Let’s be honest, Scorpion and Sub-Zero may be up there, but there’s one face that’s become more synonymous with the fighting game genre than any other, and I don’t even have to say his name or his franchise for you to know whom it is I’m talking about.
While you can surely point to tons of takes on figures like Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson in fighting games, Street Fighter’s Ryu is easily the most recognizable and therefore copied archetype in the genre. In his new video The Fighters Den takes a closer look at some 15 Ryu clones in an effort to pick out which one did it best.
To be frank, this is a somewhat subjective concept to begin with. As far as the The Fighters Den is concerned, the criteria for being the best Ryu clone includes appearance, being Japanese, fighting style, and being the main protagonist of the character’s respective title.
Especially following the success of Street Fighter 2 in the early to mid 1990’s, tons of copy cat fighting games came out with copy cat characters. The 15 examples Fighters Den moves through are almost all clearly cloned from the genre’s most inspirational character, and some are guilty of some pretty egregious imitations.
One example from 1994’s Kaiser Knuckle is named Kazuya (not to be confused with the Tekken mainstay). Kazuya doesn’t fit the criteria exactly as he looks a little more like Final Fight’s Cody with longer hair, but overlaps in just about every other way.
What struck us most about Kazuya’s design, however, wasn’t so much that he was given hadoken and dragon punch type moves, but rather that his arcade ending sees him walking through a hilariously similar 16-bit forest to what we recall from Ryu’s iconic Street Fighter 2 ending.
You may or may not agree with Fighters Den’s opinions, but a lot of the charm of this video is found in the sheer presentation of so many clones. Most of us in the FGC are aware of how many copycats followed SF2, but seeing them detailed out here is still a lot of fun, and you’ll more than likely see some games and characters you never even knew existed.