At Summer Games Fest 2024, Capcom revealed Terry Bogard, Mai Shiranui, Elena, and M. Bison for Street Fighter 6 as its Season 2 DLC lineup.
The release order of these new DLC characters is M. Bison in Summer 2024, Terry Bogard in Fall 2024, Mai Shiranui in Winter 2025, and Elena in Spring 2025.
M. Bison’s body is partially covered in cloth and he appears to be leaking some psycho power from his face, and he has long strands of white hair. He died in the last game, which should partly explain his new appearance, as he was apparently reanimated into a new body, as he is well known for doing. Bison debuted as the main villain in the 1991 release of Street Fighter 2 and has made regular appearances in the franchise ever since.
With Bison returning, we should also get an update on Shadaloo and how that organization is faring at this point in the timeline, which is roughly 10 years after the events of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. With Bison losing the previous game, Shadaloo fell on hard times.
Bison’s hat had been prominently featured in Ed’s new stage, Ruined Lab, in Street Fighter 6, showing that this allusion was a foreshadowing of Bison’s return.
Elena comes from 1997’s Street Fighter 3: New Generation and has a completely new design. She is one of the most controversial characters in the entire franchise, as she is a playable character who can restore her health through her healing move.
This was highlighted to great effect in Ultra Street Fighter 4’s competitive community, as she became arguably the most hated character in that game due to how this move worked. It will be very interesting to see how this move is balanced this time around in Street Fighter 6.
Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui come from SNK’s Fatal Fury, and they are the first two guest characters from that franchise to appear in a mainline Street Fighter entry.
Terry Bogard was one of three playable characters in the 1991 Neo Geo release of Fatal Fury, made by the creator of the first Street Fighter game, Takashi Nishiyama. There’s been a ton of overlap over the years between SNK and Capcom’s fighting games, but bringing in a guest character like Bogard is a first for Capcom’s mainline Street Fighter games.
Mai Shiranui made her first appearance in Fatal Fury 2 in 1992 and has since become one of the most popular characters in all of fighting games.
There have been many allusions over the years to various Capcom characters playing like SNK fighters, most notably with C. Viper, but how these characters will play out in Street Fighter 6 should be very interesting to see.
Like the previous season of Street Fighter 6, Season 2 appears to add four new characters, bringing the total to 26 playable characters by Spring 2025.
The art style shown in the trailer below doesn’t look like the realistic depictions of characters we’ve seen so far in Street Fighter 6. If this is just an homage to previous Street Fighter games and Fatal Fury, or potentially a change in terms of what the game is presented remains to be seen.
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In somewhat related news, B. Jenet and Vox Reaper were announced for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves during Summer Games Fest 2024.
