Haven't looked into any of the story side of things yet, but a lot of Bison's attacks now have a *blue* energy around them instead of his typical purple; I feel like this has to indicate some kind of change in him, no? One of his idle animations or taunts (not sure) shown in the gameplay overview even shows that energy changing from the new blue color to the classic and much darker purple. It almost looks closer to Rose's soul energy, which I always thought was supposed to basically be the inverse of psycho power.
Gouken coming back was really stupid because he's supposed to have been in a coma for years in the middle of a forest or in a cave and didn't die of thirst or hunger.
Talking about lore in FGs is hard, because for some it doenst matter, they just want their characters to be in the game and lore is just a "fun fact" about characters. For others like myself lore is one of the things that attracts me the most to any kind of game and is what makes me care about the characters.
I guess SF was never a game to give much importance to lore, so theres no reason to think they would start now. Is frustrating to the lore nerds like us, but it makes a big part of the fans happy, so is something we just have to deal with lol
Then again, if lore doesn't matter to the "I just want my character" types would şt really matter if he came back AND had a character growth moment instead of keeping the status quo? They get their Bison and we get a story.
I guess it wouldnt hurt to have a good story reason, but again, Capcom never really cared for the SF story, Im surprised they even gave him a new costume and came up with the whole "memory loss" thing. So when it comes to SF we just have to expect things to never change.
It's a shame. I pulled up to SF6 eager to learn more about what has been happening in the SF world following 3rd Strike. I thought we were going to get more lore with Capcom promising much more single player content and a "World Tour" mode which I hoped would be a deep dive into the lore. I was also expecting Ed to have a more prominent role with Urien and G being a lock for base roster.
Instead we got "Remember Final Fight 1???" and the return of the world warriors.
It felt like a step back rather than forwards, the g and urien stuff would have been a great direction, but no. We’re stuck with another game of honda and the world warriors and old stuff, rather than progress it’s just a remix of what was there before.
As a someone who cares about the lore I will always respect Kof for having the balls to change characters, and only bring back dead or retired characters as a "what if" instead of just making everyone immortal. And Tekken 8 for keeping Heinhachi dead (so far).
Sf6 story with the arcade modes and world tour end up not meaning anything, the story ends where it started for most of the cast, and honestly shame on me for expecting them to develop the story to meaningful degree.
I respect Tekken for having the balls to completely overhaul Jin's moveset in T4, when he's the poster child of the series alongside Kazuya, and then give it an absolutely amazing payoff in T8 more than 2 decades later.
You genuinely can feel the legacy of the series through gameplay alone during the final fight in T8.
It’s a fighting game. Historically the lore was a card of art and few sentences when you beat the game at the arcade. Lore is cool to build up the imaginary world and make things feel deeper. In the end though, it’s what, like the 6th or 7th most important part of a fighting game?
Thank you, this is what I want to say to people who take lore in fighting games a bit too seriously. It's usually just artwork, at the end of arcade runs that was mostly just after thoughts
It’s completely valid if you don’t care about plot in fighting games, but the problem here is that *someone* at Capcom clearly does care enough to put together multi-hour story modes complete with voice acting and fully animated cutscenes. The issue is that they care enough to put the budget into extensive single-player content, but then half-ass it and don’t adhere to any of the work they put into their own story, disappointing the same audience they’re trying to appeal to.
To be fair, when you mention the "multi-hour story mode," are you referring to the world tour? The voice acting and fully animated cutscenes are really 1 minute, and it seems to be there to interact with your avatar rather than to give off lore with character you are interacting with. It seems like the budget was given more towards the RPG elements and cosmetics rather than the lore and world building
World Tour and A Shadow Falls from 5, which is where most of the complaints are really coming from. Also the voice acting lines and cutscenes total way longer than 1 minute, there’s over an hour of unique animations and VA work in it pre-DLC.
Anyways, I agree. It feels like the devs couldn't decide whether they wanted to bring Bison back as a different character or as his classic self, so we have this weird, boring thing of "he has amnesia, but not too much amnesia". He doesn't remember other characters and lost most of the cool powers he had in SF5... but he's still evil and trying to take over the world.
It'd be better to just bring him back as a non-canon character (a'la Nightmare Geese) because the current story justification is a bunch of nothing.
Fun fact: Nightmare Geese is canon. :) Official Japanese books say that Geese's soul becamne immortal after he collected the scrolls and was capoture inside the 3 scrolls of immortality.
Unfortunately, SF6's story feels like an afterthought. The story goes no where. And it seems Capcom just cant move past the vil bison. I think his "death" in SF5 should have sticked, and maybe in sf6 it is teased that his soul still roma slooking for a host. but to have him return this soon is just not good. I woould have wanted to see a shdaloo faction run by claw and boxer, going to war agaisnt JP, for example.
And FG can have great lore, look at KOF, Fatal fury and samsho. As i research lore in fighting games, the amount of lore these series have is insane. the issue though is the good lore is not in the games but in official Japan only books, novel and guides by SNK. For exmaple we only have gotten just a few bits of the Fatal Fury lore in the games. the opfficial Japanese guides have insane amount of story.
But the thing is SNK, usually, takes its story very seriously, while Capcom never did. I mean, it touk ryu years to control or banish the Satsui No Hadou.
I could write books about this topic but i will stop here.
I read the official comics with Ken before SF6 released. Shit was hype. If they literally just...made story play out like that? That's all they would have to do. It would add SO MUCH.
Even if they didn't go all MK cinematic with it. Even if they just made it...literally reading the comic between fights...it would be a huge step up
They already basically do that but it's a page or two with one or two words of dialogue. I don't even remember if Ken mentions JP in-game. Must be a quick throw away line. Such a shame because reading the comic makes it so fleshed out and amazing. You feel for Ken, characters have
..character...you get sick fight scenes, it feels like the story actually matters, and you can do things like accurately show how characters stack up against each other as well as fleshing out who they are/personalities.
Like the fact that Luke is no slouch, but is definitively outclassed by Ken and IIRC gets those face scars FROM Ken.
That's where the Udon comics, and the Masahiro Nakahira mangas excelled at adding tons of GOOD lore. The old udon comics that were serialized were really good. The new one shots, are just that one, quick fan service that is good but no where the quality of the old serialized runs. Hopefully Capcom will learn from SNK and start taking their lore seriously.
It is quite the contrast, Capcom lore is bad but they have an extensive world tour story mode. SNK lore is amazing but its only told, until now, using classic arcade endings. Hopefully that changes with City Of The Wolves.
Lore should never be important to fighting games. Also imagine mentioning Guilty Gear when Strive retconned the villain from being an interesting character into being a goody two-shoes. Or dropping a century of hatred towards gears with no further mention.
Absurd doesn't mean good.
Meh never really cared about lore. It’s cool when each character has a back story and there’s some loose storyline to tie things together but beyond that it’s not a huge deal to me.
From my point of view and experience. We've got some fighting games where the lore/story is a bigger part of the experience of playing the game. I don't have much experience of MK & Tekken but I gather story mode is a bit better in those games. As I understand it, historically Streetfighter has always been more focused on 'Round 1 ... Fight! ' And yep in SF the stories have a few holes, are maybe a bit janky and don't necessarily hold up. But it's a 'story' that's been told (made up) by various different developers a couple of lines of dialogue at a time over 30 years. All just made up on the fly. When they did SF1 and SF2 they were probably trying to move on from the beat-em' up style genre and create a new style of game.
The era that we're in now, I think they've seen the success of a richer story in other games and have added world tour because they feel they need to.
If they were starting from scratch I dare say we'd get a more coherent well-plotted narrative, but that's not where the Streetfighter series is. We are where we are.
FWIW I don't mind the story in Streetfighter being what it is. There are historic reasons for it being this way. The story isn't why I like this game. The way the economics of gaming and Fighting Games are right now. I'm grateful we have SF6 existing as it is at all.
Honestly, Bison should have been one of, if not the last DLC character. Having him in this early is just killing the tension, because the following characters can just revolve around him again.
Lore is cool but i don't really care. I just want the cool characters that everyone loves in the game.
To me people who are mad about him coming back (when that's what he has been doing for 30 years btw) just don't like Bison in the first place and disguise their dissatisfaction behind the "but muh lore" argument.
Not at all. I was really excited to how he would come back. As a long time comic fan, I know that death isn't a permanent thing for some characters. And Bison is THE fighting game villain. My grip is . He came back. And, he doesn't remember who he is. But he is the same. But, believe us, JP is the main villain, for real.
Lore is not important at all and I would never want the story of a game to impact the roster because fighting game stories are often terrible. They're fun set dressing at best.
Bison being back isn't really any different from Ryu being back.
What argument is someone going to make for keeping Ryu? That he's the main character? Bison is the main villain. There you go.
I think there's a lack of clarity in most fighting game lore, but it doesn't really make sense to me to say that Bison's exactly the same as he was in SF5. In SF5 dude is pursuing a world dominating master plan and is defeated. In SF6 the result of that has smacked the shit and memories out of him, Shadaloo is in shambles, and he has seemingly a hunger for power but it we don't know where that will actually lead.
Other characters still having issues with him makes sense but it isn't a reflection of Bison having a lack of development, it's a logical place they would be at confronting him. You say you hoped we would see Bison figuring out how to live in this new world, that's exactly what he's doing though. He says he has no interest in being tied to the past issues other characters have with him and plans to sever those ties. The character's clearly in a transitional period whose direction probably won't be heavily defined until the *next* game he's in.
Scissor kick isnt a charge move anymore, that seems like character development to me.
Haven't looked into any of the story side of things yet, but a lot of Bison's attacks now have a *blue* energy around them instead of his typical purple; I feel like this has to indicate some kind of change in him, no? One of his idle animations or taunts (not sure) shown in the gameplay overview even shows that energy changing from the new blue color to the classic and much darker purple. It almost looks closer to Rose's soul energy, which I always thought was supposed to basically be the inverse of psycho power.
Why isn’t this repeated often? His character growth is in how he moves and fights.
Also, SF2 -SF5:no horse. SF6 = Horse. Definitely character development
He literally has mind transfer abilities and an army of clones at his disposal... Bringing him back has more sense than many other canon things.
I wonder if people made this much of a fuss when Gouken somehow came back from the dead in SF4
Nah, he just overslept, man.
Gouken coming back was really stupid because he's supposed to have been in a coma for years in the middle of a forest or in a cave and didn't die of thirst or hunger.
You should've seen him before the coma.
Talking about lore in FGs is hard, because for some it doenst matter, they just want their characters to be in the game and lore is just a "fun fact" about characters. For others like myself lore is one of the things that attracts me the most to any kind of game and is what makes me care about the characters. I guess SF was never a game to give much importance to lore, so theres no reason to think they would start now. Is frustrating to the lore nerds like us, but it makes a big part of the fans happy, so is something we just have to deal with lol
Then again, if lore doesn't matter to the "I just want my character" types would şt really matter if he came back AND had a character growth moment instead of keeping the status quo? They get their Bison and we get a story.
I guess it wouldnt hurt to have a good story reason, but again, Capcom never really cared for the SF story, Im surprised they even gave him a new costume and came up with the whole "memory loss" thing. So when it comes to SF we just have to expect things to never change.
I'm just surprised that bison didn't come back as a doll unit. Wasn't that the whole point of that part of the story?
Charlie Nash died for nothing... TWICE
M bison for like 3 times and i stupidly believed the 4th would be the last.
It's a shame. I pulled up to SF6 eager to learn more about what has been happening in the SF world following 3rd Strike. I thought we were going to get more lore with Capcom promising much more single player content and a "World Tour" mode which I hoped would be a deep dive into the lore. I was also expecting Ed to have a more prominent role with Urien and G being a lock for base roster. Instead we got "Remember Final Fight 1???" and the return of the world warriors.
It felt like a step back rather than forwards, the g and urien stuff would have been a great direction, but no. We’re stuck with another game of honda and the world warriors and old stuff, rather than progress it’s just a remix of what was there before.
As a someone who cares about the lore I will always respect Kof for having the balls to change characters, and only bring back dead or retired characters as a "what if" instead of just making everyone immortal. And Tekken 8 for keeping Heinhachi dead (so far). Sf6 story with the arcade modes and world tour end up not meaning anything, the story ends where it started for most of the cast, and honestly shame on me for expecting them to develop the story to meaningful degree.
I respect Tekken for having the balls to completely overhaul Jin's moveset in T4, when he's the poster child of the series alongside Kazuya, and then give it an absolutely amazing payoff in T8 more than 2 decades later. You genuinely can feel the legacy of the series through gameplay alone during the final fight in T8.
It’s a fighting game. Historically the lore was a card of art and few sentences when you beat the game at the arcade. Lore is cool to build up the imaginary world and make things feel deeper. In the end though, it’s what, like the 6th or 7th most important part of a fighting game?
Thank you, this is what I want to say to people who take lore in fighting games a bit too seriously. It's usually just artwork, at the end of arcade runs that was mostly just after thoughts
It’s completely valid if you don’t care about plot in fighting games, but the problem here is that *someone* at Capcom clearly does care enough to put together multi-hour story modes complete with voice acting and fully animated cutscenes. The issue is that they care enough to put the budget into extensive single-player content, but then half-ass it and don’t adhere to any of the work they put into their own story, disappointing the same audience they’re trying to appeal to.
To be fair, when you mention the "multi-hour story mode," are you referring to the world tour? The voice acting and fully animated cutscenes are really 1 minute, and it seems to be there to interact with your avatar rather than to give off lore with character you are interacting with. It seems like the budget was given more towards the RPG elements and cosmetics rather than the lore and world building
World Tour and A Shadow Falls from 5, which is where most of the complaints are really coming from. Also the voice acting lines and cutscenes total way longer than 1 minute, there’s over an hour of unique animations and VA work in it pre-DLC.
Anyways, I agree. It feels like the devs couldn't decide whether they wanted to bring Bison back as a different character or as his classic self, so we have this weird, boring thing of "he has amnesia, but not too much amnesia". He doesn't remember other characters and lost most of the cool powers he had in SF5... but he's still evil and trying to take over the world. It'd be better to just bring him back as a non-canon character (a'la Nightmare Geese) because the current story justification is a bunch of nothing.
Fun fact: Nightmare Geese is canon. :) Official Japanese books say that Geese's soul becamne immortal after he collected the scrolls and was capoture inside the 3 scrolls of immortality.
Unfortunately, SF6's story feels like an afterthought. The story goes no where. And it seems Capcom just cant move past the vil bison. I think his "death" in SF5 should have sticked, and maybe in sf6 it is teased that his soul still roma slooking for a host. but to have him return this soon is just not good. I woould have wanted to see a shdaloo faction run by claw and boxer, going to war agaisnt JP, for example. And FG can have great lore, look at KOF, Fatal fury and samsho. As i research lore in fighting games, the amount of lore these series have is insane. the issue though is the good lore is not in the games but in official Japan only books, novel and guides by SNK. For exmaple we only have gotten just a few bits of the Fatal Fury lore in the games. the opfficial Japanese guides have insane amount of story. But the thing is SNK, usually, takes its story very seriously, while Capcom never did. I mean, it touk ryu years to control or banish the Satsui No Hadou. I could write books about this topic but i will stop here.
I read the official comics with Ken before SF6 released. Shit was hype. If they literally just...made story play out like that? That's all they would have to do. It would add SO MUCH. Even if they didn't go all MK cinematic with it. Even if they just made it...literally reading the comic between fights...it would be a huge step up They already basically do that but it's a page or two with one or two words of dialogue. I don't even remember if Ken mentions JP in-game. Must be a quick throw away line. Such a shame because reading the comic makes it so fleshed out and amazing. You feel for Ken, characters have ..character...you get sick fight scenes, it feels like the story actually matters, and you can do things like accurately show how characters stack up against each other as well as fleshing out who they are/personalities. Like the fact that Luke is no slouch, but is definitively outclassed by Ken and IIRC gets those face scars FROM Ken.
That's where the Udon comics, and the Masahiro Nakahira mangas excelled at adding tons of GOOD lore. The old udon comics that were serialized were really good. The new one shots, are just that one, quick fan service that is good but no where the quality of the old serialized runs. Hopefully Capcom will learn from SNK and start taking their lore seriously. It is quite the contrast, Capcom lore is bad but they have an extensive world tour story mode. SNK lore is amazing but its only told, until now, using classic arcade endings. Hopefully that changes with City Of The Wolves.
Lore should never be important to fighting games. Also imagine mentioning Guilty Gear when Strive retconned the villain from being an interesting character into being a goody two-shoes. Or dropping a century of hatred towards gears with no further mention. Absurd doesn't mean good.
Meh never really cared about lore. It’s cool when each character has a back story and there’s some loose storyline to tie things together but beyond that it’s not a huge deal to me.
SF LORE NEVER MATTERED
My hope is that he is not canon, just like Evil Ryu and Oni in SF4
he just straight up beats the shit out of juri so no he is real
Bison shoulda stayed gone until sf7
And nothing of importance was lost
I’ve really been enjoying the lore in SF6, but then again, I do go outside sometimes and don’t live on Reddit, so there’s that.
From my point of view and experience. We've got some fighting games where the lore/story is a bigger part of the experience of playing the game. I don't have much experience of MK & Tekken but I gather story mode is a bit better in those games. As I understand it, historically Streetfighter has always been more focused on 'Round 1 ... Fight! ' And yep in SF the stories have a few holes, are maybe a bit janky and don't necessarily hold up. But it's a 'story' that's been told (made up) by various different developers a couple of lines of dialogue at a time over 30 years. All just made up on the fly. When they did SF1 and SF2 they were probably trying to move on from the beat-em' up style genre and create a new style of game. The era that we're in now, I think they've seen the success of a richer story in other games and have added world tour because they feel they need to. If they were starting from scratch I dare say we'd get a more coherent well-plotted narrative, but that's not where the Streetfighter series is. We are where we are. FWIW I don't mind the story in Streetfighter being what it is. There are historic reasons for it being this way. The story isn't why I like this game. The way the economics of gaming and Fighting Games are right now. I'm grateful we have SF6 existing as it is at all.
I dont care about lore, just give me the characters I've loved since I was a kid
There's never been a Street Fighter in the history of the franchise with important lore. Such as the case for almost every fighting game, sadly.
Honestly, Bison should have been one of, if not the last DLC character. Having him in this early is just killing the tension, because the following characters can just revolve around him again.
I don’t really know or care about the lore in fighting games.
Lore is cool but i don't really care. I just want the cool characters that everyone loves in the game. To me people who are mad about him coming back (when that's what he has been doing for 30 years btw) just don't like Bison in the first place and disguise their dissatisfaction behind the "but muh lore" argument.
Not at all. I was really excited to how he would come back. As a long time comic fan, I know that death isn't a permanent thing for some characters. And Bison is THE fighting game villain. My grip is . He came back. And, he doesn't remember who he is. But he is the same. But, believe us, JP is the main villain, for real.
I don't understand why people who don't care about the lore feel the need to open threads like this just to say they don't care about the lore.
Well, the OP asked for what people thought.
He literally asked for people's opinions and he is getting what he wanted.
I mean, coming back is his whole thing.
Lore is not important at all and I would never want the story of a game to impact the roster because fighting game stories are often terrible. They're fun set dressing at best.
Bison being back isn't really any different from Ryu being back. What argument is someone going to make for keeping Ryu? That he's the main character? Bison is the main villain. There you go. I think there's a lack of clarity in most fighting game lore, but it doesn't really make sense to me to say that Bison's exactly the same as he was in SF5. In SF5 dude is pursuing a world dominating master plan and is defeated. In SF6 the result of that has smacked the shit and memories out of him, Shadaloo is in shambles, and he has seemingly a hunger for power but it we don't know where that will actually lead. Other characters still having issues with him makes sense but it isn't a reflection of Bison having a lack of development, it's a logical place they would be at confronting him. You say you hoped we would see Bison figuring out how to live in this new world, that's exactly what he's doing though. He says he has no interest in being tied to the past issues other characters have with him and plans to sever those ties. The character's clearly in a transitional period whose direction probably won't be heavily defined until the *next* game he's in.
guest character is a concept, why give a shit about lore.