Many, many years ago when Street Fighter 3 launched, Capcom took a big gamble. Although previous series protagonist Ryu was still in the series, they branded Alex as the new protagonist for the Street Fighter 3 series and had the narrative largely focus on him as the next high-potential fighter in the story.
Since then, we still haven’t had a game take place after Street Fighter 3’s events, which led to despite Alex being part of Street Fighter 5, Capcom couldn’t really develop him further since he needed to still be inexperienced and at the start of his journey for Street Fighter 3. Now, though, Street Fighter 6 is finally about to show us an Alex who comes after Street Fighter 3’s story. What does that mean for the narrative going forward?
In his first canonical appearance as far as the story goes, which is Street Fighter 5, Alex doesn’t do much of note at all. As mentioned earlier, they couldn’t really do much with him due to his already established start in Street Fighter 3 which takes place later in the timeline, so his time in Street Fighter 5 was relatively uneventful.
He has a few interactions with characters like Zangief, R. Mika, Laura, Dhalsim and F.A.N.G but he doesn’t do much of anything important and is largely just there to be a character for versus mode.
There’s also some slight information on what Alex was up to before Street Fighter 3 started, which had him face off against one of the former Four Kings of Shadaloo, Balrog.
Balrog is a character who has proven mighty enough to kill an elephant with a single punch, but in the Street Fighter 3 lore Alex withstands his punches without even flinching and then unceremoniously defeats the boxer in the ring.
This establishes Alex early on as a mighty fighter by proving his worth against an established character from earlier games and while it’s outside of the games themselves, it was part of official promotional materials (Capcom’s “Secret Files”) for Street Fighter 3 moving into the actual game itself.
When he first appeared in Street Fighter 3, Alex’s story was fairly basic and not too far removed from other characters. Most of them had some kind of conflict with Gill, the game’s final boss, and Alex was no different.
Alex’s father figure Tom had been severely wounded by Gill in a fight and Alex sought revenge, eventually tracking down the Illuminati leader and challenging him to combat.
At the end of Street Fighter 3: New Generation, after a harsh battle Alex succeeds in defeating Gill but doesn’t kill him, having earned his vengeance.
Of course, Gill was most likely holding back in this encounter, though the game does make it a point to show that Gill saw something special in Alex which intrigued him.
In Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike, Alex has moved on from seeking revenge after having defeated Gill and instead finds himself matched up against Ryu who handily defeats the young wrestler.
This defeat leads to Alex becoming obsessed with having a rematch against Ryu, and while they would end up fighting again there was never any conclusion stated to their second fight.
At the time, Capcom were clearly intending for Alex to become the new protagonist either striving after their former protagonist Ryu or to become his new rival over Ken, who had largely moved on to his family life more than pursuing fighting.
But it’s been a long time since Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike came out and Capcom have deliberately focused their games on taking place before it and even named other characters as protagonists — dubiously, they referred to Abel as the main character of Street Fighter 4 and story-wise more understandably Rashid as the main protagonist for Street Fighter 5.
Now, in Street Fighter 6, there’s a heavy emphasis on the new generation led by Luke, but that doesn’t mean that Alex won’t have a place in the pantheon of powerful Street Fighter characters still.
With Alex finally getting a game focused on his actions and story path after his debut, it’ll be interesting to see what direction Capcom choose to take with him and if we’ll get an actual answer to what happened with Alex and Ryu’s rematch.
If Alex lost, is he still obsessed with fighting Ryu again? Is his story going to be focused on him chasing after Ryu until he can finally beat him? Conversely, if he won, what’s next for him? He’s already defeated two of the most powerful Street Fighter characters in Gill and Ryu, so does he just keep looking for the next stronger fighter to challenge?
Or are we going to get a more mature Alex who no longer focuses solely on defeating opponents but instead honing himself and taking pleasure in the fight itself? There’s lots of different paths Capcom could go with the character.
Given his wrestling origins, they could even go full heel with him if they so chose. Street Fighter’s wrestler characters tend to be good guys, and even if Alex would likely still stay a nice guy it’d be interesting to see him put on the heel performance in the ring and emulate a bad guy for the crowd.
My personal vision for Alex is to simply have him become a thrill-seeker for the fight itself and become less obsessed with victory or defeat. Something like a good-hearted version of Akuma, always looking for a fierce fight but with the best intentions and without bloodlust.
It would put him on a similar but distinctly different path from Ryu, whose story was largely centered on striving to improve himself without succumbing to the darkness within.
Alex never had the type of darkness that Ryu had, but he had a level of immaturity which made him obsess over winning and if he can overcome that, I think it’d make for a strong character arc.
The good-hearted nature of Alex is an arc he already started on after overcoming Gill in Street Fighter 3: New Generation, where he would become more friendly and offer advice in his quotes rather than the brash and rude personality he showed during his quest for revenge, so seeing it go even further would be a great direction.
One more thing worth mentioning is that in Gill’s own ending, he would turn Alex into a being like himself with the half-blue half-red skin, but this is clearly not canon given that Alex looks like himself in Street Fighter 6.
It does speak to the potential within Alex though, that Gill would consider him being worthy of Illuminati leadership under the right circumstances.
Whatever the case, Alex was originally the new main character of Street Fighter at one point in time. That ship has definitely sailed, but he still has a very strong fanbase attached to him and it’s likely Capcom will want to respect the legacy of him even if he’s not going to be the face of the franchise again.
As he is my favorite character in the entire Street Fighter franchise, I’m very excited to see what route they take for him. I’ll be doing a breakdown in the future on what his gameplay might look like for Street Fighter 6 as well, so please look forward to more Alex content in the coming weeks.