Yesterday, Capcom hit us with the announcement of the “get ready for Elena Fighting Pass” and all of the content that it entails.
Within this pass, there’s some avatar gear that made some people disappointed. The reason for that is because these cosmetic items let you dress your avatar up as some characters who aren’t in Street Fighter 6’s roster yet — but the assumption that they won’t ever be may not be correct.
While it’s definitely disappointing to see something like this — similar to how Super Smash Bros. fans felt whenever their favorite character got announced as a Mii costume — it’s not always the end of the line.
Although avatar gear is a new feature for Street Fighter 6 because of its World Tour mode, we’ve had a situation in a previous Street Fighter game which felt like it doomed a character even harder but that turned out not to be the case.
Back in 2017, Street Fighter 5 added a costume to Urien where he cosplayed as his brother Gill. Now, Gill wasn’t a particularly expected fighter to begin with so there wasn’t necessarily outrage about it, but the people who were hoping for Gill were definitely disheartened.
However, a few years later in 2019, Gill himself would end up joining the roster in Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition.
This was definitely a much more dire situation since Gill was already represented visually in the normal roster. With avatars, that is definitely not the case as they are mostly used to walk around World Tour or in the Battle Hub, so seeing these items added isn’t nearly as big of a worry.
That said, if you were to look at it from a different perspective, it’s also notable that they specifically seem to have targeted characters that aren’t the most popular from Street Fighter 3 to accompany Elena in her battle pass.
Oro and Remy tend to end up in the lower parts of any polls while Yun and Yang are fairly mid-level in terms of popularity.
Q, on the other hand, is actually quite high in the polls usually, so while he is more of an outlier compared to the others, the more visible and popular Street Fighter 3 cast members like Makoto, Dudley and Ibuki are nowhere to be seen in these gear updates.
Another thing to point out is that despite Mai being added as a character herself, her pass contained avatar gear to dress your avatar up as Mai herself as well, so it’s not like Capcom have anything against your avatars being able to look like playable cast members.
It’s hard to say what Capcom’s plans exactly are, but I’d advise players to not assume their favorites are out of the running simply because of avatar gear being added.
Even with the aforementioned Super Smash Bros. example, we’ve seen characters who started off as Mii Costumes and eventually made the leap to playable characters, as Super Smash Bros. 4 had Mii Costumes for the Inklings, Isabelle and King K. Rool who would all end up playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
I think the safest way to gauge this release is that there are no immediate plans to make Yun, Yang, Remy, Oro or Q into characters right now, so hoping for them for Season 3 is probably a bust.
Season 4 onwards though… ? I wouldn’t count them out just yet.