Fighting Games Friday: Street Fightin’ Power Rangers
The Power Rangers series has been collaborating with Capcom’s Street Fighter series for the last few years, the kind of pairing once thought exclusive to the realm of fanboy dreams and fanfiction. Their team-up has now ascended to the highest point yet by reaching console video game status.
The Ranger versions of Ryu and Chun-Li are coming to Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, the tag-team fighting game inspired by a series of Capcom’s own fighters — specifically the legion of Capcom vs. titles. Both will appear in the Ranger forms that debuted in other media, and contain moves both characters have used in several previous Capcom vs. games. The trailer makes it clear, for instance, that Ryu has inherited some modified moves and even properties from games like Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, including the bigger Hadouken and Shinkuu Hadouken fireball attacks and the Joudan Sokutogeri (often referred to as the Donkey Kick) with knockback properties. Chun-Li isn’t shown in action, but she’ll be the same way.
Battle for the Grid was developed by big fans of Capcom fighters who wanted to realize their dream of a modern Power Rangers fighter with the most popular characters introduced over the last several decades. Street Fighter characters were a natural fit.
The question was always whether they could get them, since Capcom isn’t that adjusted to lending the Street Fighter characters to projects primarily handled by smaller companies. Battle for the Grid has been a solid mid-level hit despite being attached to a big franchise, and Capcom is not SNK. After the Street Fighter characters were included in prior Power Rangers collaborations, someone or some people capable of pulling strings convinced Capcom to lend them.
As someone who’s been a fan of Street Fighter and Power Rangers since I was a child in my formative years, like several guys my (old) age, seeing the franchises collaborate in this fashion is a dream come true. It’s the kind of crossover that I’d love to show the younger version of me in the 1990s, who thought something like this could only happen among stories some of us shared in school. I won’t say whether I wrote a fanfic that involved a crossover, but I also won’t deny it. This is the kind of dream that never left my mind into (a sort of) adulthood, resting within the back while occasionally manifesting as a “man, that would have been cool, huh” thought in lieu of using brain activity that could actually help me in life. Now, it’s finally happening.
I’m aware that the Battle for the Grid crossover is the third such one between Power Rangers and Street Fighter. This fun started with the Power Rangers: Legacy Wars mobile fighting game getting a bunch of Street Fighter characters in a crossover in early 2018. It featured Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile, Cammy (in an alternate outfit with her main one being too hot and horny for Power Rangers), M. Bison, and Akuma, right out of Street Fighter V. The Ranger versions of Ryu and Chun-Li were eventually added. A cool crossover? Sure, but mobile games always collaborate with other franchises, and Street Fighter has collaborated with so many of them that I can’t remember them all from memory. Hell, a new one was just announced this week.
This got more special with the Street Fighter Showdown live-action short film from 2018, which first featured Ryu in Ranger form and Chun-Li in the vicinity as a mere human capable of special abilities. This had the deliberate feel of a low-budget indie film, though with good-as-hell costume design. A pity they couldn’t afford to make one for Chun-Li, who got hers officially with the aforementioned Legacy Wars collaboration. After fans harshly and justifiably criticized how she didn’t get one, they didn’t have a choice.
Having the Ryu and Chun-Li Rangers enter a console game just hits different. This is precisely the collaboration I’d want to take through a time machine to show the younger me who thought this would never happen. But I’m not sure if Young Geoff would believe it if I did. I wasn’t too cynical to believe that time travel wasn’t possible as a kid, but my reaction to a Power Rangers/Street Fighter collaboration would have likely mimicked what my friends at the time thought when I first told them X-Men vs. Street Fighter was happening. The internet was in a primitive state then, years away from being known as the vast information hub it subsequently became in the late 1990s. They, of course, believed it when it was fully revealed and playable in arcades.
Outside being a portion of a dream come true for longtime fans who still have a kid inside them, the collaboration shows how the Battle for the Grid developers plan to continue supporting this for years to come. Whether that will include more collaborative efforts with other companies and their characters remains to be seen. Ryu and Chun-Li will be available alongside the digital Super Edition of the game on May 25th, with the physical release of the latter following in July. I will be very surprised if the Ranger outfits don’t make their way into SFV eventually. No, not for free.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
