Scotia

Been awhile since I did a story review for SF, but I had some thoughts after finishing the stuff added in the Ed update and wanted to get them out after sitting on it for a few days; The Ed story update is once again, imo, just another case of Capcom building to stuff with no foreseeable pay off. What does JP plan to do with Ed? Does he want to put Bison's phantom into Ed's body or just have Ed as he is take over Shadaloo? Is he still warring with FANG as to who gets to Ed first? None of it's answered. They just meet randomly, JP is a smarmy asshole, Ed gets angry, they fight, JP vanishes. It's the exact same shit they did with Ken, but at least UDON didn't have a whole prequel comic building up to Ed vs JP to make their encounter feel just as pointless as that one did. Ed was absolutely the character with the strongest story potential in Season 1 (hell, probably the entire roster at this point) and yet he had even less stuff going in World Tour than Rashid and AKI did. Those two had quests requiring you to do a ton of stuff before you even met them, including signficant NPCs related to those characters showing up to give you multiple quests, and yet for Ed you talk to one random loser in Metro City, get on a train then Ed just shows up. Like DarthEnderX said; the new stage that comes with Ed isn't even mentioned, never mind visited. The stage has such a mysterious nature to it and I was looking forward to seeing how it would be incorporated into WT but it's seemingly just some random stage with no actual meaning or point to it. Sure you could say it'll be featured eventually, but when? Might as well just add it to the growing list of things Capcom have to pay off at some point. I appreciate the deeper dive into Ed and Balrog's characters as well as a much neeed expansion of Neo Shadaloo, but imo they were things that were expected to be featured with Ed. If they didn't have those then honestly what was the point of adding him? It's the bare minimum to talk about the ones close to these characters so I don't even really want to praise Capcom too much for it. There was a ton of intrigue going into Ed I feel after AKI's story update, mainly the fact that they were teasing two Shadaloo remnant factions racing to put Bison's phantom into Ed, but now Ed is here and it feels like that storyline is already over. Ed doesn't want to become the next Bison, both physically and metaphorically so he just...doesn't. He's just chilling in Metro City while the rest of Neo Shadaloo do the cool stuff off screen. What a complete waste. Naturally I'm sure that this along with other things will be prominent storylines in a future WT update but like...idk man I'm just sick and tired of how Capcom have been writing this series since season 2 of SF5. This constant state of building to something has been going on for fucking years at this point and I don't feel like anything that was established in SF5, never mind 6, has paid off yet. Remember when G got revealed and had a ton of very obvious Q connections? Remember how his character story answered them? Yeah, me neither, that's another thing we're still waiting for. Speaking of; remember when the last two seasons of SF5's story were spent building up G as the next main villain who was teasing a world-ending event? It's awesome that he's not in SF6 at all and all of that was seemingly for nothing! (/s) I'm just tired of it man. Nothing feels worth it in this series anymore. They establish all of these characters, all of these factions, all of these plotlines then throw them out the door the second the next game starts so we can get Honda and Blanka and Zangief in the game first to continue their riveting storylines that are just poorly painted-over rehashes of shit they've been doing since 2. Why did they want me to get excited for what Ed was going to bring to the story when his last quest is him just sending you on a fruitless wild goose chase for Falke before just telling you to give up when you don't find her? I'm sure if they ever add Falke as a playable character that we'll just get the same stuff we always get; We'll find her in Nayshall, she'll talk more about Neo-Shadaloo, talk about JP then continue to stand there until the game ends. Same with G. Same with Gill and Alex and Rose and Sakura and whoever the fuck else they add, because it's what every other character in WT does. I mean, for fucksake, they got UDON to do a whole ass comic prequel tie-in about Ken just for him to stand around in a contruction site! Anyway, rant over. I don't expect any of my issues to be fixed tbh, regardless of if there's a big WT story update or not. Like I said, they've been writing like this for years at this point and I think Ed's story additions being absolutely nothing finally broke me. Akuma being next pretty much guarantees nothing of worth is gonna happen until Season 2 anyway, if it ever happens at all.

Yeah it's probably becuase you don't hve an account, IIRC they limited how much you can see without having one. I'll just post them all here in a spoiler tag so they're not clogging up the page;

Thanks! And yeah I had this avatar saved for a while (since SF6 came out I guess lol) but forgot about it until now lmao

Yeah I had to upload them all individually instead of all at once because Twitter continues to be complete fucking ass these days. The rest should all be below Alex's.

Apologies if this has already been discussed before, I've been gone from here for a while so I don't want to really scour through 100+ pages to see if this was already mentioned lol. It's definitely Bosch and they're definitely teasing his survival/return; https://x.com/82kmnr_works/status/1759008481074364694?s=20 The person with the cap running with the other Buckler recruits has the same hair and scar across the eye that Nakayama recently posted for Bosch (which you posted in the reply I quoted). I'm not sure if Bosch had this scar before being blown up at the end of World Tour because you can kinda see something similar to it under his hair in the other artwork Nakayama posted; Also to add a bit more fuel to the fire, Luke's birthday artwork has someone wearing the same hat as the NPC/Bosch. It's coincidentally just obscured enough to not see who it is for sure, but it's pretty obvious it's Bosch (thanks @Lord_Vegafor pointing this out on Twitter, I never noticed this until I saw you point it out); At the risk of being completely wrong in the future, I'm calling it now; Bosch IS alive and will be playable in the future, maybe as soon as Season 2. There's way too many deliberate nods here to chalk it up as just asset reuse or some random NPC we're not meant to notice.

https://twitter.com/Scotia834/status/1673406014425649152?s=20 Figured some of you might like this.

That was from Nakayama, yes. I was surprised that so many people on Twitter took those comments as his deconfirmation when I feel it's pretty obvious that Nakayama is blatantly teasing that we haven't seen the last of Bison.

Hey everyone, thanks for the kind words! I'm not a translator so I was a bit worried about messing some things up but I think I did a decent job getting across what Nakayama and the others were trying to say. Just popping my head in here to link a massive twitter thread I've just made of every SF5 character's developer comments from the Climax Arts book as I'm sure many of you will appreciate some of the stuff in them. https://twitter.com/Scotia834/status/1629943235450732544?s=20

I genuinely never thought I'd see this day. This has been something I've been wanting for YEARS and I'm so glad it's finally happening. Outside of no SF3 characters in the base roster, I couldn't be more excited for SF6 right now.

Based on this actual legit leak that got a ton of info about the game right before SF6 even got revealed; yeah Rose is going to be in the game;

The Ken 4chan leak is bullshit btw. I read the whole thing and it's complete nonsense and elements of it have already been deconfirmed.

Ken-chan is coming

Imagine thinking Cody becoming the mayor of Metro City is against his character instead of it being the natural conclusion to his entire character arc and the only direction the character could have gone without reverting back to recycled plot threads. Couldn’t be me. And let’s not act like Blanka is some fucking sacred cow that’s meant for serious business only. Just look at the guy and tell me putting him in a suit is ‘too much’ for him.

Would not be opposed to suit-Blanka being his default in SF6 and his story being that Blanka-chan took off and Blanka is basically a major businessman now... ...and of course Dan is still poor and comes begging for money.

Based off some of his previous tweets, Neo-Shadaloo seems more like a Nakayama thing if anything. I think the only reason they dropped them late into SF5's life is because they pretty much wrote themselves into a corner by having the last shot of Ed's character story take place the same time as SF3, so they couldn't really explore them more without delving into that era of the timeline which I don't blame them for mostly staying away from. SF5's timeline is confusing as it is without going deeper into SF3. Of course I could end up being wrong but imo I think Neo-Shadaloo (and moreso Ed) will continue to be a thing in SF6.

Embrace it

If Bison doesn't come back in Ed's body then I literally fail to see the point of why the latter was even introduced. Regular Bison can always be a costume, but if you're going to bring the guy back so soon (ugh) then at least make his return a little bit special/different.

...I'll accept this reasoning...for now...

I don't always vibe with all of Max's tastes but for the most part I pretty much agree with those two videos. The only two things I don't agree with him on are him wanting to shelve Necro and Remy. Remy I think I can be salvaged even if I doubt Capcom or the majority of fans care enough to try, but Necro I think is incredibly underrated and deserves to come back and have an Oro-like surge in popularity. There's a lot Cacpom can do with him and Effie. Other than that though, can't really disagree with his other choices for and against returning for 6, even if I don't care for a lot of SF characters. One thing I very much enjoyed though is his thoughts on Sean as well as his chats response to what Max was saying about him. I was watching the Twitch VoD that was the source of the two videos and it really made me smile to see his chat explode with tons of 'SEAN' posts when Max started talking about how there was one obvious choice for a SF3 returnee and that they knew who it was (and I'm assuming agreed with him). It's genuinely been crazy to see that, in the last year or so, so many people are getting behind him too. I was watching a few roster wishlists/speculation videos not long after 6 got announced and a lot of them had Sean in there. Even one Justin Wong and Punk did had Sean in their most wanted tier!. As someone who actually used to get shit for wanting Sean back in the day, it's just been wild to see things start come around for him. Hopefully that turn-around happens with Capcom too and they bring back Sean for SF6.

Capcom blue-balled us so hard last month that this turned into the KOF story thread in my absence. JK obviously, I agree with a lot of the posts made about Rugal and other bosses. Really hope that boss challenge mode leads to Krizalid, Goenitz and Igniz making it in as DLC characters.

Wasn't really talking balance because lol @ playing SF4 but that's fair I guess. I just think as a character he gets a bad rap.

Fuerte was fine. I think it's a shame he gets lumped in as the other shitty SF4 newcomer with Rufus when he's not even close to being as bad.

Hilariously fake

Ingrid is lame waifu anime trash but she's still not as lazy as Oni and every other 'evil' version of a pre-existing character. As much as I don't want her, I'd be fine with seeing current Capcom have another attempt at Ingrid if it meant we never saw Evil Ryu/Akuma/Dee Jay or whoever the fuck Capcom can make evil again.

I know it's probably not fair to do so, but I blame A LOT of the stupid humour in SF4 and 5 on Ono. A character like Abigail is just so stupidly shit that it screams that only person found it funny and pushed for it really hard. Just the general tone of some characters and even the stages just feels like everything that isn't directly tied to the main plot has to be extremely goofy. Dan is just incredibly pathetic now. Ibuki literally just wants some dick (remember when she was a ninja who went on important missions?). Everything about Birdie in 5. I mean, take the Shadaloo stage in 5 for example. That's pretty much the stage where the final battle takes place, and you have guys in jetpacks flying around fighting ninjas like they're in a slapstick comedy. It's ridiculous. I hope that with Ono gone we can move towards having a more genuine sense of humour with some elements instead of the most random shit being dumb as hell for no reason.