By Todd Ciolek

Street Fighter II has a lot to answer for. Sure, it founded an entire subculture of videogames and offered a nicely complex tournament fighter that holds up even today. But it also relied on the most basic of international prejudices, from its South American beast-man to its stoic Japanese warrior, ensuring that each and every fighting game to follow would paint its cast with similarly broad strokes.

Not that we’re really offended or anything. Fighting games are all about visual impact and overbearing style, and their lack of any coherent story (no, Soul Calibur doesn’t count) makes it easy to laugh at the misguided caricatures they present. So let’s just point out the most ridiculously stereotyped characters in fighting-game history.

10) Dhalsim from Street Fighter II

Of all the Street Fighter II icons, Dhalsim is easily the most outlandish. Yes, there’s a possibly gay Russian covered in scars earned from wrestling bears, but Dhalsim’s an even bigger joke at the expense of Indian culture. An emaciated monk who practices yoga has some foundation in reality, but Dhalsim wears monkey skulls, stretches his limbs, teleports, and breathes fire. The last of these, we’re told, comes about just because he eats a lot of curry. It’s not as though Capcom’s artists devised all of this on their own, either. Dhalsim’s artistic ancestor was a limb-stretching yoga mystic in the 1975 martial-arts film Master of the Flying Guillotine.

But none of this can ever approach Capcom’s original draft for Dhalsim, which died on the drawing boards long, long ago:

We can only dream of a world where Chun-Li could fight a six-armed Elephant Man. Alas.

9) Gordon Bowman from Savage Reign

The portrayal of police officers as undereducated, beer-bellied highway fascists is rarely encountered in Japanese culture, where police are more frequently seen as dour investigators who ruin reputations, beat confessions out of suspects and hold prisoners without trial just long enough to piss off Amnesty International.

Yet the Neo Geo fighter Savage Reign and its sequel, Kizuna Encounter, are willing to acknowledge another nation’s unflattering archetypes with Gordown Bowman, a cop entering a tournament to raise money for his sick daughter. Any commentary on the plight of underpaid police is undone by Gordon’s massive gut, which has apparently burst out of his uniform and makes him look less like a down-on-his-luck officer of the law and more like the bouncer at an invite-only biker bar.

8) B. Orchid from Killer Instinct

It wouldn’t surprise us if Rare’s Killer Instinct were revealed as an elaborate prank on the fighting-game industry and the people who supported it. The game’s cast is a regurgitated wad of stock characters torn from anything popular in the mid-’90s: a Jurassic Park velociraptor, a Predator-ish robot, a featureless fire character, an equally featureless ice character, a ninja, a werewolf, an African-American boxer, and, of course, a comically over-sexualized woman.

B. Orchid’s lime-green bodysuit and shelf-like chest are perhaps inadvertent results of Rare’s character design and the finest rendering 1994 had to offer, but they clearly intended everything else; her second game finds her without much in the way of pants, and her victory footage in both games includes a player’s-eye pan up her twirling body, accompanied by orgiastic moans. In family-friendly arcades, mind you. And then there’s her finishing move from the original game:

It’s hard to pin down the fighting-game world’s most blatantly objectified female character, but B. Orchid may well be it. Unless, of course, it was all a joke.

7) Nightwolf from Mortal Kombat 3

Nightwolf’s design and backstory are standard-issue for Native American characters in fighting games: he’s a noble shaman and warrior fighting to protect his people from the forces of evil and so forth, and his look is actually less stereotypical than, say, Chief Thunder’s from Killer Instinct. Yet it’s not Nightwolf himself that stands out as silly; it’s the fact that he was in a Mortal Kombat game.

The first two Mortal Kombats were schlockfests, but they were at least somewhat consistent in that schlock, capturing the hokey atmosphere of Enter the Dragon and other martial-arts films replete with low-budget Eastern Mysticism. All of it came crashing down in Mortal Kombat 3, where the designers were free to throw any horrible, out-of-place idea into the game. Ninja robots! Star Wars Sandpeople! And, of course, a token Native American, because every fighting game needs one of those. Why didn’t they just throw in a riot cop, too?

Oh yeah. They did. God, Mortal Kombat 3 was awful.

6) Sofia from Battle Arena Toshinden

Considering how fighting games treat their female characters, it’s a surprise that there aren’t more battle-hardened dominatrixes out there. Soul Calibur’s Ivy might be the biggest (har) modern representative, but she’s English and wears an alternate outfit worthy of Annie Lennox. Introduced in 1995 by the glorified PlayStation tech demo that was Battle Arena Toshinden, Sofia is not only a full-blown dominatrix but also Russian, convincing all of those young and impressionable Toshinden players that women from her nation are either babushka-wearing hags or icy blondes armed with predatory sex drives and cackling disdain.

Unfortunately for the mail-order Russian bride market, no one thought about Toshinden after January of 1996, but Sofia had her moment. She was, for a short time, the unofficial Sony PlayStation mascot. After all, only a mascot would get ads like the one above.