As groundbreaking as it is for Capcom to welcome characters from outside their own universe into a mainline Street Fighter title, reactions to the inclusion of SNK’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui as Street Fighter 6 DLC have been mixed.
MajinTenshinhan, DreamKing and I react to this move (as well as the inclusion of Elena and M. Bison) in the latest episode of Talk and Block, and actually found that our opinions on the matter have changed over the course of the few short days we’ve known about Street Fighter 6’s second season of DLC characters.
Street Fighter 6’s launch roster was diverse and included a handful of the non-negotiable staples, (they also included characters like E. Honda and Dhalsim, which could arguably be benched for at least a game or two at this point) but still saw fans instantly and consistently wish-listing for many of the legacy fighters from over the franchise’s three and a half decades.
To start, there’s already some grief about the fact that Capcom has reduced their number of yearly roster additions from six to just four in the transition from Street Fighter 5 to Street Fighter 6, (the price hasn’t gone down, by the way) which makes each slot all the more valuable to fans who are hoping for new faces to reinforce their engagement with the game.
There’s undoubtedly hype that comes with the unprecedented reveal of non-Capcom characters entering the mainline Street Fighter space, and Terry and Mai are amongst the most kosher choices for the honor, but many fans can’t escape the rub that comes with knowing that half of the season is being devoted to this.
Meanwhile characters like Sakura, Makotao, Sagat, Dudley, Fei-Long and C. Viper (just to name a few of many) will have to wait for at least another year. These negative feelings are underscored for many by Capcom’s choice to include Elena as one of the legacy fighters.
Those who joined the scene with Street Fighter 4 (and there are many due to the fact that SF4 brought something of a renaissance to the franchise) have a widely negative view of Elena thanks to her sub-par implementation in the Ultra SF4 update, and while she surely does have plenty of fans, she’s also clearly not atop as many wish lists as some of her more obviously popular peers.
Diversity quotas are surely in play with Elena’s inclusion, though thankfully not so much along the increasingly tired practices of shoehorning along the lines of race and gender. Director Takayuki Nakayama addressed this in a recent interview.
“[W]e didn’t have a capoeira user at the moment and we also wanted to have someone who was from Africa,” he explained to Famitsu, “which were two big reasons for including her.”
Finally there’s M. Bison, one of the franchise’s most recognizable figures and so probably the least controversial of the Season 2 quartet, who will actually be joining the roster later this month. This all adds up to an interesting, but perhaps still wanting Season 2 bundle.
While it’s easy enough to see why these decisions might not make Capcom as much money as choosing other characters would have, MajinTenshinhan translated yet another interview with SF6 developers that sheds more light on the matter, and widely changed all three of our views on it.
You can hear all of our reactions, analysis and discussion in the full episode of Talk and Block below, and we’d love to hear your two cents on the matter (especially if you’re only now learning about the the full strategy from Capcom) in both the comments here as well as directly on the video on YouTube.
Each of us offer a grade for Street Fighter 6’s Season 2 near the end of the discussion, and if you’d like to offer yours (we used a scale from F – A+) we’d love to see it.
We’ve included timestamps so you can jump to parts of the discussion you’re most interested in if you choose, and would greatly appreciate a like on the video as well as a subscription to out YouTube Channel so that we can continue to make more content like this in the future.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
02:00 – Mai and Terry
05:50 – Capcom’s reason behind including SNK guest characters
15:48 – Elena
37:00 – Bison
44:47 – Grading Season 2 DLC A-F