Nonetheless! Chun-Li endures even among non-combatants as a style icon, as a shatterer of the 16-bit glass ceiling, as badass-lady cultural shorthand ready to be wielded by, say, Nicki Minaj: “I went and copped the chopsticks / Put it in my bun just to pop shit.” Fine. I was so offended, in fact, that I basically never played a new Street Fighter game again. I am a purist where she is concerned: When 1992’s Street Fighter 2 Dash Turbo first introduced her Kikoken move, a blue-fireball projectile flung from her hands and patterned after the Hadouken attacks favored by those dullards Ryu and Ken, I took this as a grave betrayal of her whole kick-dudes-in-the-head ethos. Whereas I was into Chun-Li for the melodrama-rich backstory and the elegance of her speed-over-power fighting style. (For the record, Maxim magazine gave it four stars.) the 1999 launch of the unnervingly porny Dead or Alive franchise, which would one day introduce the spinoff Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. But future fighting games would struggle with, uh, the opposite problem, e.g. Yes, as with Sonya Blade in 1992’s first installment of the super-gnarly Mortal Kombat series, Chun-Li is the only female character in Street Fighter II, which is not super progressive, no. This move, too, has stayed somewhat consistent across 20-plus years of Street Fighter sequels and spinoffs, a devastating attack indeed, though it does inevitably expose both her head (to dullard Flying Dragon Uppercuts and whatnot) and her underwear (to perverts). I imagined, as a 14-year-old, that playing pretty much exclusively as Chun-Li made me a progressive and soulful and fascinating person, and of course I was right.Ĭhun-Li’s signature move is the Spinning Bird Kick, in which she flips upside-down and shouts her iconic line that for 20-plus years I misheard as “Spinning hurri-cane!” and ardently helicopters forth, the better to kick her opponent in the head a bunch of times. The superior Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, which hit arcades in 1992 and soon dominated home consoles as well, added four new playable characters: Vega (perverts), Balrog ( Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! obsessives), Sagat (height fetishists), and of course M. Honda (steakhead cultural appropriators), or of course Chun-Li (sexy geniuses).
To refresh your memory, Street Fighter II started out in arcades with eight playable backstory-rich characters with different movesets, and your personal favorite said a whole lot about you, whether you picked Ryu (dullards), Ken (dullards with shittier haircuts), Blanka (weirdos), Zangief (steakhead jocks), Dhalsim (cultural appropriators), Guile (military fetishists), E. She is the primary reason Street Fighter II as a whole endures, a legit global phenomenon of cartoonish medium-gnarly violence beloved by clueless amateurs and steely proto-esports superstars alike.
Yes, Chun-Li, who as I type this is getting housed in The Ringer’s Best Video Game Character bracket in Round 2 by fuckin’ Donkey Kong, endures. The Best Video Game Character Bracket: The Elite Eight Character Study: The Oxen, the High-Maintenance Travel Companions From ‘Oregon Trail’
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