I’ve been playing some of the latest fighters recently and I just was wondering does anybody believe its possible to continue a series like Tekken or Street Fighter without the Main Characters. For instance a Tekken game with no Kazuya or Paul , an SF game with no Ryu, Chun Li, or Ken.
Capcom attempted this with New Generation. Originally Ryu and Ken weren’t even going to be in the game. The play testers complained so much Capcom decided to put them in, and later Akuma and Chun-li. Additionally they went back to previous character designs with Remy, Q, and Hugo.
It’s certainly possible to remove characters, but keep the spirit of the gameplay intact. I don’t think it would be a good idea to do it all at once. Simply phase out the old characters over a period of time.
It is kinda nice to have the old characters, but after playing enough I pretty much just see hitboxes floating around, if you know what i mean. I don’t mind having new characters replace the old ones as long as the game is still good.
One of the reasons I like 3S so much is that it nearly all the characters are original designs (though some characters play like old characters in one way or another), I like it when devs. go out on a limb to try something new.
I guess that when a game series go’s on it needs a cohesive element to keep it together. Since fighting game story-lines have and will always be shit, it’s usually (atleast for SF) the characters that tie the different games together - as much as I’m indifferent to Ryu and Ken I do not feel that SF would be SF without atleast those two characters.
SFIII - still has Ryu and Ken
Garou - still has Terry
Samurai Spirits Shinsho (Samurai Shodown Warriors Rage PSX) - still has Haohmaru, and a version of Hanzo
MK3 - had no scorpion lol, although he isnt a main character, fans treated the game as if he was one
_returned in UMK3
MKDA - had no Liu Kange
_By that point, its safe to say that Scorpion and Sub-Zero became main characters of franchise
Dont know if there even is an example of series that continued without main character.
Diablo ~ Diablo II would be a good example (protagonist in first part becomes a villain in second), but its not a fighting game
definitly not. werent they trying somethign like that with Toshinden? Just make it a new game. at the most have 1 word from the old tittle in the new tittle
As much as I’d like to say yes, from my experiences in this and other forums, there are too many fans who are pretty much attached to certain characters for that answer to be valid.
Theoretically, you could take all of the characters, put them all on a bus, in side character roles, or otherwise make them unplayable and the gameplay wouldn’t change a bit if you replace them all with clones. Hell, the final fantasy franchise is an example of this being done well enough to be a successful franchise. Granted, it’s an RPG and people don’t have the expectation of seeing old characters again, but the point still remains.
However, rather or not this should be done is something I believe should be handled on a case by case basis. While it would be another topic of it’s own to give my opinion of what Capcom should do with the Street Fighter franchise… okay very quickly, how many characters do you think would be given permanent bench duty and have their moves given to other characters in some cases if Capcom adopted Arc sys’s philosophy of character design? 80, 90 percent? I want to hear someone logically defend the existence of Sagot, Ken, Dan, Guile as returning playable characters without mentioning fan reactions. I can see Sagot being a tourney banned Boss version of Ryu for the first game, but other than, what the hell?
Kay, now that I got that outburst out of my system, I think Alex got the good idea for how Capcom should go about reinventing the Street fighter series. Take 3rd strike, give it a new title, adopt Arc… on second thought, this is 2010 Capcom we’re talking about. Just repaint 3rd strike and run with it. =P
All I gotta say is hurry up and rid of Dan.
Dude has been a waste of space since Alpha.
I’d rather have them go the Fatal Fury route and just get rid of useless characters while putting in new ones and give the old characters new and interesting things. In SF, Ryu and Guile have literally been the same shit forever really. Sure they’re good designs on their own, but they havent evolved that much since ST. Chun Li and Ken however have gone through quite a bit of changes over the years, keeps shit fresh. Ryu’s pretty stale now to me.
Edit: and I agree, get rid of Dan.
- is sad of the Dan hate*:sad:
On THAT note, a 3d sf3 might be pretty cool, if they take out the noob-friendly reversal windows I hear people complaining about and the srk shortcuts from 4’s engine.
Obvious answer, especially nowadays, is no. The characters and the nostalgia are a large part of the appeal to the average possible buyer. This is why new fighting games don’t succeed in the west. At the very least if one of the game’s central characters gets replaced, there’s going to have to be a character that at least emulates some of their play style. But even then it’d still be a turn off.
“Hey there’s no Guile, but you can be Remy”
“Remy is a ____”
Blazblue is the only new fighter to get any kind of mainstream US attention, and that’s probably more because of online, and playing towards the anime crowd more than anything else. In every other fighting game on the Earth, story comes 2nd to the characters. It’d be hard to explain why SF5 has 40 characters bu no Ryu, or why T7 breaks 50 but Jin was killed off for story purposes. For the purpose of sales, bringing back characters (especially the ones that are on the cover) is always going to be the smart move in a genre that doesn’t have much to sell people on.
That really depends on the popularity of the characters, and the size of the cast. If King of Fighters got rid of Kyo in 1999 as they planned, I think the series would’ve been fine. I don’t think this would’ve been the case if Street Fighter got rid of Ryu between 2 and 3.
i thought Capcom should have nuked the entire cast after HF back in 93. unfortunately, Capcom painted themselves into a box by marrying themselves to these characters for so long. gamers expect to see those iconic characters in the game.
People would more than likely question what happened to the veteran cast of characters. If we are talking about just one character, then it depends on the impact his or her presence had about the series. I wouldn’t bear to think of SF without Ryu being in it ie, so nope.
I don’t get why a company would ever want to ditch it’s beloved characters anyway. Fighting games tend to take their personality from their system anyway, not the characters.