Fighting games should never reboot their stories
It is a commonly held belief that fighting game stories are, categorically, bad. Stories are not what people come to fighting games for, the logic goes. They are an optional indulgence, and a compromised one at that, because they must always account for why, for example, a giant military cyborg would ever fight a kangaroo.
I disagree. Fighting game stories rule, actually, because they are such brazen works of thinly veiled justification. Why does M. Bison, recurring villain of the Street Fighter games, have something called “Psycho Power,” and what’s up with his evil club, Shadaloo? Why does Tekken let a kangaroo fight in the King of Iron Fist Tournament? What is the deal with literally any Guilty Gear character?
The answer is usually nonsense. But when a fighting game becomes popular and gets sequels, something wonderful happens: The creators have to write more nonsense. And then that nonsense has to be compatible with the nonsense they wrote the first time around! It is corporate improv, as studios, compelled by profits and enthusiasm, begin iterating furiously on their prior work, yes, and-ing their game stories until they end up somewhere impossibly absurd. This is how the Tekken games went from a story about a martial arts tournament built around a long-simmering feud between father and son to, well, the story of a literal demonic bloodline in a world so over-the-top that is in fact quite normal for a kangaroo to fight a cyborg.
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This is the joy of fighting game stories: Add enough things that don’t make sense and, eventually, it all starts to feel perfectly sensible. The fact that people come for the fighting, and not the stories, affords the writers this freedom — if the story was the point, people
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