Image courtesy of UDON/Capcom
Ken’s fiancée Julia is pregnant and the two are planning a wedding, but the vain and ultra-narcissistic Spanish fighter Vega has not yet gotten over his loss to Ken and is plotting revenge on the fighter with the help of champion boxer Balrog.
Cammy is in the process of deprogramming after being kidnapped and brainwashed by the evil M. Bison’s Shadaloo organization. She returns to MI6 in the UK to make amends for her past and encounters a certain green-skinned monster that Street Fighter fans know and love.
Martial arts movie superstar Fei Lung gets into trouble with a criminal in the real world and, after an initial misunderstanding and conflict, he teams up with globetrotting Chun-Li.
Ryu travels the world with his apprentice, Sakura, who can be a nuisance but is rapidly learning from her master.
All these story threads and more unfold in Street Fighter Classic Volume 2: New Challengers If the above sounds like an intricate soap opera of complicated relationships, misunderstandings, uneasy alliances and bitter rivalries, you’d be right.
The Street Fighter series has always thrived as an epic storyline largely situated around pitting characters against one another in one-on-one combat — after all, the series is based on (mostly) a series of video games in which characters fight one-on-one, with only the loosest of plots tying it all together.
In other words, this film is epic, silly, incredibly action-packed and just plain fun. It’s unlikely to win any awards for writing or characterization, but as always, UDON Studios has crafted a visually stunning melodrama with an over-the-top storyline that’s just plain fun to watch.
Indeed, having worked on this kind of work for the past few decades (the piece presented here was published 20 years ago), it’s clear that UDON has a flair for artistically impressive, over-the-top, soap opera-like styles that carries over into all of the company’s numerous video game adaptations, including the recent Final Fight.
My nostalgia for the Capcom arcade games is strong, and I love seeing the characters I played as a kid explored beyond pixels on a screen. Despite being 20 years old, the Street Fighter Classic comic has aged extremely well, especially in terms of its beautiful art. There’s also a ton of material here (with additional “bonus round” stories after each issue), making this even more of a must-have collection for Street Fighter fans.
While it’s not highbrow literature by any means, Street Fighter Classics Volume 2: The New Challengers is a perfect love letter to the video game series that influenced so many gamers in the ’90s, and I look forward to reading many more of this silly action movie on paper.
Street Fighter Classics Volume 2: New Challengers is available to purchase from Amazon.
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