About That Title

It´s from Street Fighter 2, obviously.

I say `obviously´, but unless you grew up in a certain set of circumstances at a very particular time, it´s unlikely that Street Fighter 2´s had the sort of impact on your life that it´s had on mine. And I´m going to choose my words carefully here, because the next bit could make me sound sort of mental.

It´s all about the endings. Not Blanka´s, obviously, where a woman who lost her son in the Amazon rainforest twenty years previously deludes herself that a green, electricity-channeling beastman must be her long-lost offspring, because he´s wearing an ankle bracelet that looks sort of familiar. Or Zangief´s, where president Gorbachev turns up and they have a little dance. Or even Chun Li´s - which revisionist historians insist is canon despite the fact Ryu could beat Chun Li just by uppercutting all the time - where she goes back to being a young, single girl, like all girls really want, right? No.

Ken´s ending is your classic Hollywood archetype: he wins the fight, his girlfriend turns up (yeah, at Shadoloo´s secret Thailand base, what?), they get married. Lovely.

Guile´s ending is your classic Jean Claude Van Damme archetype: he wins the fight, he´s on the verge of killing Bison, his estranged wife and daughter turn up and persuade him that murder won´t bring Charlie back, they go home and buy a dog. Magic.

(Note to Guile: killing Bison doesn´t make you ´just as bad as him´. Developing a synthetic drug called Doll which you plan to use to raise an army of brainwashed assassins and murder your way to ruling the world would make you just as bad as him: killing him is just sensible. Sonic Boom his nose into his brain: if Jane doesn´t want your daughter to see that sort of thing, she shouldn´t have brought her to an international fighting tournament.)

And then there´s Ryu.

As the victory ceremony begins, Sagat and Bison take to the podium, which might be surprising to anyone who thought a psycho-power-flaunting megalomaniac would be a bad
sport. But...














WHERE IS RYU, AS THE CROWDS CHANT HIS NAME?














He´s fucked off! Ceremony means nothing to him! He doesn´t even care about winning that much! The battle is all!

Now, you could argue that Ryu is just a stock wandering warrior archetype, that he´s been done a million times and that there´s nothing special about him. You could say that he´s wasting his life. You could also - if you´re being picky - argue that this sort of dedication to fighting wouldn´t be sensible in the real world, and (if you were charged with making a comic about Ryu, say) portray him as a luddite who has trouble grasping concepts like laundry and email.

(Another aside: apparently Miyamoto Musashi - the best swordsman in Japanese history, and as close to the epitome of the wandering warrior as you´ll find in real life - was reputed not to take baths. Ever. He also employed quite a lot of ´tactics´ that you´d probably call ´cheating´in the modern western idiom. But that´s another story.)

You might be right. But there´s something about the simplicty of one man, with a duffel bag full of passports and folding cash, one outfit and no shoes (time saved at airport metal detectors: probably loads) wandering around looking for fights that is undisputably fucking brilliant. It´s been argued that the best videogame characters are blank slates - the less you know about them, the more you project your own values onto and therefore identify with and like them. If Lara Croft, say, made a big deal of how much she liked acid jazz and kittens, and you hate acid jazz and kittens, you´d probably like her less. But because nobody mentions it, you assume she shares your opinions re: music and baby cats, and carry on buying her games.

Ryu´s the same. I don´t need to know that he likes eating and dislikes spiders (he once swallowed one when he was asleep! Thanks, stupid Capcom biography). I barely even need the subtle difference in philosophies hinted at by the arcade version´s AI (at the end of rounds, Ken starts going crazy with hurricane kicks and dragon punches because he´s a massive ponce, while Ryu´s content to wear you down with constant fireballs). I just need that shot of a man walking into the sunset, alredy seeking the next challenge.

Ryu is the best videogame character ever.