ShockDingo

I liked this dude, nice way to sum things up and clean up the events in 5. I'm very much in favour or parallel storytelling.

Welcome aboard dude! Cheers! Oh yeah, so about the costume, the code switches to his Ex2+ costume, the one with the holster and different belt (the more modern toku one). They both look really good in action!

I love that KoF rotates casts and advances plots. So just cause someone sits out a game, doesn't mean they're dead or never coming back and as cool as Rugal is, they never drove him into the ground, they keep it fresh.

Yeah, this should be Alex's story if anything. I don't to see the Udon treatment and have Post-evil Ryu kill Gill and fight a possessed Blue-Red Alex be the resolution of the game.

One of the very narrow ways I'd accept that is if it's the MK 10 approach where the intro is a fancy, historical summary on the story so far (narrated by Rose or even Ken doing a retelling to Mel) . Then have the SF3 portion summed up with the canonical events and we're dropped right in the story and moving forward to resolve the Illuminati arc with SF7 doing the KoF thing and starting a new arc. Basically this: Open with Rose reading from a dusty old book with sepia drawings, talking about the basics of how ki is in everything and it's brought these warrior's fates together. SF1- Sagat's scarring and descent into darkness, Ryu's profile rises. Alpha summary and addressing any overlap or retcons with SF2. Do the SF4-5 stuff, focus on SF3 and we immediately kick off. Heck have it open with Ryu winning against Alex and starting his new journey and then we follow him as it leads onward or even end it with Urien's 3rd strike ending where to torches Gill & the ceremonial brains. "Always forward, always."

Skullo G? I love it, I dig it!

There was some potential, but I feel it dropped the ball. It should have focused on Bale more since this was his climb to be the legendary leader (I actually liked that the brass looked at him like a nothing, cause if some guy comes out of nowhere claiming to be a legend, people are gonna balk at it until he proves himself), even if you had him on the side and the main character being an audience surrogate that was a part of John's team, that could have worked, but we had Marus/Sam Worthington and I felt it just petered out pretty quick. I liked some of the ideas (the not knowing he's a Terminator, the early prototypes and the factory stuff) and Helena B. Carter, but overall, with all the potential it had, it just didn't stay with me once I was finished with it.

That Faust move is so well animated, those are definite goals. Also glad we'll be able to have a montage of faces from his moves again lol

Yu Yu was a great show, I should go back and watch it, it's been quite a while since I last saw it. The issue with that barrier idea is it would need a major reworking to make the "normal" world fit with Street Fighter's normal world. Street Fighter is one of those martial arts = having super powers universes, but it's still, I guess grounded. So far, Necalli's one of the weirder things there. Sure Bison's gotten weirder over the years, but there's still a ceiling in place, that's one of the reasons why Ingrid ruffled feathers with her timetravel etc. With Darkstalkers, not all the supernatural stuff comes from Makai. Felicia isn't a rarity. Cat Women, according to Saiki's plot guide , are common enough that previously, there's been discussions on their human rights and even prejudice kept popping up around the time Felicia became a star. It's never stated how they came to be, but sometimes human women give birth and then around 3 years or so their daughters start growing fur and tails etc. Also characters like Sasquatch (Snowmen naturally reside in Canada) & Rikuo (the Kingdom of Mermen resided in the Amazon til Pyron's arrival destroyed the kingdom) are humanoids with no connection to Makai. Zabel/ Raptor was human, but super into the occult and serves a dark master, but I don't think he's from Makai. Morrigan was adopted into Belial's house and brought into Makai, but she was born in Scotland, there's not info about her birth parents or life pre-adoption, but yeah, I initially thought she was born in that real, but she's another character that originates in this realm. Also Anakaris is human but came back from the dead, I think it's stated that he could use magic before he died. I have to reread, when he was alive he could see the future, dude was impressive in life and death. The thing is that in Darkstalkers, they're not rare monsters crawling around that are the stuff of myths, their existence is widely known of, though as far as I know, humans no nothing of the Makai dimension, just the monsters from there that occasionally pop through dimensional rifts and the terrestrial monsters and such that pop up all the time. People who are super rich frequently hire DarkHunters to kill and or capture them so they can be used for weird, rare medical stuff, potions, or just collections. All of this is moot though it Capcom wants to retcon everything. I just hope they don't. Like I said, I love both franchises and want them to flourish, but here's my issue. If you merge the universes you run into a couple problems: SF is all about how martial arts makes you stronger and increases who you are. Even with Bison's tech, he's still based on martial arts at his core and used science to enhance his powers. With his failing in SF5, Ryu showed that his hardwork and sacrifice triumphed over all of Bison's help. Heck, he was nearly invincible due to the constant stream of negativity being pumped into him until Rashid shut things off. If he had shut it off earlier, Charlie's first win against Bison in the finale would have prevented the need for him to kill himself. So Bison's reliance on tech and treachery was trumped by the purity of Ryu's fight and train and overcome his limits (SNH) methods. If you get Darkstalkers who are just super OP by default into SF, it shakes things up thematically. Also it gets less impressive to see a martial artist attain the weird, mystical powers of Oro through his hermit life journey when you can just have a character like Jedah show up and pull people into other dimensions. Plus, I doubt Bison would want someone like Demitri walking around and messing with his plans. I wouldn't want Bison easily stomped by a guy who drank the series' equivalent of Galactus. It would leave a sour taste in my mouth. Ryu is the series posterboy, he would have to go up against the baddies if they popped up, and I really don't want to see him get some DBZ level power creep where he learns new techniques to put him on par with the DS cast and then leave a gigantic gap between himself and the rest of the cast. Aesthetics: I love the horror aspect and now, with the global audience more accepting of horror movies from different cultures, not just western or Japanese, you get a loooot more options to get more monsters as part of the roster of a future Darkstalkers. I want DS to lean more into that, get newer, more ambitious designs and plots. let's see a Grendel, a Pontianak, a Fey, etc. With Street Fighter, as much as I love Bison, I'm excited that we're finally moving away from Shadaloo (for now), on to further approach SF3's Illuminati stuff and even possibly ending this arc. I want to see SF stop all the prequels etc and just have each numbered entry from here on actually advance things. Even though I like the weird characters like G, Q, Necro, etc. I wand to return the series to a still fantastical, but more martial arts driven focus when we wrap up the Illuminati arc. Don't ditch the weird characters at all, I don't want Virtua Fighter, but the overarching feel shouldn't be a superhero show. I'm not saying things have to be super realistic and just a tournament, but we've been in world ending plots for too long and I'd love to see some fun action movie stuff that's on a smaller or medium scale, some underground fight tourny stuff, a global contest that has a race for some form of treasure that unravels towards the end with your typical anime/manga fighting zeal. I don't want the SF cast suddenly trying to figure out how to handle fighting ghosts, or vice versa, the Darkstalkers focusing on martial artists or a syndicate. From a gameplay stand point, I also want to see how creative we can get with things in the modern era. I liked how when I'd switch from alpha to DS2 it was such a different feel. I'm not the most technically informed player, but I loved the difference between the two games even if I couldn't tell you what's what. Having the elements that eventually led to some of the VS games approach was nice. Seeing the curse debuffs, magic series combo system, ex moves, etc was great back then, who knows what mechanic could be pumped into a modern DS? We could get experimental and not try to closely mirror whatever current SF is out there are the time! Hah, sorry for the essay, I just think that both series would get some dilution if they merged. Either you change up SF a ton, to smooth out the inclusion of DS, or you change up DS, tone down some of the crazy to make it fit more in with SF.

Interesting! I know nothing about Melty, read a thing or two like 6 years ago, but forgot it. I've seen the Redhead absolutely wrecking people in sprite movie compilations, so I always assumed she was some kinda op, never knew Shiki was powerful like that! 😮 On the subject of the DS characters, even with SF and eventual anime protag power creep, DS characters are pretty out there, so a mixing of the universes outside of a VS game would be a bad idea. Not just for power level stuff, but aesthetics, while I'm absolutely begging Capcom bring back Darkstalkers, I hope they do it as their own IP again so they can flourish and not just do a shaky MCU thing and shove them in the SF universe. I think it'd be a baaad move (the roster request wars would be a nightmare hah). SF & DS are wonderful things, and I hope they can keep flourishing on their own without awkwardly stapling them together.

Indeed. Never underestimate the power of a typical, average anime highscooler lol

Street fighter, Final Fight, Slam Masters, and Rival schools are all the same universe (though they're weirdly trying to shove Strider in there as well now). Captain Commando takes place in Metro City, but in some cases it's referred to as being fictional, Darkstalkers, unless they retcon it heavily is not in the same universe, don't let the Udon comics fool you, heh. The world structure is totally different with people commonly aware of all these monsters running around with insane hunting guilds going after them, but showing such a lack of humanity, some people consider them worse than the Darkstalkers. Also most of the DS characters are ridiculously OP, Demitri can't be killed by sunlight due to that field you always see him surrounded in (it's said to withstand like 1 million degrees or something), plus Pyron is basically Galactus (cosmic power, made the Hutzil robots literally kill the dinosaurs to let the planet forcibly evolve and get richer before he'd consume it)...and in canon after Night Warriors Revenge, Demitri drank him dry. So no Hadoukens gonna make a dent in most of the cast. Though you could potentially have the DS & DMC universes be canon with possibly minimal tweaking, but I dunno.

Heh, thanks man, also thanks for posting, this was nice to see! Yup, it was a publicity stunt to get RR in, oh and speaking of Steve Blum, he calls this celeb-cameo/starring-phenomenon Star Fucking, if I remember correctly. He was notably talking about it when Grey DeLisle-Griffin, Frank Welker and the usual Scooby Doo cast was deliberately left out of the recent cgi movie in favour of using Hollywood stars and sadly it's a more common issue facing animated movies and games. A lot of times you'll get the usual voice actors left out of a big adaptation of a property to get the hype of celebrity voices in movies, but for a few years now, it's bled into games with mixed results. Now, I'm not against all Hollywood actors doing voice work, there's several that are awesome at it and welcome to try out. Ron Perlman is my go to example of an awesome on-screen & voice actor. Dude still is my favourite version of Clayface due to his take on him in BTAS. The issue comes when you'll have an a/b-list celeb show up in a production, let's say there's a AAA revival of Vectorman and they have several voice actors, but for a cameo, you get Vin Diesel as the King of a Hot Rod planet....they're not going to adjust the pay, he'll get far beyond what most voice actors will get for a bit part and the main cast will get paid their normal amount. Sometimes you'll get an animated feature filled with celebs, not actors and they're not really doing anything special with their voices, yet they get the lavish treatment that VAs do not get. The excuse of "well, you're not big names, we need to promote" comes up, but in the early Disney days, that wasn't an issue. Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, etc weren't stuffed to the gills (hah) with Hollywood types, they tended to go with singers and Broadway talents and they did gangbusters. Also, in the case of "Scooby!", the main VAs are good enough for the cartoons, so why not take a risk and keep the VAs and put them in the Silverscreen? The kids in the audience want to recognize the voices they always watch, they're not screaming to hear Gina Rodriguez, Amanda Seyfreid and Zach Efron. In the past, at least for games, it's even led to problems where a studio will get too hyped at nabbing a celeb, but then oops! The budget is impacted a LOT more than if they stuck to a normal cast, and so you're getting VAs having to do extra characters at a small extra or NO pay before it all ships. I'm rambling a bit, but it's a pretty controversial thing these days and often it can go from eyerolling annoyance to actually screwing up a game's budget and / or schedule. Tl;dr there's some gems like casting the late, great, Robin Williams, a Cate Blanchett or Sigourney Weaver, Judi Dench, or Patrick Stewart vs having a reality TV star or flavour of the month get a leading role in a big budget animated feature.

To me, career bias aside, it's awfully bland, stands out compared to other characters, and is a step down from Tricia Helfer, her VA in the previous games.

He's probably in her stage or an assist of sorts, doubting he's the 5th character.

Holy crap and Captain Commando?! Dang Capcom's trying hard at the redemption arc! I hope they bring back the actor from the Beat 'em up bundle commercial and just start using him to promote stuff.

Nice stuff! I really keep wanting to mess with Blender more, but always get roped into other things. Have fun with the experimenting! This would be a dream for me. I want it, even if it's a somewhat smaller roster than SF, to just go for broke and have fun again. Go nuts, go stylish, have some of the ASW flair and give us a new DS. I love SF, but another option is just nice. I'm not a great player, but I love fighters, my sister and I played so much DS on the Saturn and have a blast, it was just so different from Alpha aesthetically and mechanically. I think DS and SF can survive without each other's audience. Yeah, no kidding, sometimes I go back and look at all the Cacom ips and they really could bring a bunch of stuff back, they could have their own Capcom version of smash with the sheer number of characters they have. It's a shame so many are dormant.

Darkstalkers definitely churned out the best versions, however, I can help but want only a few of the designs to be repurposed into npcs or something. I wouldn't mind proto-Morrigan showing up as a glam rock succubus from a rival family or the sickle soldier Zabel being a random ghoul or something.

Yeah, I was hoping she'd have her hair and then she'd look like this with the code. 😕

Oh snap, really? Alexia or Naomi?

I've been really curious, but sadly we have nothing to go on. People think the character will be male due to the number of costumes. Some people think it'll be a crossover character (I hope not), me? I just think they weren't ready to show off whoever at the time, though, maybe it's a super secret, final boss? I have no idea what to expect due to the silence overall.

So I was posting some headcanons on my twitter and I also recently got into Jojo (I'm the slowest, I know, I know). With my old theory that G employs various agents all named after the Alphabet (thus all the Q's), plus the art of the male & female agent on G's CFN page, I thought it would be cool if a high ranking female agent looked similar to Lisa Lisa when we first see her:

You did real good man, nice presentation, humour and info! Chun-Li_Forever covered the crits I had, so overall, good job!

Bless Yuan Herong <3

Also, did anyone catch that they said: "this title precedes the events of Street Fighter III, but for certain characters, their stories of what happens after Street Fighter III are also told. Iiiinteresting, I wanna backtrack, but who's story takes place after 3, I wonder.