With Akira coming to Street Fighter V many fighting game fans are asking who else? Who else should Capcom include in there biggest fighting game title? Eventhubs.net has posted an article talking about 8 rival school characters who should be brought back.. Here are there choices
Daigo Kazama
The most obvious choice of the entire bunch, Daigo Kazama is the older brother of Akira and is seen as the strongest and most dangerous person to have on your wrong side in Aoharu City, where Rival Schools takes place. Thankfully, Daigo is a benevolent young man and doesn’t cause violence unless provoked, so you have to go out of your way to actually end up on said bad side.
The main catalyst for many of the events of Rival Schools, his disappearance and subsequent brainwashing to work for the bad guys is what sets most of the characters in motion to try and find out what happened to him, and in the case of Akira and her allies from the first game Edge and Gan, to bring him back to his senses.
Depicted as an absolute powerhouse Daigo is a very imposing force even in Rival Schools and it’s honestly hard to even buy him as a high schooler (though that barely even registers on one’s radar as a problem with believability in the eccentric Rival Schools franchise) and he’d be a perfect returnee to the big stage as the resident badass of Rival Schools.
Natsu Ayuhara
One of the more responsible characters in the game, Natsu takes on a sisterly role to a lot of characters and is a charismatic and sensible member of the Volleyball club. While this doesn’t seem like it would translate very well to fighting, you might revise your opinion after you see her spiking an airborne opponent straight down to the ground.
With many of the characters in Rival Schools being based around school clubs and various sports and similar activities, it’s super interesting to see how creative the development team got with some of the movesets and Natsu feels like one of the most unexpectedly solid ones
Group that together with her personality being a fair bit different from what you might expect in a Japanese high school-themed game and she stands out as one of the better female picks to me.
Hayato Nekketsu
Probably my favorite character in Rival Schools as a whole, Hayato Nekketsu is the school’s P.E. Teacher and definitely lives up to his name (Nekketsu meaning “hot-blooded” in Japanese).
He comes equipped with a shinai, a type of bamboo sword common in Japan, which he uses to smack his opponents with as if he’s disciplining an unruly ruffian, which I guess he technically is since the entire school seems more interested in fighting rather than going to class.
His Team-Up Technique even has him whacking his partner character with the sword to pump them up and get them hyped, which culminates in them thanking him with a bow before going on to defeat their opponent.
Hayato Nekketsu is an extreme example of a disciplinary instructor and shows beyond anything that tough love can go a long way … Well, in a setting like Rival Schools it’s possible, anyway.
Kyoko Minazuki
Another member of the faculty, Kyoko Minazuki is originally the school nurse and later chemistry teacher at Justice High School, one of the academies which characters in Rival Schools attend.
She’s a very serious and skilled doctor, but only while wearing her white lab coat and regresses greatly as soon as she removes it and isn’t in “work mode” anymore.
Being the school nurse, she actually has a Team-Up Technique where she gives her partner character acupressure treatment which restores some health to them and her fighting style involves breaking opponent’s joints showing her putting her education to very good use.
At the end of the first game, she is proposed to by another faculty member, the Japanese Language teacher Hideo Shimazu and the two start a happy life together.
Roy Bromwell
A rich foreign exchange student from the U.S.A., Roy Bromwell is also portrayed as the rival character to the series main character Batsu Ichimonji. As if the Ken comparisons weren’t evident enough already, he also has fllaming uppercuts. It’s not a ripoff if it’s from the same company, you know!
In all seriousness, while there are very obvious Ken influences to Roy, I actually felt like he had a lot of inspiration from rival company SNK’s Terry Bogard in him as well, which naturally lit my soul on fire considering that very same Terry Bogard is my #1 favorite character across all fighting games in general.
Roy is technically an American Football player though this isn’t nearly as evident in his moveset or demeanor to the same degree you’d see from most other characters, with him being more of a straightforward fighter you could expect to see even in fighting games that don’t employ a school setting.
While he doesn’t obviously represent any particular club or school activity and as a result may end up looking fairly plan when put against his fellow students, he feels really good to play and has a lot of cool moves to him. There’s a reason why characters like this (Ken Masters being a prime example) tend to end up topping popularity polls, after all.
Tiffany Lords
Much like Roy, Tiffany is an exchange student from America and they even attended the same school before they both came to Japan (as a sidenote, Tiffany is in love with Roy as well, which might have had something to do with her transferring along with him). A preppy and cheerful girl, she’s a cheerleader at the school but also employs kickboxing moves in her fighting style.
Probably my personal second favorite of the female characters in the franchise, she has a lot of fun moves and a really bubbly personality like you might expect from an actual cheerleader in such an over-the-top school setting as Rival Schools. Her exceedingly high pep comes into play for her Team-Up Technique where she comes in to her partner a kiss to bring their health back up.
As one of the most acrobatic fighters in the game, her personality fits perfectly with her gameplay and I’d love to see her bring some levity when paired with the generally gloomy and edgy characters we often see populate fighting game rosters. There isn’t too much of that in Rival Schools itself, but she’d be a perfect addition for a Versus game to balance out the mood.
Nagare Namikawa
In my eyes probably the most bizarre character in all of Rival Schools, Nagare Namikawa is from the Swimming Club and he will literally swim at you in several of his special moves, and has a dive kick which is… literally him diving.
He’s an absolutely absurd character who highlights better than anyone just how crazy Rival Schools as a franchise is, which is further exemplified from his Team-Up Technique where he joins his ally character and the opponent in an elaborate synchronized swimming routine, at the end of which the enemy character for some unknown reason takes a bunch of damage.
Perhaps the absolute best part of Nagare is that the character himself is a straight-laced serious person, making his absolutely ridiculous moveset and fighting style all the more hilarious.
Fitting an eccentric pick like this in something a bit more serious like Street Fighter seems like an impossible task, but for a Versus series games or a potential Rival Schools 3 he’d fit the bill perfectly. As such an exceptional example of how crazy Capcom can get with their ideas when they want to, it’s a real shame to see him in his current status of being relegated to obscurity.
Ran Hibiki
Without a doubt my favorite character out of the girls in Rival Schools, Ran Hibiki is the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper and is always out looking for the next scoop (or really just banal gossip).
Her moveset consists of snapping shots of you with her camera, throwing today’s headlines in your face in the form of an actual newspaper and a Team-Up Technique which sees her snap a collage of beautiful yearbook photos of her partner and the enemy character together. In short, she’s definitely beating you with love… or something.
There’s actually an interesting story about her surname as well, which you may notice is the same as Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter. Since Rival Schools and Street Fighter both take place in the same universe, it was long speculated that Ran was actually the younger sister of Dan who had been mentioned in Street Fighter but never seen, and the developers played with this assumption as well, though with Dan’s younger sister Yuriko Hibiki now appearing in Street Fighter 5’s shop it seems like a fair assumption that this shared surname is a coincidence and nothing more (unless Dan happens to have two sisters…)
Much like Nagare, she has an absolutely bizarre moveset which becomes more funny the more you use it and I’d love to see her make a comeback in the future.
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