Street Fighter V, still in progress, Part 3 - plus bonus cubing.

Continuing on with the developments of Street Fighter V, here are the remainder characters that were announced so far.

Vega has been a series regular, inasmuch as any character can - he was in the II series of games, first as one of the unplayable bosses, and then as a playable character from Champion Edition onward. He was also in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and all of the versions of Street Fighter IV.



While much of his gameplay is familiar to people who have used him before, a major change is a new ability to change from using his claw to not using his claw, allowing him a few different moves.

R. Mika has only previously appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 3, but apparently she has really made an impact with players because she was on the top ten list of most requested characters.



While she may seem like bubbly fan service, she is an even more complex character in her Street Fighter V appearance than she was in Alpha 3. All the characters that use command throws (a special move with a more complicated controller motion as opposed to a regular throw that only takes a particular button combination) a referred to as grapplers. This includes Zangief, T.Hawk, Hugo, Abel, and Hakan. R. Mika's look is more in the vein of wrestling-as-entertainment than serious fighter, but that's part of her charm. In addition to a grappler's arsenal of grabs and smashes, she can also rock the microphone to hype herself (increasing the damage that her command throw does in the process). Even more amazing is that she has a few moves that utilize her tag team partner Nadeshiko. Watch out for attacks coming from any direction, and really watch out for the spectacular tag team finish.


Rashid is brand new. We don't know a lot about him, but we think he's one of the good guys.


We do know that he harnesses the power of the wind, but he's also wearing a scouter like he's from Dragon Ball Z. Is he trying to find out if Ryu is over 9000?

Karin is another fan favorite from Street Fighter Alpha 3 returning to the game. In Alpha 3, her primary function is to serve as Sakura's rival, and uses counterattacks and rushdown moves to get the upper hand in a match.

Her Street Fighter V incarnation doesn't seem tremendously different in overall style, but it would appear that she has a wider variety of moves available to her.

Zangief was just announced October 1st at the Russian gaming convention IgroMir. He's been in one more game than Vega has, since he was included in the Alpha series a game earlier. This is the grappler that all other grapplers originated from.

This time around, Zangief  has many more moves at his disposal and it's just crazy what they've done with him to soup up his abilities. I was most impressed with him repelling an attack by just flexing, and him headbutting a fireball to disperse it. (Too bad it was Bison's two-hit fireball that still had one hit left.)

While I was busy putting this together, another character was leaked, but there's no video yet. I did find a few still pictures of the brand new character Laura fighting Ryu on the Brazil stage, which I think we can assume is hers. She seems to have some jujitsu moves, and a strange fireball, but I think that her fighting style will make more sense once we actually have some video.

There are only a few characters left to be revealed prior to the game's initial release, but knowing Capcom there will be lots of added characters over the life of the series.

In a side note, I was so excited at the grocery store this week to hear the following words spoken by the cashier (emphasis is mine) - "You're the second person today to come through (the line) with a Rubik's cube." However, when I had my cube solved 40 seconds later she still seemed surprised.

Yesterday at the other grocery store on a trip for pizza and cannolis, I did a demonstration for the dessert counter attendant, and popped an edge piece out of my DaYan brand cube while I was doing it. I recovered well, so it wasn't a big deal. I went a little more in depth than I might usually because she asked better questions than I usually get. She even remarked that she felt like she had learned something. I hardly ever take my DaYan cubes apart, and I had my other DaYan pop at lunch that day for the first time. I guess I've put enough mileage on them in a year and I probably need to take them apart and clean them and re-lubricate them.