Date 8.21.22 [RGV] - Select Screen Aesthetic Pt. 1 -Street Fighter '90s-
I love fighting games. These games may have a high skill ceiling, practicing and training being constantly required for any kind of constant success, but if you really think about it, that same learning and training methodology is necessary for real life combat training. Just as every real-life fighter, whether in televised professional wrestling, recognized boxing circuits, the grappling-focused UFC, or any other fighting tournament you can think of; so too do the various characters in fighting games have their own fighting style and way to operate them. One given shotokan karateka might play entirely different than another though they may look and play similarly.
In the most famous fighting game of them all, Street Fighter, there are no less than seven individuals who practice the same style of martial arts, the fictional Ansatsuken, or assassin's fist, and each of them play very differently from another. Ryu is a traditional, one might say archetypical shoto - honest and straightforward, with only three specific specials to call his own, four in Street Fighter III. Meanwhile a character like Akuma is a more aggressive glass cannon - lower health, in fact he generally has the least health when playable, but he makes up for that by being stronger and trickier to deal with; air fireballs, a backflip maneuver that can lead into different techniques, teleport dashes, and his famous shun goku satsu grab super are some examples of how Akuma is very different than Ryu or his kin. Further, Sakura is not a traditional shoto fighter; yes, she uses ansatsuken techniques but her style is vastly different, with charge fireballs and a different hurricane kick, moving in an arc rather than a straight line. Her shoryuken analogue moves her along the ground before she rises with the uppercut. in Marvel Vs. Capcom, her fireballs attacked diagonally up rather than straight forward.
By the same token, fighting game character select screens can tell you a lot about the kind of game you're playing and what you are in for, and each one has a different style that fits them. I'm certainly no expert in graphic design, in fact Iris tells me my logo treatments suck at times, but today I'd like to go over a few series of character select screens from six different fighting game series: Street Fighter, Capcom Vs., Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, and The King of Fighters. You might be asking: "Shion, you have two separate Capcom series in this list! is there favoritism?" and I will fully admit a Capcom bias, however as you'll see, the character select style is vastly different than the average Street Fighter game.
Let's start with the obvious one: 1992's Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting and go to Street Fighter III: Third Strike.
The character lineup is clean and the grid has no blank spots, which is a recurring theme with Street Fighter II and its updates. as Hyper Fighting (aka Street Fighter II Turbo, on the SNES) builds off SF2': Champion Edition, the four boss characters of M. Bison, Vega, Balrog and Sagat are on the far right, cordoning off the evil characters from the good characters. The two shotokan characters on the far left, Ryu and Ken, are stacked atop each other, and picking one over the other in this case is no longer a mere matter of "Which gi do you like the style of more" or "do you want American or a Japanese national?"
while Street Fighter Alpha's character select was rather interesting it was asymmetrical which always bothered me. Street Fighter Alpha 2 and its update Alpha 2 Gold fixed this with this symmetrical shape. in Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dreams, there were three hidden characters who could've easily taken up that empty slot but were shuffled into the random select. Here, those hidden characters are plain as day in the bottom row: Akuma, M. Bison, and Dan Hibiki. You'll note that now you can actually see the character sprites in addition to their portrait. Street Fighter Alpha had been inspired by the theatrical OVA 'Street Fighter II MOVIE' (here released as Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie) in its art style, animation, and character designs.
Take Ken for instance, with much longer hair than his Street Fighter II counterpart (this is a prequel, after all) and a more animated style, much cockier - if that was even previously possible - and confident. While I would've preferred the four central characters of Street Fighter Alpha's plot line - Ryu, Chun-Li, Charlie, and Rose - to be in the four corners of the panels, this is a much cleaner outcome. We can, however, do better.
Ah here we go. Street Fighter Alpha 3's character screen is what separates the Street Fighter IIs of the world from the Karnov's Revenge chaff. the character portraits loom over the character sprites, larger than life as befitting these characters, what really sells it is how the character select looks in motion, which can't easily be described here, as it's something to be witnessed rather than observed.
The character panels are arranged in a diamond shape, and as Street Fighter Alpha 3 has plenty of hidden characters just beyond the panels, there's a little something for those that take the time to look. What I find interesting is that this game has a different feel than Street Fighter Alpha 2 did. Alpha 2 felt like an SNK fighting game of sorts, and we'll get to KOF soon; or like Capcom's own Darkstalkers. Street Fighter Alpha 3 feels like its own beast; more technological and staticpunk. There's a lot of dim fuzz all over the UI that isn't represented in a static image.
I wanted to bring up Street Fighter III: New Generation, simply because of how it evolved the Street Fighter II style. Gone is the world map just above the character select, now the world map is in the background, with the character portraits looming large and their in-game sprites represented as the icons. A new Street Fighter for a new age, and this is reflected in the characters: the only two characters to remain are Ryu, and Ken, with the other eight being brand new characters that at the time were not recieved well, that have since earned their place in the lineup.
I don't want to spend a lot of the article talking about New Generation because it's just an upgraded World Warrior screen, but I bring it up because without this, you wouldn't be able to appreciate this.
Street Fighter III: Third Strike's character select screen is damn near perfect. Instead of the panels being lined up neatly in a grid underneath the character portrait, now the portrait is on the side and the character panels to the right, which does move to the center when two people are about to go at it. Street Fighter III: Third Strike, among all the Street Fighter games, is the most aesthetically-pleasing of the lineup, but there's more
What you don't hear in a static image is the character select music, and while most of the character select music for Street Fighter is banging (Alpha 3 in particular is this heavy techno grunge), Third Strike's character select theme is legendary. Take a listen to the character select theme.
What a difference twelve years makes. the red and orange background of the original Third Strike was swapped out with a gun-metal gray background, the portraits are cleaner and the character select icons are entirely different (I believe they were drawn by the talented artists at Udon Entertainment, wouldn't shock me), but what really sells how this game is Third Strike, evolved for a new generation is the character select theme
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