Elena (Street Fighter)

• 1. Introduction

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  Elena first appeared in 1997 in Street Fighter III: New Generation, and she carried a double distinction into the arcade. She was the first character in Capcom's Street Fighter series to come from Africa. Writers have also cited her as one of the first black female characters in any fighting game.

  She did not fade after that debut. She turned up in comics and manga, returned in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and in 2024 joined Street Fighter 6 as part of its Year 2 downloadable lineup.

  Her story raises a handful of questions. Where does a development team learn a martial art when none of its members have practiced it? What does a fighter's costume reveal about the people who drew her? And why do critics who admire her fluid movement still disagree, sharply, about what she represents?

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• 2. Building an African Fighter

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  Akira "Akiman" Yasuda and animator Hiromi "Mori" Kotobuki began with a single goal: Street Fighter III needed a fighter from Africa. They made her a woman for a specific reason. In their view a male character would come across as "stern", and the roster already held enough of those.

  Capoeira became her style for two reasons. The team associated the art with female fighters, and they believed African women had long arms and legs. The catch was that nobody on the team had any experience with it. They worked from whatever material they could find, which turned out to be travel movies.

  Her look was shaped by a second round of decisions. The team felt Elena was revealing but never openly lewd. Then requests arrived from Capcom to make her sexier, and artist Kinu Nishimura answered by drawing her New Generation artwork with an emphasis on her behind.

  By 3rd Strike, the third game in the Street Fighter III series, the developers turned their attention to motion. They let more of her attacks link smoothly into one another, which improved both her play and the look of her style. Her earliest concept art had also shown her holding a spear, and the team considered giving her a spear attack. That idea was dropped, yet the spear still sits in her 3rd Strike character portrait.

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• 3. A Deliberately Misplaced Look

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  Elena stands 183 cm tall, or 6 ft, with listed measurements of 83-58-88 cm. The team built her around beauty, and one developer summed up the target by calling her "Yuki in Africa". The phrase pointed to the Japanese actress Yuki Uchida. Yasuda wrestled with her proportions, and he raised the placement of her chest to balance her long legs.

  Her original outfit paired a white foldover bikini bottom with a strip of cloth that crisscrosses her chest and runs up to her neck. Bands in red, gold and blue wrap her neck and wrists, along with parts of her biceps and legs. The aim was for her to look "misplaced" beside the rest of the cast. It was also meant to contrast with Ibuki, the other female fighter in Street Fighter III at the time.

  That outfit stayed her primary look in every game for years, even as later releases added secondary costumes such as Japanese schoolgirl attire. Street Fighter 6 broke the pattern. Game director Takayuki Nakayama wanted both a Capoeira user and a character from Africa, so her design was revised to read as more mature. Her hair is slightly longer and her bangs are gone. She now wears white pants with black stripes, a red sash around her neck, and white sandals with a red strap.

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• 4. Legs Only

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  Elena never lands a punch. Every attack in her fighting game appearances is a leg attack, including her basic strikes and her throws.

  Her long limbs give her more reach than most fighters. Her stance, meanwhile, keeps her lower to the ground than many taller characters.

  Her most unusual tool is a Super Attack aptly named Healing. If it goes uninterrupted, it restores a good amount of her health, and very few characters can do anything similar.

  In Street Fighter III, a player could bring only one super attack into a fight, so choosing Healing was a real tactical gamble. Ultra Street Fighter IV placed it alongside more traditional super attacks, which gave her both offensive and defensive options. That mix has led some to call her one of the best characters for beginners. It is a fitting trait for a fighter whose stated ambition is friendship rather than conquest.

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• 5. A Princess Abroad

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  In 1997, Street Fighter III: New Generation introduced Elena as a Kenyan tribal princess whose tribe is devoted to fighting. She took to Capoeira at once because of its link to dance.

  Her ambitions are social. She wants to travel the world and make friends, and for a time she studies at a Japanese school, where she befriends a girl named Narumi. Elena later invites Narumi to visit her family.

  Street Fighter IV is set before Street Fighter III, and it gives her a more urgent reason to move. Her bond with nature tells her something is wrong. Her father reveals that he has entered her in the Worldwide Fighting Tournament, because he suspects the person responsible is tied to the event.

  When the tournament ends, she looks back on the friends she made, among them the boxer Dudley and the Japanese warrior Akuma. She decides to keep traveling, and her next stop is Japan.

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• 6. Pages and Panels

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  In the first volume of Masahiko Nakahira's manga Street Fighter III: Ryu Final, Elena has a minor part. She follows the fight between Ryu and Dudley through her bond with nature, and she helps Ryu beat the boxer, much to Dudley's delight.

  Street Fighter: The Novel gives her a scene in its second chapter. Interpol agent Chun-Li is hunting for information to bring down the criminal organization Shadaloo, and Elena offers to fight her for it. Elena loses, then agrees to help against the organization.

  A brief cameo comes in issue 74.5 of the manga Kengan Ashura. She is one of the fighters representing the "Capcom Association" as they watch Ryu face the protagonist Ohma Tokita. The event is later suggested to have been Ohma's dream.

  UDON Entertainment's Street Fighter comics give her the most room. Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki's second issue introduces her as a new student at a school, where she meets the tomboy Makoto and the teen ninja Ibuki. She helps Ibuki train and fend off a rival ninja clan.

  In Street Fighter Unlimited, the girls are invited to a tournament run by the self-proclaimed god Gill. Elena sparks an impromptu dance party beforehand and persuades the troubled mutant Necro and his girlfriend to join in, which eases his mind. When Gill is revealed as a villain, she fights beside the other participants to bring him down.

  In Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers, she fights an impending apocalypse alongside Victor, a character from the Darkstalkers series, and the other heroes. She also helps heal his comatose sister. Later comics include Street Fighter: Hyper Looting, a promotional comic for the company Loot Crate. In Street Fighter: Back to School Special, she wrestles with Makoto, and the two then ponder which college to attend.

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• 7. Voices and Merchandise

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  Kaoru Fujino was the first to voice Elena. Mie Midori took over for 3rd Strike, and later appearances went to Saki Fujita in Japanese and Karen Dyer in English.

  Fujino said the English lines gave her trouble because she was not fluent in the language. She still enjoyed the work. She played the fighting as a natural part of Elena's life rather than as a competition.

  Capcom backed the character with a wide range of physical goods. Figures and garage kits in a variety of poses came from manufacturers including G-Dome, Mad Hands, Yujin, and Kotabukiya. Most followed her primary appearance, though several came in alternate versions based on the color options in Street Fighter III.

  Promotion for New Generation included merchandise such as phone cards. When 3rd Strike's Online Edition arrived, player avatar items featuring her were released on Sony's PlayStation Network.

  She also lives in mobile games and card games. Capcom's mobile game Street Fighter Battle Combination includes her, as does TOPJOY's mobile role-playing game Street Fighter: Duel, whose Chinese version has exclusive "Student" and "Summer" versions of her. She appears as a card in the SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters series and in GungHo Online Entertainment's mobile game TEPPEN. On physical cards she shows up in Versus TCG, which is based on Card Fighters' Clash, and in Jasco Games' Universal Fighting System.

  Karen Dyer, her current English voice actress, has cosplayed Elena several times to promote herself.

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• 8. Praise and Backlash

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  GamesRadar+ admired the smoothness of her animation in Street Fighter III. It acknowledged how little she wears and how openly her moves show off her body. It insisted she was more than "a bikini-clad tease with impossibly fluid and graceful movements".

  Planet Xbox 360 said her presence brings "a lot of depth to character roster that truly needs more women representation". Paste called her "a great character from a design standpoint", though it criticized how her gameplay changed between Street Fighter III and IV. It still described her fighting style as elegant and wrote that "Elena is still one of the series' strongest ideas."

  Edge magazine disliked the style itself. It said her fighting "made her feel more like a Tekken character than one drawn from Capcom's asset library."

  Amanda LaPergola of The Mary Sue held mixed feelings. She praised Elena as a "unique fighter" in combat. But she objected to the personality, saying Elena "looks and acts like Storm's annoying younger sister" and leans on a "'but I just want to be a normal girl!' storyline". She conceded that Elena was making an effort, "so you can't hate on her that much."

  Gavin Jasper of Den of Geek wrote that "Elena's design never caught on with me", and he called her goal of making friends "lame". Then he saw her Street Fighter IV ending. Watching her befriend so many characters, including the normally fierce Akuma, changed his mind.

  Funké Joseph of IGN called her the "first playable Black woman in the series, and, at the time, one of the only Black women in video games at all". Joseph also said her Capoeira "offers a sense fluidity and finesse that other characters don't possess."

  The sharpest criticism concerns what she stands for. LaPergola noted that other characters in the series were exaggerated stereotypes, yet wrote that "it seems like the default mode for 'character from Africa' is always 'a tribal princess who wears no clothes.'" Author Nnedi Okorafor pointed to Elena's "light skin, blue eyes and white hair" and "European features" as proof that a character's ethnicity did not always match her appearance. She asked: "Could it be that game makers felt that beauty existed only in those of 'fair' skin, straight hair, and small noses?"

  Jean-Karlo Lemus of Anime News Network admitted the criticism of her design but still called her one of the most influential women in Capcom's history. He saw her as a fan favorite because she was the franchise's first black female character. He also reported fan anger over Street Fighter: Duel, where she was often drawn with such a light skin tone that she looked whitewashed. The "Trendy Elena" version, based on Japanese gyaru fashion, drew his sharpest comment. He thought the style suited her, given her dark skin and her time in Japan, but not the way the game carried it out.

  Lemus said the look strayed so far from her original design that she seemed a different character. Fans reacted almost universally with disapproval, and he himself felt disappointed with Capcom. The episode shows that fans still measure every new version of Elena against her original design.

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