Characters designs/ evil characters these days

It’s never been secret that I like the badass (boss) characters (Dictator, Geese, Pyron, Kazuya, Dragonuv etc.),
However as the last few years passed by I slowly but surely realised the a lot of games are starting to lack these.

Where am I going here? Imho fighting games are slowy getting ridiculed by emo & lolli characters…

Let’s go way back to SF2:WW, this one is filled with generic stereotype fighters.
No ranting here, besides characters sometimes do need to develop over time.

Let’s jump forward to SF Alpha 2; ah the introduction of Sakura, hate her or love her.
I wasn’t too fond of the japanese school girl fanboyism, but hey I thought “it’s just one character”, we’ll be fine… and we were for a while… although we slowly did get more; Karin, Ingrid.

Let’s hop to the current times, take BlazBlue for example…
I truly wonder what happened somewhere down to the line, when we get a roster full with Mary Poppins esque girls (Rachel) and Harry Potter look-a-likes (Carl).

another example, KOF:
Ash Crimson (you know he was coming :p), I mean come on, does this crossdressing move stealer (henche Guile) look menacing or dangerous? How can he even suppose to resemble an evil character, when he looks like a chick who just came back from her 4pm beauty salon appointment.

Not hatin’ if you like that sort of thing… but no… this already to much for me to take…

What happened, what went wrong here? Was it anime? Pokemon?
Has the fighting game genre become a comedy? Sure I can handle one joke character in a game i.e. Dan, but going all out Sailor Moon on the roster is getting ridiculious.

On a different note, let’s take a look at a game with a fairly “normal” cast of characters;
Super Street Fighter IV, I truly think a couple of more “evil rooted” characters would flesh it out a bit more… let’s see what we got so far…

Dictator - ain’t gonna complain here
Sagat - More of a tweener these days… stil badass though
Vega - Twisted to the bone although a bit silly sometimes
Balrog - Just in it for the money, mercenaries don’t count
Akuma - becoming a Jedi these days, only takes fights with the “worthy”, no senseless voilence here…
Seth - More of a victim role to me… could have been better
Juri - I’m trying to like her, I really am… but she looks too much like Rita Repulsa :stuck_out_tongue: only time will tell…

That’s only 3 for in my count… Rolento and Urien wouldn’t have hurt… but that’s just my opinion.

But what matters here is; Am I the only one who misses the more serious fighters/characters?
Or am I doomed to Teletubbie-esque fighting games in the future?

Are you talking about Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, or Chaotic Evil character?
Also, majority of your post was in the scope of SF only

Money is the root of all evil…How does that NOT count?

Also:

lolUrien.

evil characters these days tend to be a bit more subtle in terms of design compared to BLATANT EVIL DICTATOR style designs.

Another reason fighters these days tend to lack them is because players have grown up a little and aren’t so attracted by the whole BLACK IS COOL cliche anymore. Developers want their characters to be gray rather than black, because it allows players to sympathise with them more. This is the reason why there weren’t any ‘true’ villain characters playable in TvC (Doronjo doesn’t count).

On the other hand, you’ve got fighting games full of nazis…

Personally, I like Seth as a villain. He’s definitely got the evil laugh down.

Seth is good as the evil guy but I agree the curve has gone downhill Bison is at the top of the hill of bad asses and then seth in sf series I feel that capcom will only start to add females to serve the virgin faboys

Urien is also a good bad guy

Hazama. Does Hakumen count?

I find it odd that someone would blame anime as though to somehow say that SF wasn’t influenced from japanese popular culture from day one.

Also isn’t this thread about villains? Blazblue’s is Hazama and he is just as much a reference to today’s anime/manga (most would say its Gin from Bleach) just as some characters in SF were based on the Jojo’s & Kinnikuman.

anyway, Hazama is a good villain. he’s a total jerk and that makes him entertaining. Nu was pretty fun too since she was friggin crazy, too bad she’s dead. OR IS SHE?! (dun dun dunnnn)

Here’s your ultimate evil character
"Born from steel, iron will, shit for brains, born to kill"

Now, who knows this song?

technically carl is evil to, considering that he is possesed by nirvana or some shit like that, also wasnt sf kinda based on HNK too
and yeah i find idiotic to blame anime, specially when sf use a lot of anime steriotypes, only that they are bland and not to whacky, compared to modern fg, people this days are dellusional if they think that sf isnt anime

Hmmm… you prove a very valid point :wgrin:

Btw I blaming anime was more or less sarcastic, should have inserted a smiley…
On Carl being possibly evil, he doesn’t look like a threat to me in terms of character design. Which some would claim as an “element of suprise attack” but seriously he doesn’t look menacing or anything like that.

Aizen wasnt menacing as well, while in glasses

oh god cannot be unseen

LOL at blaming anime, yet totally missing how SFII had a hard on for Hokuto no Ken and Jojo’s.

hyperbole much? do you even know the roster of blazblue
i like how you completely ignore hazama and hakumen as villains

i guess it’s because he’s so powerful he mocks you by being apathetic. spewing green fire is pretty cool and villainous as well… while I like him as a character to include, I’m sort of eh about him as a central character too, but whatever. I’m pretty sure he’s designed to both troll homophobes(well, transphobes really) and attract people who like effeminate guys.

you didn’t make much of a case for proving there’s some new direction where there’s no more “serious” male designs. like other whiners about “ohh fighting game character design is going to boogie hell” you just pointed out some characters that are different without examining their proportion in the roster.
sf2 had its own silliness: dhalsim and blanka. still muscular men, but lol

We went from Dio and Raoh to Aizen ,and Orochimura. Fuck outta here with these new villians. Dio was completely crazy and evil he never had any redeemable qualities all he ever did was cheat ,steal and player hate on the Joestars.

Seriously. I didn’t even know Ash Crimson was an evil character (never paid attention to KOF storylines) until recently. I was like, “This dude is a bad guy?!”

I mean you can look at characters like Dictator (Street Fighter series), Demitri (Darkstalkers series) and Kazuya (Tekken series) and automatically know they’re the bad guys. But Ash Crimson?! I’ve always thought he was just a normal female character.

Not hatin’ on Ash Crimson though, I like him. No homo.

Demitri as a bad guy is a fucking joke. Hell, take note of how goofy he became over the course of the games.

Op is a numbnuts for pointing out Ash Crimson as being a Guile ripoff when that road has been crossed years ago, like this shit is new to him. And we can’t lump Ask Crimson in with bad guys just yet anyways as it hasn’t been revealed yet.

And KOF still maintains the best ratio of overtly evil and maniacal bosses characters.