Long story short: Capcom unveils a new character named Decapre for Ultra Street Fighter IV. Decapre joins former Street Fighter/Capcom veterans Rolento, Elena, Hugo and Poison when the expansion releases.
The knee-jerk reaction that seems to be prevalent is that Decapre isn’t really a new character, but a weak-effort palette swap/modification of Cammy. Obviously, the parallel is not difficult to see as she is pretty much Cammy with a mask on, and no amount of sugar-coating and bullshit-flinging can change that, but it is funny to see and read how people are trying to defend it.
The bottom line is that I have to side with those that feel that Decapre is more or less a copout by Capcom in trying to declare her a new character. Tell me all about her mask, her Russian ethnicity instead of English, how her bracers have claws in them, and how her attacks are charge-based and not directional, when the day is over, when the sprite’s back is turned to the screen (which I imagine it will be, since it’s pretty much Cammy’s ass), nobody will be able to tell the difference between Decapre and Cammy.
She’s not even really a new character, and I think it’s somewhat of a flaw for Capcom to admit that so freely, by revealing her first “appearance” as a sprite that shows up for two seconds in Street Fighter Alpha 3, so regardless, she’s essentially another legacy throwback instead of really being a new character. I guess it was done preemptively, so that the notoriously fervent Street Fighter community doesn’t backlash at the idea that Capcom was trying to pull the wool over their eyes in bringing back a cameo character as a mainstay.
So anyway, Decapre is a copout creation by Capcom, and it’s only a matter of time before she’s denigrated as “DeCammy” or something along the lines of Ryu/Ken/Akuma/Gouken being called the ShotaKlones.
However, this recent copout got me thinking about who’s really to point the finger at, as far as how SFIV has developed since its release. Sure Capcom appears to have taken the easy way out in bringing back old characters and integrating them into the game instead of creating new characters and trying to expand the horizons of the Street Fighter world, but at the same time, are they not doing what the fans want them to do?
It’s no secret that when it comes to communities of one individual series, Street Fighter fans are amongst the most die-hard and dedicated out there. There’s good reason why Street Fighter games and spinoffs are played all the way back as far as the original Street Fighter II with as much passion for the old as there is the new (Frankly, I still consider myself somewhat of a competent Alpha 3 player).
There are massive, comprehensive and very intelligent communities all across the internet focused solely on Street Fighter, from the fictional world itself, the development of games, to the notoriously dedicated fighting game community. When I was a kid, I thought I was pretty good at Street Fighter, but without the internet, there wasn’t many people to share my enjoyment of the game with, and had it been around then, I could very easily have been sucked up into the scene pretty easily probably.
So at any given point throughout a day, there’s likely plenty of discussion about Street Fighter, often times ranging from anywhere to game mechanics, exploits, reminiscing, development, fantasies of what to have in the future, to what characters should come next?
Naturally, when SFIV was released, many were excited. Even I was excited, as indicative by the fact that I actually purchased SFIV when it was released for the Xbox 360. Sure, a lot of people were enamored by the new characters, Abel, C. Viper, Rufus and El Fuerte, but god damn do I remember there being a whole lot of whining going on about how the returning roster was exclusively characters from SFII.
Everyone calling Capcom dumb, stupid, and all sorts of negative things. Those who understood the expandability of DLC, and anticipated that other characters were patches away were then calling Capcom greedy, selfish and money-grubbing for basically insinuating that Capcom was going to charge them in order to play more characters in the future. And so on, and so on.
And they weren’t completely inaccurate accusations. With Super SFIV, and now Ultra SFIV coming out, the roster of characters has expanded to somewhere around 44 playable characters; but among those 44 characters, only seven of them were genuinely new characters created for SFIV. The remaining characters are all characters from a previous iteration of Street Fighter (or worse the copout “alternate versions of an existing guy” a la Evil Ryu, Oni and Gouken), which is obviously no slim task re-creating them for seamless integration into the SFIV engine, but from a creative standpoint, very little progress has actually been made to expand the Street Fighter roster.
But this is where I begin to wonder who is really the party at fault for Capcom’s creative stifling and/or reliance on copout ideas like DeCammy, Oni and bringing back old characters?
Capcom, or at least the Street Fighter team is pretty well known to be very receptive and acknowledging of the enthusiastic Street Fighter community, but sometimes it’s times like this in which I think that they’re being a little too accommodating. I get that there’s something to be said about Capcom trying to be savvy with social media and include the people in decision making of bringing back older characters and stuff like that, but there are also times where people bitch, bitch, bitch and bitch, and eventually it seems like Capcom caves into the demands to bring characters like Rose, Ibuki, Makoto or Dudley.
I’m not saying that Capcom should slam the internet’s door on the face of the fighting game community, but at the same time I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with taking a few steps back and actually trying to create again. Save the expansions for even further in the future, they’d be just as welcomed then, as they would be now, but at least the people would have the opportunity to expand their horizons before taking a trip back memory lane.
When Street Fighter III came out, I was blown away by the fact that the character roster was Ryu, Ken, and ten new characters. I didn’t know what to do, so I naturally went with Ken, and then got annihilated by Oro because I had no idea of what to expect from him. With all these legacy throwbacks being churned out, I at least know what to expect from most of them, even from the standpoint of simply knowing Rolento will throw bombs; the first time I fought Oro, I was like “what is this one-armed motherfucker going to do?” and then he throttled the crap out of me.
It’s admirable that Capcom wants to be a company that’s very welcoming to its community, and that they actually listen to their fans, but from a business standpoint, I think they’re really doing nothing but stunting themselves when they stifle creativity to focus on accommodating the demands of the people instead of creating new material, and then relegate themselves to copout production like releasing old characters and trying to pawn off a lazy palette swap as a new character.
