As a villain character, it's more relevant than ever. ;p
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Street Fighter V |OTVII| New Generation - Connection To Haters Was Lost
- Thread starter Reizo Ryuu
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TheSpoiler
Member
Look how disappointed he is:
Guile is so American I forgot about it him.
SolarPowered
Member
Capcom going full master race with their blonde characters now. Trump would be proud.
sixteen-bit
Member
Shadaloo's Nazi aesthetic doesn't help, lol
TheSpoiler
Member
Because the hoodie look is literally 8 Mile generic as fuck.
lucebuce12
Member
I'm expecting stubby normals. Any other guesses?
Bad jump ins, bad walk speed, very punishable specials and useless V-Skill. Better play it safe than sorry with DLC characters. Panic buffs in S3.
Good AA normal that rivals Birdies cr.mp.
Doctrine Dark
Member
I have no issue with this design.
I know it doesn't mean they're all Americans, or "white", but visually, it crushes a lot of possible design uniqueness. It'd help a bit if their alt costumes / colors worked with variations a bit more too. Or better yet, make the "unique" looks their defaults, and then make the alts indulge in the safer, less surprising looks.
One shouldn't have to fight so hard to find the differences in blond hair, fair-skinned characters. Or shouldn't have so many of them in the first place? When things as simple as hair and skin color can strengthen the feel of a character's uniqueness, why are they using such a limited default palette?
Capcom in like... their Darkstalkers days, have designs more akin to Overwatch. Even people who are from the same group, country, or region of the world, are visually very separate from each other. Every character design is a chance to make a different person feel like "I have someone that I can relate to!" in the game. Your audience grows by giving more people an anchor point into your universe.
So why waste resources pushing so many designs towards the same, or similar, archetypes? It's a really poorly done creative method, and honestly far beneath the standards Capcom has set over the years.
And if you're going to overload on something... at least overload on something refreshingly different.
Good post. While I agree with most of what you said I don't think creativity is completely bankrupt within the SFV team when it comes to the character roster. Rashid, Fang, Necalli and Laura all look and feel very different with unique personalities and play styles however, recently, it seems Capcom wants to keep up with the blonde hair and white skin motif with Kolin and Ed.
Reizo Ryuu
Member
Kolin and ed have always been blond though...
If these are the characters they want to make playable, they shouldn't have to replace them or push them back just out of fear that people will complain about "my diversity".
Also creating a "diverse" character, just for the sake of having said diversity is even worse, they should just do whatever they get excited about creatively, whether that's blond ed or lion akuma.
If these are the characters they want to make playable, they shouldn't have to replace them or push them back just out of fear that people will complain about "my diversity".
Also creating a "diverse" character, just for the sake of having said diversity is even worse, they should just do whatever they get excited about creatively, whether that's blond ed or lion akuma.
I think they definitely have the potential for it. Which is why it hurts a bit more each time they decide to ignore it. It's just... not very Capcom-like. Which is weird because premium characters attached to a 60 dollar game should be the pinnacle of their design talents, not the bottom.
kusanagi1777
Member
Reizo Ryuu
Member
Just because your cast isn't a fucking rainbow doesn't mean it's at the bottom design wise, suggesting that is ludicrous.
Nice. He looks better in full view.
UcchedavÄda
Member
I'm not saying to change the base character, but Kolin doesn't have a single non-blonde alt out of 56 different color and costume combinations. That's a bit boring.
EDIT: Correction, she has 1 orange-haired alt (Story 15), which I missed.
Costume looks a lot better from this angle, but I am still not sold on the hat.
TheSpoiler
Member
I agree that Capcom definitely had that diversity on lock in the previous eras - partly due to how many games t hey had going (Rival Schools!).
But, ah, I don't think it's difficult to see that Kolin's face is different than Vega's. Design wise, you can tell what country they rep. Birdie doesn't really even look that American. It's kind of the sum of it's parts, you know? Sure, the blonde is there, but that's not the whole outfit. Changing just the hair color is lazy to me.
I get that the blonde is offputting, but Birdie having blonde hair doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't count as a black person.
On the flipside, I do hope the next character isn't a blonde American. Ten blondes out of twenty five or so characters is cutting it close in my eyes.
Edit: Hair color changes as a different alt should be a common thing. Not for diversity or anything, but just because it looks cool.
DoubleTake
Member
That design is utter trash. Wtf is this. Nazi Ed? GTFO Capcom
UcchedavÄda
Member
TheSpoiler
Member
That's blue fam.
Black, blue whatevs. Same color. Could be lighting too.
Rickenslacker
Banned
The whole Blonde Fighter thing is a bit overblown. Counting Ed there are 10 blondies in the cast, but there are 9 characters with black/dark brown hair. They might be missing gingers and more variety of eccentric colours, but it's not that skewed.
UcchedavÄda
Member
Looking at the numbers (and not making any judgment here), there are now more blonde or white-haired characters in SFV (12) than there was in USFIV (11), despite the size of the cast in SFV (24) being roughly half of that in USFIV (44). In other words, there are roughly twice as many blondes in SFV as in USFIV, proportionally speaking.
hey_it's_that_dog
benevolent sexism
Getting over the original surprise of how different Ed is from his hoodie-teen incarnation, that's a pretty cool outfit, albeit pretty close to Bison's.
Has anyone been seeing a lot of the new costumes online? I fought a schoolgirl Juri and a cheerleader Mika and a couple of school Chuns (nobody warned me they were thigh high stockings!) right when the content launched but I haven't seen a single Ken, Ryu, or Alex in a new outfit. I'm seeing Bison stage a lot, though, which is nice.
Has anyone been seeing a lot of the new costumes online? I fought a schoolgirl Juri and a cheerleader Mika and a couple of school Chuns (nobody warned me they were thigh high stockings!) right when the content launched but I haven't seen a single Ken, Ryu, or Alex in a new outfit. I'm seeing Bison stage a lot, though, which is nice.
Rickenslacker
Banned
Yeah but, so? Is it supposed to be proportional to Ultra's?Ucchedavāda;235920916 said:
lucebuce12
Member
Hybrid.
There are, literally, only three blondes in SF3 (including Gill). Seven in SF4 (out of 44).
Is it really overblown. Is it.
If he is motion i might look into maining him, I'm kinda digging the character, and getting tired of Rashid.
Rickenslacker
Banned
And Alpha 3 had 8 (which a fair few of the blondies here are being pulled from). Big whoop.
If there's anything to blame, it's SF4's negligence towards Charlie, Mika, and Karin. ;~;
UcchedavÄda
Member
Ultra is probably the best point of comparison, since that is the last game in the series, and what people would naturally tend to compare SFV with. You could also compare with real-world statistics, but that would probably make it look even more skewed for SFV, since blondes are much less common than darker hair colors, globally speaking.
But I am not saying what it should be, merely what it is.
Rickenslacker
Banned
I'm just viewing it in absolute terms because proportionally can be misleading. SF4 has an infinitely greater amount of pink haired characters than SF5. Ergo, SF4 is pink fighter. Though given that the "new" characters of Season 2 has actually come to means characters existing in SF5 in some fashion now made playable, I suspect we're going to be having a blonde drought for the remainder of the season.Ucchedavāda;235923043 said:
The Kolin thing is mildly irritating because her default is her Helen disguise which, from the story mode ending at least, seems to be an illusion created by Gill. So I would have preferred if they made the default a redhead or something while her nostalgia is blonde like everyone else.
After owning this game since launch essentially, I am just now really making a serious effort to get into it.
I picked Cammy this time, because I think my brain works with her the best for some reason (not that she's easy to play or anything, of course not).
I don't know about Ranked though. Either I get blown the fuck up, or I'm fighting people who I am convinced are just trolling me (Zangiefs with 0 SPDs, Ryus with no fireballs, etc). That, and I've probably fought at least 10 Kens all across the spectrum.
I guess I'll keep playing, but the "flow" of combat in this game has not really clicked for me despite how I still keep up on the game in the tournament scene.
I picked Cammy this time, because I think my brain works with her the best for some reason (not that she's easy to play or anything, of course not).
I don't know about Ranked though. Either I get blown the fuck up, or I'm fighting people who I am convinced are just trolling me (Zangiefs with 0 SPDs, Ryus with no fireballs, etc). That, and I've probably fought at least 10 Kens all across the spectrum.
I guess I'll keep playing, but the "flow" of combat in this game has not really clicked for me despite how I still keep up on the game in the tournament scene.
UcchedavÄda
Member
The same artist that recently did a digital painting of Juri has put up one of Makoto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtiqnsXTdf0
Both absolute terms and proportions can be misleading. But nobody here, that I have seen, have made arguments like your example with Poison. I could have argued that USFIV had 32 non-blonde characters, while SFV has 12 non-blonde characters, making V much less non-blonde than IV, but that would have been just as silly.
Rather, we could also look at it like this:
If V the same size cast as IV, but with the same proportions as now, then IV would have 1 pink-haired character more than V, but V would have 11 more blondes and white-haired characters that IV. Or if IV had the same size cast as V, but with the same proportions as now, then IV would probably not have any pink-haired characters (1:44 < 1:24) and would have 6 blondes and white-haired characters, compared to V's 12.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/makoto-060517-10670268
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtiqnsXTdf0
Both absolute terms and proportions can be misleading. But nobody here, that I have seen, have made arguments like your example with Poison. I could have argued that USFIV had 32 non-blonde characters, while SFV has 12 non-blonde characters, making V much less non-blonde than IV, but that would have been just as silly.
Rather, we could also look at it like this:
If V the same size cast as IV, but with the same proportions as now, then IV would have 1 pink-haired character more than V, but V would have 11 more blondes and white-haired characters that IV. Or if IV had the same size cast as V, but with the same proportions as now, then IV would probably not have any pink-haired characters (1:44 < 1:24) and would have 6 blondes and white-haired characters, compared to V's 12.
Here we go, found an image of him -
Of course, Capcpom hoisted by their own petard yet again
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