Hey, don’t talk shit about my boy Hsu Hao!
Y’all are just jealous of his sexy chest laser. 
Everyone, even Netherrealm, shit talks Hsu Hao. He doesn’t even have a face a mother can love 
Hsu Hao is just misunderstood, I’m telling you! 
Sometimes I feel like I messed up and entered into a MK forum…
Ferra/Torr, Cassie and Jacqui are quite good. Geras and Kronika, well, more on the generic side.
The others you cite are from the “dark era”, so invalid argument. I’m comparing the designs of recent games, not previous eras.
The Hell you’re smoking. Yeah, Lucia she looks a lot like Sonya in MK11, but MK has always tried to be more realistic and less cartoony. Lucia’s completely unimaginative design doesn’t even fit its own series, it’s quite embarrassing.
Hakan’s physiology is too weird even for a Street Fighter. He looks more like a Guilty Gear or a Skullgirls character. With Necro I can understand because he’s a mutant, but is Hakan supposed to be a normal human being? What the hell.
Main difference between MK and SF is that MK goes for more realistic and standarized, while Street Fighter is a cornucopia of cartoonish colorful characters. But even among that style there can be designs that don’t feel like belong.
That’s why Ed and Falke and Lucia look so boring comparing to the rest.
Yeah, many of the MK9-11 redesigns are clunky, but I really think Street Fighter hasn’t made the best choices in character designs recently.
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Right… Cos its really realistic to punch someones entire spine out leaving the body in tact.
Realistic and humanly-proportioned character designs, man.
It also has a more consistent tone when it comes to its universe rules and worldbuilding, with stricter guidelines to what kind of characters can fit in the games.
Yeah, guest characters completely break that rule, but aside from that, everyone fits like they belong to a consistent universe.
Street Fighter it’s like has been expanding whatever kind of characters are allowed to join in. Sakura, for example, would have never fit into Street Fighter II, or Twelve in Alpha. After SF3 everything became a complete clownfest, and now it looks like there’s no rules to whoever weird design can join the universe.
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Yeah make some strong and valid points. I get where youre coming from. I would prefer if all sf characters were based on martial arts and “serious” but shit hit the fan after Ono got involved. He thinks everything should be “fun” and wacky. Look at the stupid ass super moves in SF4.
I also would prefer everyone be martial arts characters, but I don’t need them to be serious. Nothing says martial arts like Jackie Chan.
I like where SF is at tone-wise.
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I like a mixture of both.
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Same. You can have some serious characters, but having everyone be overly serious sucks. You’re gonna have cocky showboaters, goofballs, etc in there like real life. I like some of the “freak” characters as well as the traditional martial artists, it keeps things interesting.
I feel that there should be liberties though. Go too serious and too strict on “this character represents this martial art and that’s the end of their character” and you wind up with virtual fighter. I liked Virtua Fighter back in the day, but never really fell in love with it the way I fell for a ton of other games, most notable Street Fighter and KoF.
Chun Li & Juri are examples I hold up as a good way of blending the martial arts rep + their own character design flair. Chun Li has a “traditional” outfit and the ox-horns hair, but has leggings, combat boots and the spiked braclets. Juri has the baggy TKD pants, but a unique hairstyle, that Spider-based top and spiked bracelets and a belt. These designs show the characters are more than just their martial art, they’re people with more going on in the background.
I think Street Fighter is overall fine, I like the freaks, but moving forward, I want to see some more martial arts brought in, I want to move things back to the martial art world and less from world ending threats. That being said, I don’t want things to be JUST a tournament. You can bind things together with plot and character design, just less Godlevel sci-fi beings and more underground tournament stuff with anime influences.
So yeah, I don’t think Street Fighter needs to over-correct and dramatically tone down the future character designs moving forward. Less “unknown” fighting styles, and more fantastical manga-exaggeration of things that exist in real life
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I think its about balance. Thats why SF2 was so good. You had a good mixture of people. Pure martial artists like Ryu, Sagat. Grapplers, military people, some freaks like Blanka and Dhalsim and some random wtfs like Vega (a spanish ninja!?). I think Vega is one of the best SF designs ever btw.
Edit: but even the freaky ones were treated as “serious” compare blanka then vs now. Sure he had a wavky ending but during the game itself you didnt get that impression.
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I definitely would like Blanka to get more serious. Staying friendly and occasional lighter stuff when with Dan and Sakura, but I’d like him to have a more serious air about him. A while back I wanted him to have a go at Slammasters in universe or something where he could play up his beast persona and still be a momma’s boy in private. Heck, he doesn’t even have to be a heel. He could be the Wolverine of Slammasters in that he’s tough and feral, but the kids love his character.
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It’s like in th end they had to embrace all the silliness for things to keep making sense.
SFIII TNG was a bit like SFII, it had mostly “realistic” martial arts characters like Dudley and Elena, along with more stylish Alpha-inspired characters like Alex, Yun and Yang, and a couple freaks like Necro and Oro.
I think it was with Third Strike and the introduction of Twelve and Q, extremely weird characters and concepts with very little martial arts in sight… but that entry still gave us Makoto, one character you could probably have seen slip into Street Fighter One or so.
SFIV and V still has some a couple relatively “serious” stuff like El Fuerte (design-wise; personality he’s a disaster), Abel or Laura, but things reached its peak of weirdness with designs like Rufus, Hakan or G. I think it got out of control.
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Personally I didnt mind the design of the characters so much as the animation/moves themselves. Its ridiculous. Like I know its a fantasy game with people throwing fireballs but theres still thing about having some sense of physics.
Case in point, compare Yangs SA2 in 3s to sf4. In 3s he rolls and kicks the opponent up into the air. Its obviously the moment from the role is what takes the character up there - however unrealistic. Now comepare this to SF4 where, once the opponent is up in there air they somehow STAY there as does Yang and he proceeds to beat them further. I mean, seriously what. The. Fk.
Most of these supers where the characters are suspended in air for a long time really grinds my nuts. In mean you would struggle to find anything similar in the old school games cept for Dhalsim and maybe bison/vega.
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Karin’s CA is very fucking Looney Tunes.
Not to mention…
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A bunch of the supers in SF have become straight-up goofy and stupid looking unfortunately.
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That blame is fully on the Alpha series, not SF3.
As weird as SF3’s characters are, SF3 is something like the natural extension of the world of SF2. Hugo’s design is clearly more exaggerated than Zangief’s, but he is the new physical extreme of characters like Zangief, Honda, and THawk. Necro is Dhalsim’s limb stretching combined with Blanka’s inhumanity and electricity. Oro is extreme, but he’s the other side of Akuma, with a bit of Dhalsim’s fantasy mysticism. As silly as Gill looks, he still arguably isn’t as embarrassing a design as Deejay or T.Hawk.
Twelve is admittedly a bit too extreme to fit into SF2. But Twelve is a product of Third Strike, which came a year after Alpha 3.
It was the Alpha series that threw open the door to wackiness. It was the Alpha series that further exaggerated the character physiques. It was the Alpha series that said anything goes in regards to weapons (Rolento’s grenades and assisting subordinates). Alpha introduced Dan as an intentional joke character, turned Blanka into a comedy act, and introduced Jailbird Cody. Alpha has a wrestling ring magically appearing and disappearing for Mika’s moves. Alpha turned both individual character stories and the overall Shadaloo story into a laughable mess.
Twelve would fit right into Alpha 3, because Alpha 3 excludes nothing. Everything fits Alpha 3. Gill would have been fine in Alpha 3. So would Oro. So would Scorpion, Sabrewolf, Master Roshi, Kazuya Mishima, Emperor Udan, Kumi, Sol Badguy, Blitztank, Zero, Nakoruru, Simon Belmont…
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The way I’d fix Karin’s is really simple: camera angles. Instead of them floating in full view for so long, I’d speed up the spin slightly, but have a camera angle cut to Karin’s hands in slow mo (maybe give her Xmen: COTA Magneto hand fx) and then have her deliver the final attack. Kind of like how in film, you can see a bunch of things happening, but it doesn’t mean that things, in this case the spin, are happening at the same time as the other camera angle shows,and for that long.
Akuma’s tatsu ultra in SF4 though, I’d completely rework.
Someone - probably ono - has a super hardon for anything that spins for some reason. Sometimes less IS more because less means less stupid looking.
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