Ryu (Street Fighter)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ryu, the protagonist of Capcom's Street Fighter series, has been the subject of an unusual piece of research. A 2019 study calculated that he would need to move at nearly 70 miles per hour, about 110 kilometers per hour, to actually pull off his signature spinning kick, the Tatsumaki Senpukyaku. That is a strange kind of tribute for a fighter who first appeared in the 1987 arcade game Street Fighter, standing beside his closest friend and rival, Ken Masters. Across decades of sequels, crossovers, manga, anime, and a 1994 live-action film, Ryu has chased one goal, becoming the strongest fighter he can be. All the while, he wrestles with a darker version of himself that keeps threatening to take over. Where did that darkness come from? Why does the same character keep splitting into evil counterparts? And how has a fighter drawn almost the same way for decades ended up on lists of the greatest video game characters ever made, while also becoming the center of an internet joke about his own body?

• 2. Origins

  ›

  Before Capcom designer Takashi Nishiyama settled on Ryu, he had a different lead in mind. It was a Caucasian man in a leather jacket, who still appears briefly in the opening sequence of the first Street Fighter game. Nishiyama set that idea aside for a fighter who practiced karate and wore a traditional dougi, and Ryu took shape from there. After Nishiyama later moved to SNK, he revived the leather-jacket idea and built it into Terry Bogard, the star of 1991's Fatal Fury: King of Fighters.

  Ryu's temperament came from a real martial artist. Nishiyama modeled him on Mas Oyama, the South Korean-born fighter who appeared as the hero of the kung fu manga and anime series Karate Master, drawn by Ikki Kajiwara. Nishiyama had grown up watching that series and was struck by Oyama's skill and philosophy. It pushed him to want a game with a story like a film, an anime, or a novel. Ryu's rival Sagat came from the same well, based on the bald Muay Thai martial artist who rivaled Karate Master's hero.

  Even Ryu's name is a quiet piece of autobiography. It is the on'yomi, or Sino-Japanese reading, of Nishiyama's own given name, Takashi, which can also be read as Ryu, or Long in Mandarin, written with the character meaning grand or prosperous.

  Ryu's popularity was noticed early. In an interview with the magazine Game On!, Capcom's research and development head, Noritaka Funamizu, said Ryu ranked among the most popular characters with American audiences, alongside Zangief and Guile. The team also knew he had a problem: his Shoryuken uppercut was noted as highly difficult to execute, and they wanted to fix it. That attempt to fix the Shoryuken would soon collide with a design choice that left Ryu the weaker of Street Fighter's two nearly identical leads.

• 3. Built To Be Standard

  ›

  Yoshiki Okamoto said plainly that Ryu was the weaker of Street Fighter II's two lookalike fighters, despite Ryu and Ken sharing the same moves. Capcom had wanted to add a weak point to their shared Shoryukens, then decided against it, but a mistake left Ryu weaker anyway. The two of them were mainly handled by a designer known as Shoei, who still recalls building the Hadoken and Shoryuken by hand. Shoei Okano remembered that Ryu and Ken were originally slated to belong to a colleague referred to as Y.S.-san in the project's early stages. Okano described the pair as the "so-called standard characters in the SFII world, and since they were coming from SFI, we could have the other characters be weirdos." The result was a deliberate redesign toward a stoic feel for both fighters.

  That instinct to keep Ryu standard carried into the prequel Street Fighter Alpha. The first decision the development team made was to keep Ken, Ryu, and Chun-Li in the cast. Capcom did not want to end up with an all-Japanese or all-Asian roster, and pushed for a balance of skin colors across the games. Alpha also carried a secret: a team-up mode pairing Ryu and Ken against M. Bison, which the staff meant to keep quiet until word leaked out anyway. The mode became troublesome once it was public, though the team still found it fun, and it inspired later team-up fights between characters wearing opposing colors, following the same Ryu-and-Ken template.

• 4. A Face That Barely Changes

  ›

  Ryu wears a white gi as a symbol of his Japanese heritage, marked with the characters for Furinkazan, meaning Wind, Forest, Fire, Mountain, stitched on his belt and stylized on his gloves. While many Street Fighter characters have been redesigned repeatedly, Ryu's look has stayed largely the same. In Street Fighter II, his presence from the first game let him symbolize the idea of a Japanese martial artist, and his build was made more muscular to match. The development team considered the white gi Ryu's most defining trait, saying it let viewers know he was "a karate master at first sight."

  For the Alpha prequels, Ryu was redrawn as a younger character. Artist Naoto Kuroshima, known as Bengus, said the expectations riding on Ryu or Chun-Li were far greater than those for newcomers like Sakura Kasugano. When Street Fighter V was being cast, producer Yoshinori Ono wanted the roster to differ from earlier games, yet Ryu kept his original look, in deliberate contrast to a changed Ken.

  The three Street Fighter III games pushed Ryu toward a harder edge. Designers described the older Ryu there as a more hardcore fighter, and Capcom framed him, despite being Japanese, as an American-style martial artist, a choice that led to the creation of Makoto with a more Eastern point of view. The staff was comfortable keeping Ryu as a simple protagonist, content to let him contrast with flashier casts built in the mold of Saint Seiya.

  Small details slipped in by accident. Ryu's headband was originally white and became red in Street Fighter II purely through an oversight. The bandana was meant to cover long hair, but the artist known as Akiman said Capcom chose to keep that hair shorter anyway, to make Ryu look cooler. In Street Fighter X Tekken, he received a swap costume styled like a devil, reflecting the power he keeps in check, while an unused design gave him a futuristic look instead.

  Street Fighter V pushed Ryu toward realism, close enough that previews compared him to the cast of Tekken. Capcom said the game's art direction focused on two goals, keeping the art "easy to follow and understand" while giving each fighter a "personality with artistic accents." Ryu received several costumes in V, including a callback to his Alpha look and one noted for its sex appeal, followed by a Kairi-themed costume in 2020. The Championship Edition update gave him new moves aimed at making him a more defensive fighter.

  By Street Fighter 6, Ryu had grown a beard and traded his gi top for a kasaya, a Buddhist robe echoing the one worn by his late master, Gouken, and drawing on the alternate Street Fighter V design that had already expanded his sex appeal. The game is set after the events of 3rd Strike, when Ryu is meant to be wiser. Director Takayuki Nakayama said he was "not there yet," though he seems to have gained some dignity, and he is no longer barefoot, wearing sandals instead.

• 5. Ansatsuken

  ›

  Capcom regularly labels Ryu's fighting style Ansatsuken Karate, even while also citing influences from Kyokushin, Shotokan, Kempo, Taekwondo, and Judo. His first special technique, the Hadoken, was based on the wave motion gun fired by the titular spacecraft in the anime series Space Battleship Yamato, which Nishiyama watched during the seventies. His other two original techniques were drawn from real martial arts moves, then exaggerated for the game. Because Ryu was the only playable character in the first Street Fighter, designer Manabu Takemura wanted those three moves to be easy for players to relate to.

  Those same three moves resurfaced decades later, reused by Ryu's master Gouken in Street Fighter IV, but made stronger at Kamei's request to make the master look more skilled than the student. The tradeoff is that Ryu became a genuinely difficult character to master, leaning on projectiles and leg sweeps rather than flash. His Hadoken grew more powerful over time because Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda wanted the move's visual size increased for Street Fighter II, with Shoei Okano animating the new version.

  Ken and Ryu still share a moveset, yet Ken was given flashier combos, and Sagat was built as another rival carrying a near match for Ryu's Shoryuken in his own Tiger Uppercut. The first enhanced Hadoken appeared in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Street Fighter Alpha 2 frames it as Gouken's creation, but has Ryu learning it independently after he defeats Sagat. According to the retrospective book Undisputed Street Fighter: A 30th Anniversary Retrospective, Ken's Street Fighter V redesign helped his popularity by giving him a more original identity, distinguished partly by his flame-based special moves against Ryu's electric ones, introduced in Street Fighter III. Electricity generated inside the body appears yellow, while electricity from an outside source appears blue, and the Denjin Hadoken, shared by Ryu and Gouken, blends both the Hadou and that electric current. It can only be learned once Ryu has mastered the Satsui no Hado, while Kage's version of the same technique is described as far more enhanced.

  Director Hideaki Itsuno was kept away from working on Ryu directly because of his inexperience early in his career, so he worked instead on building new characters able to rival Ryu and Ken. For Street Fighter V, the team also tried dressing Ryu in an alternate high school uniform, recasting him as a rebel, the "leader" of a student group or a band of delinquents, an idea later spun into super deformed April Fool's jokes.

  Ryu was originally built for newcomers to the genre, but the series kept rebalancing him, with 3rd Strike leaning into his defensive side. That shift eventually hurt him: multiple expert players said he had become unsuitable for competitive play in Street Fighter V, until Capcom patched the character in 2019 to a positive response from fans. A manga based on Street Fighter Alpha has Ryu develop an even stronger Shoryuken against M. Bison, a version that Yuichiro Hiraki liked enough to bring into the games, though for Street Fighter V he wanted its execution simplified.

• 6. The Dark Hadou

  ›

  Street Fighter Alpha 2, released in 1996, is where Akuma first tells Ryu the truth. After their duel, Akuma reveals that Ryu carries the very same power inside him, the Satsui no Hado, that Akuma himself wields. Akuma is also, in this telling, the brother of Ryu's own master, which makes the discovery personal rather than abstract. That confrontation is also where Evil Ryu first became a playable option, though only in the international versions of the game.

  The character actually began on the page. Evil Ryu was introduced in a 1996 Street Fighter Zero manga by Masahiko Nakahira before Capcom folded him into the games' official canon. Two years later, Street Fighter Alpha 3 gave the story a new twist: M. Bison sought Ryu out as a potential new host body, and after their clash Ryu won, forcing Bison to retreat. Playing as Evil Ryu in that same game triggers a different clash entirely, against Akuma, to settle who commands the Dark Hado more completely.

  The comics pushed Ryu's dark side even further. In the Street Fighter Unlimited series, Ryu absorbs the Dark Hado himself and briefly becomes Evil Ryu, fighting Akuma in his Oni form until the villain Gill intervenes and defeats them both. Training afterward with Gouken, Ryu learns to balance his light and dark ki, eventually transforming into a form called Shin Ryu to defeat Gill and win a rematch against Akuma. He then returns to Brazil to keep training with a fighter named Oro.

• 7. Beyond The Arcade

  ›

  Comic book writer Len Strazewski wanted a far more dramatic storyline for Ryu than the games ever attempted. His version put Ryu at the center of a revenge plot, one where Ryu's own motivation came from a plan to kill his best friend, Ken Masters. The comic was cancelled after its third issue, so that storyline was never fully explored. Nakahira, the same manga artist who created Evil Ryu, later wrote his own take on Ryu elsewhere in his career, aiming for a more serious version of the character.

  Casting Ryu for the screen came with its own tangle. Actor Byron Mann has said that during the making of the 1994 live-action film, he had no knowledge of who Ryu was or what Street Fighter even was. Director Steven E. de Souza wanted Mann for the role, but Capcom initially resisted, since the company already had its own actor, Kenya Sawada, who had played Ryu in promotional appearances across Japan. Sawada's version would have leaned more serious than Mann's, but DeSouza ultimately used Mann because Sawada's English was not strong enough, giving Sawada the separate role of Captain Sawada instead. Even the pronunciation of Ryu's name caused friction. Damian Chapa, who played Ken, has said the name should sound like "Ree-you," but DeSouza insisted on "Rye-you," believing it would be easier for Western audiences.

  Ryu's presence beyond Capcom's mainline games was treated as something close to essential. When Arika built Street Fighter EX, producer Ichiro Mihara called Ryu one of three characters the series could not do without, alongside Chun-Li and Ken. Discussing the prequel series Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist, director Joey Ansah described the Ryu and Ken dynamic this way: "a good analogy with Ryu is that he's not actually ever competing with anyone else; he's competing with himself. Whereas Ken is driven fiercely by competition." For the crossover Tekken X Street Fighter, producer Katsuhiro Harada said Ryu would keep signature moves like the Hadouken to reassure fans, even as most of his ordinary moves were reworked to fit the Tekken cast. When Masahiro Sakurai brought Ryu into Super Smash Bros., he rebuilt him around his classic Street Fighter II persona, added moves suited to Smash's extra buttons, folded in one technique borrowed from Street Fighter III, and made the Shoryuken his single strongest attack.

• 8. Icon, Meme, Inspiration

  ›

  GameSpot featured Ryu in an article titled "All Time Greatest Game Hero," while CBR's Stone Sam called him a "video game icon" alongside Chun-Li, crediting how much both characters had grown since their debuts. IGN went further, placing Ryu first in its "Top 25 Street Fighter Characters" list and praising a design built from just a white gi, dark gloves, and a red headband as rare restraint in a genre full of clutter. He has also been voted one of the best video game characters in a Famitsu poll and in the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition, in 2011. In 2010, Empire ranked him 27th on its list of greatest video game characters, writing that he had gone "toe-to-toe with SNK's finest, The Darkstalkers line-up and half of the Marvel stable, only to emerge unscathed and victorious nine bouts out of ten." Kotaku's Ian Walker offered a shorter version of the same idea, calling Ryu "a Kevin Bacon of video games." Capcom's licensing followed the praise: an officially branded NubyTech and UDON joypad for the PlayStation 2 was announced on the 27th of September 2004.

  Ryu and Ken's original moveset earned its own nickname, "shoto," and the three signature techniques behind it, the projectile Hadoken, the close-range Shoryuken, and the spinning Sepunkyaku, have been echoed by other characters ever since. Street Fighter 6 reopened the conversation around his design in a different way. Kotaku pointed out that Ryu's classic look never covered his own feet, despite the character clearly being able to afford shoes by then. Polygon called the character's exaggerated shoulders and comparatively small head "ridiculous" on first look, sparking social media comparisons to Chris Redfield from Resident Evil. GamesRadar reported that the redesign drew fandom attention specifically for Ryu's sex appeal, while PCGamer turned it into a running joke about his rivalry with Ken over who had more of it. Briana Lawrence of The Mary Sue wrote that a screencap of Ryu from the Street Fighter 6 trailer landed as a more unintentionally appealing moment than Lady Dimitrescu, the widely discussed character from Resident Evil Village. Kotaku, more warmly, recommended listening to Ryu's new musical themes, which use vocals drawing on the spirit of Jet Set Radio.

  Ryu's influence reached rival companies too. His original designer, Nishiyama, has said that Art of Fighting's Ryo Sakazaki was built at SNK as a direct homage to Ryu. Capcom's own designers used him as a template again when building the villain Akuma, wanting Akuma's design pulled closer to Ryu's than to the series' other antagonist, M. Bison. At The King of Fighters, designer Yuichiro Hiraki worked under Nishiyama's guidance to make sure Kyo Kusanagi read as clearly distinct from Ryu rather than a copy. Even outside Capcom and SNK, Ryu's fingerprints show up: Shenmue's protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, was originally meant to imitate Ryu's Shin Shoryuken in combat, before director Yu Suzuki cut the move, a decision that former Sega developers only leaked years later. In 1993, Hong Kong artist Situ Jianqian based characters in his comic Supergod Z: Cyber Weapon on Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li, though he renamed them after Capcom sent a warning. That single renamed comic is as good a measure as any of how far Ryu's white gi had already traveled by the early 1990s, long before Kage, Kairi costumes, or kasaya robes were ever on the table.