5 Fighting game characters that should have retired already

There is life after round 3.

Fighting game tournaments are not like real life tournaments. Whereas in real life most of the people who compete do so for sport and train for it yearly, character stories in videogames need to be outlandish things full of good vs evil, revenge, and sometimes runaway brides. Those who say that fighting games have no stories really do a disservice to how committed the makers are for giving Mark Joe a reason to be in Mark of Punches 5.

 But in giving characters a motivation, sometimes it clashes with the fact that regardless of the ending, the character will probably come back at some point. If you stick with a fighting game franchise long enough, you will see every character come back at least once, regardless of how resolved their plot arcs are or how dead they where last time. But some of these characters fullfilled their reason to join the tournament years ago. And yet, here they are, still trading blows. Who are this guys?

Tina Armstrong(Dead or Alive)

Tina is one of my favorite characters from this franchise, with her lighthearted personality and enormous breasts. However, her motivation has been weird from the start. And this is from a series that has a character that is trying to defeat a guy who saved her once.

See, Tina is a wrestler, but she doesn't want to be a wrestler. She wants to be in show business. So she gets into the tournament to get enough money to do so.

Can you two let me talk?

Now, let's pretend in this world wrestling isn't staged.  But  the tricky thing is, at the end of each game, Tina succeeds into  getting  into different aspects of show business, while not winning the tournament at all. Which makes no sense. If she breaks into modeling in game 1, why would she need to fight in another tournament to break into acting? If Dwayne"The Rock" Johnson wanted to become a singer, would he have to participate in a tournament, too? No, silly, he's already in!

And if winning was key to her goal, why can she still achieve it even though canonically, she lost?

This is why the movie changed her motivation to the less stupid "I want out of fake wrestling."  And it's always sad when fighting game movies actually make sense of the games.



Sentinel(MVC3)

Sentinel, buddy: come here a minute. I know you started in  a game that was mostly mutants. You hunt those. It's your job. And then you came back in Marvel vs Capcom 2. You where a little broken, but I guess all the mutants where there, so it made sense. If you had to fight Strider and Megaman, well, that's just fine.

If he wasn't a mutant, he probably heard about them.

But why are you in Marvel vs Capcom 3? No, DON'T tell me about your fruit palette shenanigans. In this game there's like 3 X-Gene mutants and arguably two more technical mutants.

And no wonder, man! Last I  heard, Mutants without ongoing comic appearances where extinct. Even Jubilee's a vampire now. Maybe you should hunt vampires and quit this "fighitng game" business. You're not good at it anyway.



Balrog(Street Fighter)

Unlike everyone else in the Street Fighter universe, Balrog is in it for the money. He works for a terrorist in  a military uniform and punches people to death. For the money. But is this paying off?

See, everytime a Street Fighter game ends, Bison is defeated. Well, except if he wins I guess.

I would also guess that Balrog probably goes to jail, or escapes somehow. But why? Does Bison pay ahead, and  is the money that good? And how much money does one  really need that going back to fight Foodtown Bruce Lee and Pink Ryu is worth it?

It's time to retire, Balrog.  If you must fight, then fight. You don't need Shadaloo. And Shadaloo sure as hell doen't need you.

Seung Mina(Soul Calibur)

Seung Mina is a young Korean woman who wants Soul Edge because she doesn't want to get married off by her family and also to defend her country. So she runs away to search for the sword.

Am I missing something, here, lady? YOU RAN AWAY FROM HOME! You don't need to  depend on your parents anymore. Sure, you can't join the Korean Army because you're a gurl, but you could always just join the battle or pull a Mulan.

As for the marriage...well, problem solved. You ran away from home! Just stay away from home and that's it.
You don't need a magic sword, you just need some follow through. It's obvious you're self sufficient if you're traveling to some other country and fighting Ivy.

I think she'll do just fine.

 The thing about Mina is, we don't know if she's back in the series newest, decades after the fact timejump. But I'm guessing she'll be back.


Scorpion(Mortal Kombat)

You could argue that Scorpion is probably Mortal Kombat's most known character. Yet the demonic undead Ninja hasn't had a real reason to fight in years.


See, at first it was revenge for the death of his family as well as himself. And he got it. He killed the guy. Then the guy's brother showed up, dressed the same. This lead to a hilarious misunderstanding that lasted  several games and a spinoff. Finally, in Mortal Kombat 4, he finally caught up with the guy, but He wasn't the killer, this other magic motherfucker was to blame. So he dragged that guy to Hell.

GET OVER IIIIIIIIT!

After that, Scorpion's motivation started to get muddy. He chased the guy out of hell, became a conduit for the Elder Gods, then decided to get revenge against the Gods. Come on, Scorpion, kill the guy and rest in fucking peace already!


Oh, wait, time got reversed?  Well, back to hunting the brother of the guy who killed you then, I guess?

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4 Origins that you didn't need to know(but they made them anyway)

What do you mean, "his X-rays will show no evidence of being shot through?" Be quite and let me work on my memory erasing bullets in peace.

Have you ever met an interesting person and wondered how they arrived at that particular junction of their lives? Of course you do. Or maybe not, I dunno. The fact is, curiosity drives us to wonder like this.

It's no different with fictional characters. However, very often, especially if a character's coolness is helped by  having a mysterious past, trying to tell the origins of a character you know and love already is a bad idea.  And a lot of times, those origins aren't something the character really needs. Here's some examples.

Everyone in Shenmue:

But aren't you curious what they do when not being  punched?

Shenmue is the precursor to a lot of what we're doing right now in video games, for good or for ill. However, one fact that didn't caught on was that every single, solitary NPC, enemy and pretty much every character had a name and a backstory.

Never mind that most of them have stock responses to whatever you're asking. Yu Suzuki really thought he needed to explain why a pizza guy runs the pizzeria or or that that one girl likes to undress her dolls and display them or what lead to those mean ass bitch schoolgirls to being what they are.

Finally...closure...

Look at this shit. How much of this do you think comes into play in the actual game? Hardly any. It's one thing to see each character head to home after hours, it's another to know that they're still paying their mortgage.




Master Chief:

Stupid floor! Help! I'm stuck!

If you're willing to invest yourself in Halo Mythology, you could learn a lot about it's protagonist,Spartan Super Soldier Master Chief. You could learn he was once a boy who was kidnapped, replaced with a clone, and made into a supersoldier. You could learn his name is John.

I see what you did there, Bungie.

You could...but play the freaking games. Master Chief is known for never showing you under his helmet , for attempting to finish the fight and for being marooned on the surface of a ring-world. Does his origin change any the perception of him?

In fact, in the games, The Chief is purposely kept a mostly blank slate, because it's the player who guides the character's actions. How he became a soldier isn't even a priority in this story of alien zealots, secret super plagues, and lovelorn AIs.

Sonic the Hedgehog:

Is he putting the number 2 or taking it?

Now, kids, Sonic may have become a convoluted mess of friends and Final Fantasy knock off monster bosses now, but  there was a time when Sonic was just a Felix the Cat analogue fighting evil Teddy Roosevelt and his robots by running from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen.

And during those times, in the official games, there WAS no explanation where he came from. At least in the games. Sega of America made a friggin' bible trying to get just where Sonic is that leads him to be what he is. And, you know, it involves Sonic 's past as an actual, bug eating hedgehog, his father dying and him becoming an anthropomorphic hedgehog because of radioactive sludge.

Sonic Begins.

Of course, you could take the Sonic Underground origin, as sung by Not-Disturbed, about how he's really a heir apparent and searching for his mother because of a prophecy.

Hey, geniuses, Sonic doesn't need an origin. He's a cartoon hedgehog that runs into trouble with robots. Don't try to make  this explainable by tacking on origin to it.

Darth Vader:

It is your deshtinee...to become Jenny Cho...

Now, enough has been said about the Star Wars prequels to block out the sun itself, and most of it isn't good.

Now,  I don't want to retread that old ground and I don't really hate the Prequels that much. But as a point of analysis, I ask you: What where the prequels supposed to be? Why they where supposed to show the story that lead to the Origin of the Empire, and the origin of Iconic asthmatic Villain Darth Vader.

And as bad as the movies may have been, they did set up the Empire, if in an overly convoluted way. But Vader, not so much.

I mean, yes, he ends up in the suit. But the character is not really the same.  See, Vader, as voiced by James Earl Jones, had a suaveness to him. When he's yelling at you to find them and bring them back alive, you get a sense he's a leader.  But when he's not aggravated, you get a sense there's more to him than being a space bully. He's like...a very smart, cultured man. Or at least a man with some wisdom.

They should have gotten Collin Salmon to dub over Hayden Christensen.

The Prequels essentially have him as an angry young, dumb man. You never get a sense that he's anything more than that. He doesn't have the leadership skills or confidence in the Force that future Vader does, and it doesn't show where those came from.  I guess for that they would need to bridge between Ep 3 and Star Wars, huh? But if Lucas can't tell this origin properly in 3 movies, I doubt  he could do it in 1.

But seriously, what are the defining points of Anakin by his final battle with Obi Wan? He thinks that the Jedi are evil(though he has no real reason to believe this), he wants to gain enough power to stop death(for one person, which  he himself choked with little provocation) and he's willing to help a shady old man he knows is evil(who explicitly draws his powers from something known as "the dark side". No confusion there.) into ruling the galaxy. He's evil, sure. But he's not the kind of evil real Vader is.

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BGEVER Webcomics: Backstories!

Some Jerkwad spreading rumors that Strider and Hsien Ko are in MVC3. I doubt that, but now I'm riled up about Hsien Ko.

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