abel has had some kind of run in with the deceased Charlie Nash. Like the others, this thread doesn’t get much elaboration, but it does point to what may have been a very interesting but abandoned connection to another French character from Street Fighter 3 Third Strike: Remy.
You’ll get all the details, theorizing, and more in the full video below. We hope you find both entertainment and enjoyment as you watch, and would greatly appreciate any and all likes, comments, and subscriptions to our YouTube Channel so we can do even more video explorations like this in the future.