[I had a huge brain fart, wrote it down, and later reviewed it. I've added most new stuff in ALL CAPS.]

I've been thinking about Fei Long for awhile now...

....Apologies to Nilcam and the many Fei Long fans I'm sure browse Dtoid, but I mean it when I say that a character like Fei Long should have never been put in the SF series. He was not a good fit for the game for a number of reasons. His look, purpose and move selection betrayed the legacy characters and their respective designs.

Let get this straight, Fei Long is fun to play as or against. He has some great moves and creative combo abilities. However, I find Fei Long symbolic of how little Capcom respected the name of the franchise during its peak years. Fei Long set a precedent that developers should inject concept characters into the middle of a current game rather than be allowed to frame them within a proper sequel. Super Street Fighter II begat a legacy of rehashed sprites mixed in with all new ones. Fei Long is one of the concept characters whose moves, look and purpose had not been refined when he was placed in Super SF II. He was a character that would be forced into canon and game engine. He seems introduced before his time, and represents a dramatic shift in the fictional universe as well as the real world. A world where Capcom was pushing the developers further than the dated SF II allowed and as a result forever changed the potential for the series.

Fei Long also represents a poor era in fighting game character designs, even from within Capcom, the masters of the craft.



Fei Long and characters like him are based on a thinly veiled Bruce Lee. Namco is just as guilty as Capcom is in using a one-to-one copy of the martial arts star with their Marshall Law. Bruce Lee as you may well know was a true martial artist and credited as the forefather of mixed martial arts. People tend to lump all action stars in the same group. They are all mostly pretty actors that get by on wire work and choreography. Movie fans fail to recognize that Bruce Lee was a real fighter before he was an actor. He didn't pretend to know martial arts for a movie role. He was absolutely passionate about fight culture. If anything he had to dumb down his techniques and lightning quick punches for the camera.

Placing an imitation Bruce Lee in a videogame is a design cop-out, no matter how much people try to convince themselves otherwise. It was a way to appease fans that asked for shit like "who would win in a fight, Hulk Hogan or Ryu?"

Giving Fei Long and Marshall Law the same basic move sets, pulled from various Lee films, was not a sign of respect as much as it was pandering to the masses. Both Capcom and Namco should have tried harder but it was Namco that indeed "jumped the shark," they figured that if one Bruce Lee in a fighting game was a good idea then two would be better? Forest Law, the son of Marshall Law, was a carbon-copy clone of Marshall with no redeeming factors or qualities.

Namco failed to respect the legacy of Bruce Lee's son Brandon and failed to show some class with regard to the design and moves of Forest. Whereas Brandon Lee was indeed trying to become a star like his father, he wasn't trying to by copying his father's moves, look or techniques. Brandon tried to distance himself from kung-fu cinema by taking edgier roles in Hollywood. His defining character of the Crow was a world apart from anything Bruce had done. I am not saying that Namco should have put the Crow in Tekken, but the son of Marshall Law should have had nothing in common with his father, if they meant to respect the inspiration and make a solid character.



Let's get back on Fei. Long(:3) betrays the legacy of the character design in the Street Fighter series because there was nothing original in the character, his appearance and mannerisms were all taken from Lee. Fei represents a cast of unfinished designs that should have been meant for SF III.

Him and Cammy/DeeJay/T.Hawk seem rushed to market so that Capcom would not lose it's momentum in the arcade to the upstart,albeit shitty, fighters like Mortal Kombat. Being forced to bring what seems to me like half-finished designs to the arcade caused a rift with the developers and caused many to walk away from Capcom and join rival studios(I wish I had links...). While this talent pool was good for budding franchises and fighting games abroad it also crippled what could have been the greatest trilogy in fighting games, if not all videogame, history.

THINK ABOUT IT SON. The Street Fighter III that we did not see. The one that Fei Long, Cammy, Dee Jay and T. Hawk SHOULD have been destined for.

I'm gonna go ahead and wander off to a somewhat relevant tangent right about NOW.

Fans of the series have made the distinction between the canon of Street Fighter and the real martial artists that inspired it. Having some sense of realism helps separate the SF series from every other fighting game. It is one of the many reasons why SF is one of the best franchises. For no other title can really claim to have been a dramatized account of the battles between REAL martial arts legends. When fans argue who is a fighter, Fei Long or Ryu, they miss the legacy question, the comparison should be between Bruce Lee and Mas Oyama.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masutatsu_%C5%8Cyama

Mas Oyama, like Bruce Lee, did not travel the Earth in a vain attempt at proving that his martial art was the best. Both Lee and Oyama spent their formative years traveling and learning everything they could from other martial artists. They traveled EARF, fighting the best fighters they could find. They picked up fighting and training techniques from all over the spectrum, including judo, wrestling, jujitsu, kung-fu, boxing and even strength/weight training. They adapted and incorporated everything they learned in their forms and in the ways they taught. They were doing this decades before the term mixed martial arts was even farted out of a smart ass.



The genius of Capcom was not in putting Mas Oyama in a fighting game but instead making an exaggerated version of those characters that looked like characters from a manga series, with moves and techniques that were over-the-top. The aerial triple kick became the tatsumaki senpuuyaku (hurricane kick), the fireball was born from Oyama's masterful punch "the Godhand." All Capcom did was make the original SF a retelling of the story of Oyama(a very exaggerated retelling) which culminated with him defeating a muay thai legend. Of course even this was exaggerated for the sake of VIDYAGAEMS. Oyama was a strong man but he wasn't towering over his opponents. I imagine that the muay thai fighter he faced was more or less his size. When looking at muay thai fighters in history I see that the majority of them were very lean. An videogame where Oyama defeats a skinny muay thai fighter does not make for an industry changer.



Instead Capcom created dramatic versions of the muay thai fighters, one lanky in a nod of the tradition (Adon) and one that was a fucking tank. Even if the man Oyama fought, known only as "Black Cobra" was bald and wore an eye patch, chances are he wasn't as huge(and overpowered :O) as Sagat. Placing a dramatized version of Oyama against Black Cobra in a videogame made for a much more entertaining experience than Capcom playing it to the "history books". The framework for the SF universe had been set in exaggerated reality that was as much an homage to real fighters as it was entertainment. Unfortunately following versions of SF would begin losing sight of the fighting legacy in favor of entertainment.



Fei Long could have worked had he, like Ryu, only been loosely based on a real person. He would have been a better fit for the franchise had only glimpses of the character had inspired the comparisons to Lee, rather than being a blatant copy. Great character design is hard to come by but Capcom's designers were the best at the time. Had they been given time those designers would have taken a step back and seen that Fei Long was a little too obvious. They would have taken him back to the drawing board. Such was the case while working on Street Fighter EX. They needed a new rival to the strongest, balanced, characters in the game, Ken and Ryu. They thought Bruce Lee was an obvious choice to balance the Oyama of Ryu. Rather than put Fei Long in the game they took cues from Bruce Lee and his contemporary, Chuck Norris, and combined them to create the character of [url]Allen Snider. I contend that Fei Long would have not existed in his current form because he was not original enough. He lacked the creative spark to make him more than a cheap imitation. SF III should have been the first appearance of an Allen Snider-like character with only passing cues from Bruce Lee.

Which leads me to my regular thinking about Capcom, since if you haven't noticed yet, ...I'm a Capcom fanboy.



Street Fighter II was a smash success because it did many things well, not the least of which was filling out a cast that represented other martial arts. However for many both inside and out of Capcom, the biggest hook was the plot. Rather than being strictly a fighting game, SF II's emphasis was on plot. The fighters were now fighting for something more than a title. They were all embroiled in a conspiracy with the criminal syndicate of Shadoloo. This was an interesting angle yet one which should have ended with SF II. Unfortunately because of the success of SF II, every other fighting game, without exception (I'm looking at you SNK and NAMCO), has relied on a dramatic plot to pull the characters together. Usually it is the fighters against some evil shit bent on global domination. Be it a dictator, demon, the good versus evil plot in most fighters today.

Capcom was, and still is, trapped between a rock and a hard place with the SF franchise. The demands from fans and the unpredictable market for fightans made SF:IV a highly scrutinized sequel. Yet, Capcom was responsible for putting the franchise in that position of uncertainty. Capcom failed to deliver the strongest version of Street Fighter they could have. They knew they should have excluded minor upgrades to the SF II title, or to inject unfinished fighters and a plot into Super SF II rather than pursue a proper third title.

As an outsider it is easy for me to call Capcom on what could have and should have been(JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER ONE OF YOU FUCKERS READING THIS!). The reality of the market and management is a different beast. It would have been retarded to have told the Capcom board of directors that the team wants to take some time off to develop a third SF game rather than capitalize on the red hot SF II property. It was so popular then that Capcom and it's licensing partners couldn't keep up with the global demand. They could slap the SF II logo on anything and it would have pushed product off shelves. Having the SF II team stop in their tracks so they could work on something else probably seemed stupid at the time. A break in the revenue stream would have been bad news for the shareholders. Arcade games came and went, keeping the public interested in their game several summers in a row was the best way to ensure profit. Can you really blame them for making sure SF continued to remain top dog?

In the long run that decision ended up weakening the franchise. The Super SF II upgrades felt dated and unfinished, AT LEAST TO ME. By the time SF III came around, without the input of the majority of team SF II, it was met with a lukewarm response. Besides, by then the arcade industry had collapsed in the USA. Capcom did not have a plan in place for this eventuality, a time where SF wouldn't be the hottest property in the fightans.

Capcom, and not the fans, had failed the franchise and buried it in a shallow grave.

But, as SF:IV proves, there is a bit of hope left for us, the fans.














....this shit's pretty long.