There are several factors here why this design ended up like that
First the casual wear of the protagonist
Because of KPOP is wildly popular now here in asia. That it strongly influence the current trends from fashion sense and culture in mainland youth. The difference with mainlanders and other asian is the restriction and accessibility of media that they consume.
- This is WHY the casual wear of the protagonist characters like Ryu and etc is more vibrant than usual and not particularly on personality. Which is design to appeal to their target the demographic in mainland.
I had been in a environment with lots of expats mainlanders in their twenties men would either wear those kind of fashion and some would be just into geek printed shirts while the likes of punk, metal and etc is very few.
But there is a catch here, Mainlanders mostly are the one into kpop fashion in casual wear than actual Koreans.
So HOW about the common and generic THUGs?
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KOF craze is more stronger in the recent twenties generation in mainland than any 2D fighter. SF2 era had also a strong influence but most of the other SF like ALPHA series isn’t that popular there. So SF is more on the boomer era of mainlanders not the current influential work force.
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In fact it reflect strongly in piracy, passion projects and non-official games to be prominent to be KOF even before SF4 era.
To be fair… SF Duel Thugs are more diverse and unique in thugs than the usual in a 90s beat em up from popular titles because they look like a clone of each other,
I think the main issue here with SF Duel thugs and enemies is that they look out of place or misplace and because some of thugs automatically reminds you of another very familiar character in another game. Rather than seeing them as a random generic thug like how we see 90s beat em up thugs even they are literal clone of another.
It’s like the feeling of seeing Guile in a non-capcom game. Another thing is that some doesn’t feel that they belong in a SF theme because some enemies in SF duel even looks like they were from other genre of games for example overwatch.
I believe most of their priority in generic character designs were prioritizing references from popular trends and basing it with demographic which reflect mostly in their design output.
Which was also obvious in the Persona similarities that I also pointed out a year ago before the other fgc site talks about it.
At first glance of seeing that. I already knew what happened that they ended up with Persona’s interface. I knew what information made them do that and what made them motivated to copy it. The thing is they either misunderstood the information or they just became lazy and copied it anyway. LOL
I have worked last year in a gaming company here that are mostly consist of expat mainlanders and a few locals here. I don’t work in tencent and I am not a mainlander.
From my working experience they literally want me to copy the steam interface and the previous design I was going to replace a CS interface. LOL It wasn’t just mainlanders but also some local guys here. The problem there was because the local people working there and the mainlanders are just graphic designers. Spoiler I didn’t do it.
