With Mai Shiranui’s inclusion in Street Fighter 6, I was expecting there to be some piece of information that would hint at a future story thread. I was excited with the side mission that accompanied Mai’s primary story, thinking there was a way to hypnotize her to become the avatar’s lover rather than Andy Bogard’s. It turns out I had gotten too excited. The side quest ended up being a music quest, and for your troubles, you got several pieces of a Japanese song called “Over the Fighters”. The full music video, released on YouTube, features a Japanese gamer utilizing several questionable strategies and eating foods connected to many of the characters in the game in order to get better at the game.
To be fair, it was an excellent quest, and did somewhat prove a statement I made privately to someone in my DMs that there would be a focus on sound going forward in World Tour mode. For the future, keep your attention on the boomboxes and radios you hear in Metro City and Nayshall. Something tells me there’s going to be new audio content at some point and those overlooked audio devices may play a part.
However, since Mai did not become my avatar’s new girlfriend, the quest was a bit of a letdown. Mai was just kind of there to be there, same as Terry. There was no continuation of the story in World Tour, with Mai never once interacting with Chun-Li, seemingly passing the ninja mantle on to Kimberly. Her interactions with Juri were fun, but really only established that Juri likes to be touchy-feely with sexually attractive women.
We already knew Juri was into girls. She’s been called the first openly bisexual character in Street Fighter for a reason (sorry, Marisa). This is like saying water is wet or that Akuma likes to punch things.
So, I had to wait until future developments finally allowed me to write something substantial. This took months until, finally, Elena’s gameplay trailer was released. https://youtu.be/cdaMW5JLb2w?si=rHH7pKoRdNWiz-wx
Whereas most people focused on the ending of the video, with Elena saying the word “Healing!” and giving professional players traumatic flashbacks to Street Fighter 4 days, I focused on the beginning of it. Elena speaks about the abilities to take life and give life, and suddenly I was very focused on what else she had to say.
The developers’ Steam blog goes into more detail. As the blog states, “[Elena] makes friends as easily as she can hear the voices from nature. In Street Fighter 6, after an intense fight with her friend Akuma, she travels the world once again in search of the meaning of a lesson that Akuma teaches her. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1364780/view/534348484694770026?l=english
So, what lesson would this be? He wants Elena to fight someone to the death. Elena already has the power to heal and give life. If she were to take someone’s life away, she would have a full understanding of the cycle of life and death. Moreso, because of her healing powers, she has the ability to do something Akuma does not: revive her opponent from death. No death has to be permanent as long as Elena is involved, and Akuma already knows this.
Quite simply, it appears Akuma wants Elena to be fully in control of life and death, essentially making Elena not just the ultimate healer, but a necromancer as well. For Akuma, it allows him to be able to fight opponents repeatedly without ever having to worry about the fight being a one-time deal. As Akuma revealed in his Arcade mode, thanks to Ryu, he now finds the fight more important than the ability to kill someone with his power.
However, there has to be more to it than this, right? It can’t just be about beating someone to death, having Elena patch them up, and then having them go at it again the next day. This would be something of an abuse of Elena’s healing powers, and even Akuma isn’t that avaricious to do that to the African princess. Something else must be going on.
One of the things I felt from playing through Street Fighter 6 is that what we saw at the end of World Tour mode meant that there was far more to do before the story truly ended. The ending of World Tour mode was NOT the true ending that some people believe it is. It hinted that there was more to come, and between an incomplete Metro City map, the existence of a shimmering city in Nayshall, more DLC characters coming, and the likely return of Bosch, mark my words: the developers haven’t made a true ending to the game yet.
We have more characters coming, and even though he hasn’t made more than a few cameo appearances, there is one character whose presence continues to be felt, as if he was always there from the beginning.
G’s presence is so strong in Street Fighter 6 that you could say he’s the main character of the game without ever actually seeing him. Whether he or his name appears on a billboard for headphones, in the Battle Hub, in Hado Pizza, in a barber shop, or even has his subordinate Q appear next to Hugo in the Giant Attack billboard, G is active in the background doing things only the developers know that he’s doing.
His connection to Elena was established in his Arcade mode ending in Street Fighter V, but much like Rashid, Elena doesn’t seem to have any ill effects from shaking the President of the World’s hand. I’d argue that G’s ability to turn people into Qs can be activated any time after initial contact, even years down the road, but of the people in G’s ending who do end up shaking his hand, Elena is the least likely to be affected because of her healing ability.
What’s also interesting is that, whereas Elena can hear the voices of nature, G himself is described by Rose as an “overwhelming force of nature”. Elena, of all people, should know the threat he poses. However, she appears to be way too naive about the world around her and wants to make friends with everyone.
She already made friends with Street Fighter’s version of Cthulhu. Now Cthulhu wants to protect her. Yes, Akuma wants to protect Elena. She’s the only real friend he has. The only way to protect her is to teach her how to make her healing powers stronger, to teach her the full cycle of life and death, to try to imitate if not match G’s own power. Quite simply, Akuma feels G’s presence even if Elena can’t, and he knows Elena is the key to beating him. Akuma may be able to fight G, but he also knows he can’t win.
How would Akuma know about G’s presence in the first place? G made himself known around the world, then he sent a Q to face Akuma. Remember that Q’s rival is Akuma in the SFIII games, and in his Japanese win quote to Q, Akuma makes a comment on Q being an undead puppet in Third Strike:
“Begone, and expose your corpse to the elements!”
The idea that Akuma calls Q a “corpse” tells us that Akuma knows Q is essentially a zombie, and should also know by now who Q’s controller is. To sum it all up, G is a necromancer who can raise the dead. Akuma knows about G and sees that Elena has similar powers and wants her to match G’s in order to save the world.
I suppose Elena was worth the wait.
Street Fighter Game Lore Theories 