F-ZERO to F-HERO: Top 10 fighting game characters

Friday, April 10, 2009

With the heralded success of both Street Fighter 4 and Soul Caliber 4 and Tekken 6 on the horizon it would seem that fighting games are making some sort of resurgence. No problem with me I have always enjoyed fighting games throughout my long assorted gaming career. The feelings of nostalgia all bubbling to the surface I figured i would run down a list of my favorite characters from fighting games.

I kept my list to one character from each series so I could touch on more universes and not just a bunch of sequels from the same maker.

10. Ragnar Bloodaxe: Mace the Dark age N64 1997
Face it vikings are cool. Whether you agree or not with the morality of raping and pillaging villages and basically building a religion around war you have to admit they could probably kick some ass. And when your fighting demons, golemns, monks and hell knights you need all the ass kickery you can muster. VALHALLA!

9. Slash: Eternal Champions Genesis 1993
Sometimes you don't care about what type of martial art training your character has. Sometimes you just want to grab a fucking club and beat people about the face and shoulders with. In comes Slash a cave man of particular brutality. In his character write up it states "He did not train in any specific martial art, and instead fought in any way which could cause as much pain as possible."

8. Rasputin: World Heros SNK 1992
Whats more bad ass than a crazy evil wizard? How bout a crazy evil wizard with giant spectre fists and feet. Plus he's based on one of the most infamous characters in history. Now that my friend is badass.

7. Voldo: Soul Edge & Soul Calibur series
Back in the glorious days when fighting games where coming out seemingly everyweek in the 90's there was one character a little bit different from the others. He had a unique fighting style that blending a certain flow with scorpion stings and some good old sado maschism. The best part about Voldo is his "untouchable" fighting once you get in the groove.

6. Jax: Mortal Kombat series
Really theres no that much to say. You have giant metal arms and you can pop enemies heads like zits or rip their arms off. Among the many Mortal Kombat characters Jax was always the most satisfying to lay the beats with.

5. Bakuryu (the Mole): Bloody roar series
If you never played bloody roar, weep. Just start crying right now because you missed one of the fastest paced awesome fighting games. What made this game a standout was each character had a beast form that they could turn into which was more powerful and even had a super combo move that dealt major damage. There was one character who was equal part fast powerful and trickery and that was the ninja assasin who turned into a mole. He was my first character that I mastered and soon became my favorite guy to return to if I was having trouble with a particularily annoying apponent.

4. Sabrewulf: Killer Instinct 1&2 1995-96
If your a man of any Ilk then you respect the art of Lycanthropy. Werewolves are awesome. Utilizing this and letting me control on in a game is actually a very easy way to appeal to me. Now take that werewolf and give him cybernetic arms and well sir you just blew my fun muscle.

3. Ken: Street Fighter series
He's obnoxious he's cocky and half the fighting games out there use the same move set as he did. You master ken and you master about 85% of fighting games available. Besides who wants to be that moody fag ryu anyway sure his fireballs are bigger but look at kens dragon punch. You wanna fuck something up you dragon punch that shit. Look what it did to sagats chest. Ripped it in half my friend right in fucking half. Why would you do that kind of damage then focus on fireballs? Because your not ken and you don't drive a red porshe and bang sluts and look in the mirror and smile because you fucking rule all. Thats why.

2. Juggernaut: X-men vs Street Fighter
At first I didn't want to mention this character because I always thought of him in the street fighter lineage but this game should be considered a crossover and it also it lead to the best 2d fighter ever made which is Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The reason I love Juggernaut is not for his size, which is huge. Its not for his power, which is again huge. Its for his medium punches. The are straight they have lots of reach and he grunts ever punch. There is just something so addictive and maniacle about trapping an enemy in the corner and laying about 20 punches into them. Hunh hunh hunh hunh hunh hunh hunh hunh hunh.

1. King: Tekken series
Tekken is the best 3d fighting series ever made. EVER. The realistic fighting styles mixed with simplistic move parameters makes for a very pleasant experience. Your a wrestler who wears a tiger mask. I find it hard to really find the words to describe how rad this is. I would go into length about why I love king but it would just be me gushing about every move he has and his bio and such in length. He truly is the only character that could not have been made better in any way.