Okay, okay, I know that the entire game doesn’t take place in Metro City, but a very large part of Street Fighter 6’s world tour mode including some of its stages are centered in an important Capcom location, namely Metro City.
Street Fighter has a long history in this city, but as most fans are aware, it’s more intricately tied with its sister franchise Final Fight, Capcom’s popular beat’em up from back in 1989 which established strong ties and canon coexistence with the Street Fighter series as early as the Street Fighter Alpha games. So with that in mind… Where are all the actual Metro City residents?
Metro City has been well-established as being the place where the Final Fight games take place and hence where most of the characters originating from Final Fight live and hang out. So when Metro City held such a big focus in Street Fighter 6’s early promotional materials, it honestly left me more confused than anything.
At that point, we already knew the roster for the game as well as its first season due to some unfortunate leaks, so we were well aware there weren’t any Final Fight characters coming. But if that hadn’t been the case, I’d definitely have assumed that we’d be seeing a strong Final Fight presence in the roster.
As it stands right now, the only actual proper Final Fight connection we have is the fact that Kimberly is Guy’s student, and… That’s really it.
Kimberly herself doesn’t have any direct connection to Final Fight, but she does have some kind of student-master relationship with Guy who is an iconic Final Fight character, so her being a Metro City resident makes sense and all, but it really doesn’t scratch the surface of the characters we know hang out in Metro City.
Of course, I’m aware that there are many Final Fight characters who show up in the game’s World Tour mode including one of the Final Fight 2 protagonists Carlos Miyamoto who even got his own theme song arrangement if you fight him in the mode.
While those are all nice callbacks and easter eggs, so many of Street Fighter’s most beloved cast members are from Final Fight and it’s a bit weird that none of them are around, not just in the launch roster, but now two full seasons into the game.
Even ignoring some of the really popular Final Fight characters that never joined the Street Fighter roster such as the longtime mayor and wrestling champion Mike Haggar, let’s just have a look at the Final Fight and Final Fight-adjacent characters who already made the jump to Street Fighter yet remain conspicuously absent from Capcom’s latest entry in the series.
The case for Cody: Mayor of Metro City. ‘Nuff said.
In all seriousness, Cody is probably the straight up most popular character out of the entire Final Fight cast and while I personally don’t like what they did with him in Street Fighter 5 in regards to his move set, he still remained popular with Street Fighter 5 players as well.
The only real challenge in bringing Cody in is specifically that, trying to appease fans of both versions of Cody since they were so drastically different in how they played and what moves they had.
Nevertheless, he’s looking more and more like a mainstay in the Street Fighter series ever since his debut back in Street Fighter Apha 3, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Cody comes around sooner or later.
Honestly, it’s kind of weird that Metro City’s hero as well as its mayor is nowhere to be seen, especially when Street Fighter 6 does mention that he’s still Mayor as well. All these things put together make me think Cody’s inclusion is more of a “when” than an “if”.
The case for Guy: Guy actually has a stronger case than several others by virtue of already having an in due to his personal connection with Kimberly, appearing in her story images in-game as well.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that Guy doesn’t have a chance because Kimberly would play too similar to him, but I honestly don’t feel like that’s really true. Kimberly is quite different from what we’ve usually seen of Guy even if she does borrow a few of her moves, so I don’t think that would be much of an issue.
There’s also the fact that Guy did skip last game, Street Fighter 5, meaning that the developers likely feel more inclined to bring him back than someone who was already back more recently since he does usually rank quite high in the popularity polls.
Worth mentioning is that Kimberly is the third character Capcom have put in Street Fighter who is a Bushinryu practitioner but not Guy, which could come off as them trying to replace him multiple times, but I doubt that’s much of a factor considering his popularity and that he isn’t actually all that close to Kimberly as far as move sets go.
All things considered I’d see Guy’s chances to eventually join the roster as decently high.
The case for Maki: The best case I can make for Maki, one of my personal favorites, is that she’s cool as hell. She has a brief cameo in one of Street Fighter 6’s story images, but nothing else that really indicates anything about her current status.
But quite frankly, that’s really all she has going for her. She hasn’t been in Street Fighter for a very long time and the one time she was, it was more of an asset flip since they put her in a late version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 alongside other Capcom vs. SNK 2 characters Yun, Eagle and Ingrid.
On top of that, her being a Bushinryu practitioner puts her in direct competition with two other characters on this list in a roster which already has Kimberly. While I think there’s definitely room for two ninjas in the roster, her lacking the attendance record of Guy, the connection with Kimberly that Guy has and just general recognizability in the franchise makes her a hard sell over someone she’d likely be in direct competition with.
That said, she also manages to rate decently high in popularity polls despite these factors, so while I wouldn’t count on her showing up I wouldn’t count her out entirely either.
The case for Lucia: For the setting, Lucia fits amazingly well. Metro City has Mad Gear Gang members roaming around everywhere and as one of the city’s police officers, Lucia being present to keep them in check would make perfect sense, but as far as I can tell there’s been no mention or indication of her in Street Fighter 6 whatsoever.
While she’s a fairly old Final Fight character, her Street Fighter debut was quite recent back in the later days of Street Fighter 5 and I was honestly a huge fan of her implementation in that game and given her results in recent popularity polls I don’t seem to be the only one, though part of those results is probably her recency leading to her staying fresh in people’s minds.
I think that Lucia sticks out enough with her moves and personality and just in general fits well with the setting that her odds of joining eventually are quite high.
Her main competition is the fact that we’re not getting that many characters per year, meaning that additions have to be chosen carefully and while she’s decently popular, there are a lot of very popular characters that still aren’t in.
The case for Zeku: Zeku suffers from some of the same issues as Maki, though not all of them. He was a fairly welcome addition in Street Fighter 5 and had an interesting gimmick in that he could swap between his old and young forms which makes him stick out in Street Fighter’s cast of characters quite a bit.
The only reference to him in Street Fighter 6 that I’m aware of is that the recently released Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury mentions she’s heard of ninja techniques that cane make you young again, an obvious callback to Zeku’s special power.
Zeku isn’t an unpopular character, but he isn’t really a popular character either and since he has to directly compete with Guy and Maki to an extent, he seems like an unlikely pick to be prioritized over either of them, especially Guy. I don’t think his inclusion is impossible, but I’d label him probably the least likely in this list.
Speaking of this list, it’s honestly debatable if he should be on it at all since he never really appeared in Final Fight itself, but was part of Guy’s backstory once he appeared in Street Fighter… But he has enough ties to Final Fight that I’ll let it slide like a Bushinryu ninja would.
The case for Rolento: Although Rolento is definitely a Final Fight character, his ties to Metro City itself have always seemed tenuous at best.
He’s a member of the Mad Gear Gang, but his actual goal is to make his own nation and it just doesn’t feel like he really has any relevance to Final Fight or the Mad Gear Gang at this point.
Although I actually like him quite a lot, but popularity is pretty lackluster and based on the argument “we’re in Metro City, so we should have Metro City character”, he really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
I could see him entering the roster at some point moreso because of his unique abilities and moves than anything else, but as far as relevance and popularity go he doesn’t seem to shine particularly well in either area. I’d say his chances don’t feel that great.
The case for Sodom: Sodom is probably the saddest character on this entire list simply because he has been left out to such an extreme degree.
I actually made the case for him at one point back in Street Fighter 5, largely based on the fact that he was the only unique character from the Alpha roster who never got to join either Street Fighter 4 or Street Fighter 5, but still his inclusion never came to pass.
Funnily enough, Capcom even gave a reason for why he was snubbed back at Street Fighter 5’s release by saying he was too difficult to fit into the story and that they couldn’t put Sodom in if Cody, Haggar or Guy aren’t there.
This logic doesn’t really work at all considering they later put Abigail, a Mad Gear enemy just like Sodom, in without having Cody, Haggar or Guy in the roster, so while reasons have been given for Sodom’s long absence, they seem more like excuses at this point.
The one virtue that Sodom seems to have in regards to Street Fighter 6 is that he gets mentioned by E. Honda a lot in World Tour and that you can find both his semi-truck and a store he’s the owner of (where his employee by the way happens to be named Gomorrah…) so at least there’s ample references to him in the city itself.
Based on his track record, Capcom not seeming to be very fond of him as well as his fairly low popularity overall, I’d say Sodom’s chances are not very good at all. The only thing he really has going for him is that he’s been away for so long… Which isn’t a very strong point, it seems.
The case for Hugo: Hugo is another character who sits firmly in that “not actually that popular” category based on polls, though the people who love him really love him… And let’s be honest, his chances probably weren’t hurt by the massive attention Hayao brought to him back at Evo last summer.
Hugo used to be the biggest grappler in Street Fighter as a whole until that title got usurped from him by Abigail in Street Fighter 5, though honestly the size difference is only around two inches (or four centimeters), so it’s not exactly a huge Abigail win.
As for Street Fighter 6, Hugo himself does not directly appear in World Tour, though an Andore does appear as a boss fight. Hugo’s full name is Hugo Andore, though it has been established that there is a full Andore family with several members, so most likely it’s one of Hugo’s brothers who you battle against in World Tour.
It feels pretty obvious to say that Hugo’s main competition is Abigail, though, they are both gigantic characters with a command grab and big swings playstyle who originate from the same franchise… The only question is which one Capcom prefers.
If the in-game character poll is any indication, Hugo falls very short of Abigail but it’s probably not that much of a data point since it only polls those who already bought the game.
Hugo definitely sticks out, that’s for sure, and when Capcom decide that they want an even bigger grappler than Zangief, it’s likely the choice will be between him and Abigail. I’m fairly sure that day will come eventually and honestly? My odds on this one go squarely down the middle, I’d consider it a 50-50.
The case for Poison: Poison sticks out among the Mad Gear gang in a way that others don’t in a very big way: she’s popular.
Despite making her actual franchise debut in Street Fighter 4, Poison was actually included in the cross-over game Street Fighter X Tekken before she’d ever been playable in Street Fighter itself, and ever since then she’s cemented herself as a mainstay.
Much like Cody in Street Fighter 5, she received a full move set overhaul (one I personally wasn’t very fond of), so much like him it’ll come down to which direction they’d prefer to go with how they present her in the game if she gets added, since she has two entirely different pools of moves to look at.
None of this is a case against her, but actually might even enhance her chances since they’ve got even more stuff to work with. Hell, they might even give her another brand new weapon and put her in with a third entirely different move set for all we know.
But much like Cody’s chances, I genuinely feel like Poison is more of a “when” than an “if”. I’d be very shocked if she isn’t part of Street Fighter 6 by the time it finishes its roster.
The case for Abigail: Honestly, the case for Abigail was already largely made in the Hugo section.
The two things I can give Abigail over Hugo is that he has recency which makes him more immediately recognizable to people who are newer to the franchise and the fact that his workshop, which was his stage back in Street Fighter 5, is present in World Tour mode of Street Fighter 6.
Overall, I think Hugo and Abigail feel like they fill a very similar niche even if their move sets themselves are quite different and honestly, there’s probably not room for both of them (maybe even literally not room for both of them on the screen).
As I said in the Hugo section, I’m pretty sure this one will just come down to the whims of the development team whenever they decide they want someone bigger than Zangief. I think it’s a lock that we’ll see Hugo or Abigail eventually — but only one of them. Which one is a pure coin toss.
There you have it, those are my calls on why these Final Fight characters may or may not join Street Fighter 6 down the line (though frankly I think we should already have a few in the roster, but that’s just me). Who are you hoping to see added to the roster from our Metro City inhabitants?
Source: Event Hubs
