So I was reading a review at Gamespot that happened to mention a character in the Street Fighter series that I didn’t know about: Dan Hibiki. Apparently, this guy is modeled after the main character in the Art of Fighting series (which was a direct competitor to Street Fighter). But he’s comically weak: his fireballs only go a short distance, his signature moves are easy to block. He also executes his moves in a way that the characters in AoF do (one-handed fireballs instead of two-handed fireballs in SF). He’s an overconfident weakling.
So, he’s comic relief, which is nothing really notable in and of itself. But the interesting thing to me is that he plays like a character from Art of Fighting within a game of Street Fighter. He’s weak, precisely because his moves would be fine in a different game, but not in SF.
Usually when you see crossover characters, they get updated so they’re balanced. Like it’s pretty obvious to me that Samus could beat up game-and-watch guy, but in Smash Bros. he’s given a boost to level the playing field a little bit. The cool thing about this character is that they create comedy by showing you what it’s like when a crossover character is not balanced.
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I remember Dan having a weird kick that would always get me at least once so he was foiled me from getting a perfect off of him.
One day, though, one day….
Dan made his first appearance in Street Fighter Alpha, a game which I not only owned for Sega Saturn, but also for which I bought the official strategy guide. One of Dan’s supers was listed as the nissho-murai-ken, which the guide translated into “Certain victory relying on nobody but myself fist.” I am not kidding.
Dan is also one of only two characters in the Street Fighter series to have a super taunt. I don’t remember what all went into it, but the animation sequence was something like roll, taunt, roll backward, taunt, roll, taunt, then just go crazy.
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