The volume in the Evo 2015 ballroom had already reached ridiculous levels as fans had just finished watching Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 finals and were preparing for Ultra Street Fighter 4’s top eight, but when Capcom hit us all with a trailer for a brand new character coming to the then-soon to be released Street Fighter 5, we all lost it.
It came in waves, too, as each time this badass Aztec warrior showed off a new special the crowd quickly expressed more approval. This was our very first introduction to Necalli, a character who had tons of promise… until Capcom revealed his story.
As many of us recall, however, Capcom wouldn’t release the main story for Street Fighter 5 until some months after the game had released, and the breadcrumb bits we learned about Necalli during that time actually made us even more interested in him.
He was introduced as a mysterious and ancient Aztec warrior who served a particular role as an emissary of the gods. His specific mission is to consume the souls of earth’s strongest warriors, and we learned that he’s an entity who appears every few hundred years to do his dark work.
While we didn’t have his contributions to SF5’s main events we did have Necalli’s backstory as narrated by an Aztec character named “The Warrior Prophet.” Mr. P prophesies that the character is about to awaken again and that he’ll feast on the souls of Ryu, Dhalsim, and M. Bison.
This instantly made Necalli even more massively formidable as he took out the best of both the good and the bad guys without breaking a sweat, plus we got to see that he assimilates victims by turning his arms into a sand-like substance and enveloping them entirely.
The facts that Necalli was thousands of years old and that he wielded some mysterious, unnamed power meant he could connect to the past in ways most all other characters couldn’t, and suppositions that we might start hearing about the origins of one of Street Fighter’s prominent dark energies, either the Satsui no Hado or Psycho Power, naturally emerged.
How was anyone going to fight this? Would the good guys and bad guys have to team up? Necalli’s pre-story even ends with his killing and consuming the Warrior Prophet himself, leaving us effectively terrified of and intrigued by this seemingly unstoppable rebel force. Then the main story came out.
Check out the full video below to hear how things turned out, and let us know in the comments if you enjoyed and would like to hear the tales of other characters in this same style.