What If Scenario: Street Fighter V & a Gender Balanced Roster
I did this several months ago with the Smash Bros. Roster (which you can find here), but the roster was over half revealed at that point and there were a LOT more characters to work with in the Nintendo universe than with Street Fighter. Also, there were costumes and plenty of gender neutral characters (such as all of the Pokemon) to make the process a lot easier.
But I thought I'd give it a shot. So here's the rules, once again...
Could a Street Fighter game have equal female & male characters and still have a roster that people could be happy with?
1) Street Fighter V is the first version of what is likely to be a multi-version fighting game. Some decry this as nickle and dimeing, but it's an effective way of keeping the competitive scene alive and interesting. Keeping this in mind, I've cut some pretty obvious choices (mostly male) in anticipation of more characters being added later.
2) That being said, I set a target of characters a little larger than most initial Street Fighter titles. Street Fighter IV, for example, had 25 characters by the time it hit consoles. I'm thinking of a roster of about 25 characters seems fair.
3) There will probably be some new characters added to the roster, but not too many. I think saying 3 new female characters and 2 new male characters is a little hopeful on the gender distribution, but not unreasonable.
4) Has to use the two characters announced (Chun-Li and Ryu)
5) The goal is to have a roster with 12 returning female characters and 13 returning male characters (15 female characters and 15 male characters overall).
6) No EX characters or other characters owned by companies outside of Capcom.
7) No characters that are Capcom characters that haven't appeared in a Street Fighter game.
8) I'm going off the theory that this is going to be a mixture of Street Fighter III & IV, taking place after IV and before III and seeing a mixture of those characters.
Okay, with that, here's the list I could come up with!