Besides when she was absolutely top tier in Third Strike
When you think of Street Fighter, Ryu and Ken are probably the first two characters that pop into mind since they’ve basically been the poster boys since the initial game, but Chun-Li is probably right behind them.
Why is it then that almost no one goes into battle with the “strongest woman in the world” across most of her appearances despite being one of the most popular in the Street Fighter fan base overall?
MC MuraFGC recently dropped a rather introspective video delving into one of his favorite characters and go-to mains to see what scares off players from giving her more of a shot.
If you look at the hard stats, Chun-Li has remained in the lower half of characters in terms of usage across Street Fighter 6’s life so far where she most recently ranked at 14th overall with only 2.3% of matches featuring her.
That extends to Street Fighter 5 as well where she fared a bit better in the ranks though she’d basically always stay outside of the top 10 despite her being considered one of the strongest characters in the final season thanks in part to her V-Trigger 2 shenanigans.
This is in stark contrast to Ryu and Ken, who are often both at or near the top of the leaderboard in terms of usage to the point of being around or even above double digits.
You can also couple that with Cammy and Juri out-performing Chun stat-wise across both previous games as well where they both regularly cracked the top 10.
The only notable exception we can point to is Street Fighter 3: Third Strike where Chun-Li was of course among the two best characters in the game alongside Yun.
A large part of that is due to the technical nature Capcom likes to design her with in slightly different ways across the series that makes her overall gameplan a lot harder to figure out compared to the Shotos or even the other leading ladies of Street Fighter.
Part of that also likely comes down to her simply using charge moves as well while now stacking motions and stances on top of that in Street Fighter 6 though that still doesn’t quite tell the full story.
So we’ll let Mura take you on a journey with Chun-Li below.