a.k.a. no longer canon world.
WTF? Gill is Kars!
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True. If Balrog was too far below Bison, then why would Balrog even be present so late in the tournament? He’d be more functional as an entry barrier, where you weren’t even allowed to enter the tournament unless you were capable of beating Balrog.
Though some of this goes back to just what the tournament structure was. Here, the game itself doesn’t really help matters, as fighting game tournaments are by nature rendered wonky. To maximize gameplay, the player is forced to fight single-elimination against every (or nearly every) other opponent.
Note that Okamoto said nothing about balance, or boosted speed, it was just that he wanted Chun-Li to have less health because she was female.
The topic came up not too long ago I believe in the other SFV board. There were some somewhat surprising results. (I’m counting Seth and Poison as female, as they are presented with female bodies.) Did you know that no female SFV character has more than 1000 health, and only two even have 1000 health? The maximum female character health is less than the average, the median, and the mode for male characters. The most common (mode) health value for male characters is 1025 (11 out of 26 characters), the most common female health is 975 (6 out of 14 characters). These also happen to be the medians (middlemost value when viewed as a list). The average male health is 1009.6 while the average female health is 960.7.
While Vega has gotten pretty beefy, his concept in theory is to be an agile character; he has 1025 health. For better or worse, Ryu has long been a bit of the middle-of-the-road when it comes to design; he also has 1025 health.
Effectively, there is a 50 point health difference between male and female SFV characters. While balancing is ultimately a factor, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that just being a female character starts you with a default health of 975 while a male character starts with 1025.
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And yet they made with facts her a faster than average char, more difficult to hit (smaller body) and with greater agility… i may remember wrong, but i think Chun was the first and only char to have the wall-jump ability… they literally invented a new mechanic only to highlight her unique agility
Tbh i ever found Chun the most meaningful/impressive female char, being a WWarrior with that premise: she was one of world best fighters in a world where the strenght gap between genders was considered
Both Chun and Cammy got design “tricks” to justify a bigger punch, see Chun’s spiked heavy bracelets or Cammy’s reinforced gloves/boots
Each design/fantasy universe have it’s own physical and rules, SF started with that mindset, wich survived till today tbh, even if a lot watered down
Let’s start that 1025 has been a recent overall balance thing, traditionally a Ryu (or Vega) have 1000, wich is kinda the SF standard
Then “beefy” is the key there
Aside particular balance situations (Akuma, Seth etc), as general rule HP tend to try reflect the char design
If anything the softened this, i remember SF4 (vanilla?) being particular evident at that
Vega usually got his 1000 being even taller and heavier than standard boy Ryu
There were lighter or smaller (than Ryu) males with lower than 1000 HP too, see Yun and Yang, Dhalsim, Elf, Gen, even Adon…
By design hp ever been more something about body mass
Reality is even the biggest females in SF are way less buff built than Ryu
If they do tomorrow a 90+kg thick muscle girl built like a boar, they will surely give her more than 1000…
…but thing is, they don’t because they don’t want design not-waifu range females, and audience in majority seem to don’t want either
And again, usually great HP tend to come with a cost… slower speed, worse jumps, biggest hurtboxes.
Big body chars are supposed to being able to take more strikes, but also get hit much more often due worse mobility and being bigger targets
Last but not last, i find unfair question a translated quote from 30 years ago Japan, and apply some outraged 2020 american standard
“because women are not as strong”
Is not wrong
Can’t blame him because truth decades after, in another country became offensive
We’re not talking strongest woman being unable to match the strenght of Average Joe, but against other world level top fighters
Take real life pro fighters of similar level and weight, ability to take damage change from male to female
Tbh change also power and speed, yet in SF females are powerful as most males and generally faster
So if we want go by facts, if anything SF world bend “real world rules” in females favor, to make them equally credible as fighters in a both-genders context
We seen Laura casually carry two big shadaloo grunts, SF girls ARE strong af
Average Person (male or female) by SF standards will have like 50 HP max, 5-10 more likely lol
It would be unfair if they had changed mentality in the meantime…
…but thing is, they didn’t.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be stuck in 2020 watching Chun-Li (“the strongest woman in the world!1!111!”) losing every fight until the vision of a poor hapless child triggers her motherly instinct to rescue her… only to be reduced to an useless damsel in distress AGAIN immediately afterwards, when she needed the intervention of the magical all-shielding hadōken from the almighty Japanese male protagonist.
She could have kicked all those debris by herself, but no, we needed another reminder that a woman is weak, frail and temperamental and the best she can do is care for the children, while the men (specifically, the Japanese men) are the real heroic and reliable characters here.
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If you seen reply i gave you above i AGREE on that point 
While on one side i laughed at people being like "Chun should have defeated Bison 
", i absolutely agree they should have not treated in that way Legends like Chun or Cammy
It will have worked have Fang being a respectable enemy (instead 5 people punching bag), and Chun defeat him 1-0, then like you said, handling falling building pieces by herself having hands tied by the child, was a good chance to show her KICK (Chun’s big deal) the pieces in acrobatic af way
As for Cammy she could have defeated Vega in their second match, overcoming and opponent that proven in first clash to be a great challenge.
That will have been a great W for Cammy, specially considering Vega is not a dumb slow brute that can be outplayed with simple anime waifu-agility.
He’s fast and agile himself, skilled, smart… and armed with blades
PS: as great Ryu fan myself i’m still very of the opinion they overdone with him in ASF
Beat Necalli
Beat Bison
Save Chun with hadomagic
Beat Ken just to make 101% clear previous Loss was fluke
Lol
That was overkill.
Ryu always beat Ken when he is of sound mind. The only time he lost to Ken was in Alpha. Him beating Ken shows that he is finally back to being of sound mind and soul after the “disturbance” he just endured for many years.
The rest is fine IMO. For SF5 Ryu - Necalli was the sub-boss, and Bison was the final boss.
Say what you will, but UDON does a better job at writting Chun Li (and Cammy to some extent) than friggin Capcom.
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I will. Udon are utter shite at story telling.
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I disagree, but to each its own, I will say Capcom themselves arent particularly stellar (lol ASF).
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ASF is better than any shit Udon came up with, and ASF is deeply flawed in its execution.
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Hard, HARD disagree, I Think ASF is utter crap, not “deeply flawed”, it is shamefull specially in comparison to other games but also very bad by itself, a penchant for hating UDON (for whatever reason) should not elevate the idiocy that is ASF. Years waiting for a compelling Story mode for a franchise as emblematic as SF and that is what they shit out, SMH.
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I respect the thought of giving Chun Li less health, though ideally other characters should have different healths too. Like, as Cestus suggested, Zangief>Ryu/Ken>Chun. (btw, Chun Li and Vega had the wall jump, and Guy had it in Final Fight before as well)
I can also understand the idea of thinking of Chun Li as the weakest World Warrior back in the day in the broadest sense of the word (as in, the other World Warriors would beat her in a fight). After all, well you know, reality is a thing and a referent for fantasy. Nothing mysoginistic about that.
Now by Street Fighter V some 25 years later, though, Street Fighter has developed a story it owes to and it has lot of fantasy elements that can justify anything. Chun Li has earned the respect from the players, she’s got a story and development that very, very few other SF characters can compare to, and the idea of not letting her be a big damn hero is a mistake. Not because of society-something but because Chun beating Bison would have been awesome cause their long lasting story. As Akiman pointed in that one interview, Bison and Chun Li shaped each other’s character from development stages of SFII; Bison shaped Chun Li and Chun Li shaped Bison into the big bad evil lord that killed her father, greatly defining the story of Street Fighter as a whole. Street Fighter owes Chun Li its villain. A final fight between those two would have been… just awesome.
Rashid lost against Fang, then he got his heroic powerup and won.
Ryu lost against Necalli, then he got his heroic powerup and rotfstomped him.
Chun Li lost against Bison, then she… she asked Ryu to fight Bison and Ryu rotfstomped him as well.
That’s garbage. In fact, that proved to be garbage. It happened and was garbage because it meant nothing.
She could have beat Bison through a heroic powerup or heroic inspiration. The idea that she was too weak doesn’t really have much weight considering that Street Fighter had barely had any solid references of power tiers for her before that. We basically know that Chun Li “lost” to Juri in SF4 (the very anime that made this fight used the kid distraction as a justification) and that she “won” against Urien in SF3 (details up to the writer). Perfectly able to get a powerup and beat Bison, had the writers wanted; they didn’t even need to imply she was stronger than him, just give her a stroke of genius at the right moment to decide the fight or something. They could have made it. But they didn’t. And it predictably sucked.
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I’m gonna disagree there.
Bison shaped the development of many characters - And played a part in most characters even.
His own development as a character wasn’t shaped by them as much if at all. They were Tuesday to him, and he was a walking atrocity after another. BIG difference.
Furthermore, Chun-Li could’ve fought Bison at the end, but she chose NOT to. She chose to save the girl’s life. This goes 100% in line with her realization in SF4 and her story in SF3. It had nothing to do with her being “omg female”.
As far as ASF’s climactic fights - My take:
- Chun-Li’s arc should’ve ended with Vega and not FANG. Vega and Chun-Li have a shared history in pop culture, and he was retconned into her early life in SF5.
- Rashid’s ends with FANG (We don’t see FANG until Bison’s defeat if at all).
- Nash and Ryu with Bison as it happened more or less. Guile should’ve been incapacitated by Bison like the SF2AM or just be doing what Ken and Karin were doing and buying his friends time.
- Cammy fights all the dolls, winning them back one by one, and her arc ends with Decapre. Then they could’ve fought Juri in the end if needed who couldn’t resist being a bitch to them, forcing her retreat.
It’s not Rocket science. This is where the story logically leads to and Capcom more or less stayed true to established canon in ASF. They didn’t do drama for the sake of drama, and they certainly didn’t pander to trending tropes and themes. This is the kind of storytelling that leads us down the path of Season 8 of Game of Thrones, where years of build up were squandered so that they can give a female character the chance to rob the OBVIOUS protagonist of the White Walker arc of his kill. Why? Because GIRL POWER OMG.
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Even then, should Chun-Li be viewed as physically weaker than Dhalsim? During the SF2 era, Dhalsim was an emaciated stick man. He didn’t gain muscle mass until Alpha, where nearly all of the male characters suddenly gained anywhere from 50 to 400 pounds of muscle. While he had stretching limbs from the start, he didn’t become an outright rubber man until I believe SF4?
Current health figures aren’t the end-all be-all of balance, either. Would Juri be winning more tournaments if she had 1000 health instead of 975? Probably not. She doesn’t have 975 health for balance reasons. She has 975 health because Capcom currently offers female characters only the range of 925-1000 health, and they’ve decided that she’s not a “max”-health tier like Laura or Kolin.
That isn’t to say that health isn’t a balancing factor. Balance is one of the things that makes direct comparisons more complicated. You can complain that from a purely body representational standpoint it is wrong for SFV R.Mika to have the same health as SFV Dhalsim, but R.Mika has long been a much bigger tournament threat than Dhalsim, and her health is low(er than she’d theoretically deserve) as a balancing factor. From build and story strength, Guile should seemingly have more health than F.A.N.G, but Guile does mean things to people in tournaments while F.A.N.G doesn’t. But such balancing seems almost randomly and arbitrarily applied. Akuma sets the bottom of the scale because he’s Akuma, and the actual bottom figure is arguably as much just what Capcom doesn’t want to go below as it is what Akuma “needs” for balancing. Abigail sets the top because he’s Abigail, and different people will protest the idea of shifting his health in either direction as unbalancing.
Gameplay variables have no bearing on the canon.
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What is a “compelling story mode” in a fighting game for you? I am yet to see such a thing.
Bison’s character as a criminal has a lot to do with Chun Li’s story. In the Street Fighter II arcade you only knew two things about Bison: he killed Charlie and he killed Chun Li’s father.
But this is exactly what happened. Ryu came out of nowhere and beat Bison for no purpose taking him from characters with actual stories. Because RYU STRONK OMG.
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I am not a Netherrealm or MK fan, but I can accept both MK and Injustice are far above ASF in terms of story mode, even trying to deny that is crazy. Either way, even if you think or not wether those are compelling they are much better as I said and mediocrity is not to be excused because some other games story modes dont seem “compelling enough”; SF should be far above whatever the heck ASF was supposed to be.
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We’re not in Kansas in anymore, this is the year 2020 and things in the canon have changed a lot since then.
To your point though, Bison is a criminal to Chun-Li, but to himself (and in accordance with his own SF2 ending), Bison is a power hungry ruthless fighter. The fates of Charlie and ‘Dorai’ are inconsequential to him and his ambitions.
Ryu and Bison stood on the side lines of ASF for most of the time waiting and preparing for their final battle. Ryu fighting his demons to their conclusion, and Bison setting the world on fire - Both of them acted in this way for the purpose of their inevitable fight.
The Shadaloo arc involves many characters, but at its core - it is and has been for a long time; Bison and Ryu. Any proper objective reading of the source material will lead to this conclusion.
We can agree that the execution of this overarching plotline has been less than stellar, but the major plot points as presented in ASF are reasonable and are in accordance with the universe’s own internal logic and setups.
Only in terms of production values. The actual stories are just as meager, if not more so because of their consistent destruction of established canon over and over again. This has only gotten worse in the last 2 MK games.
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