Don’t Call Her ‘Titty’
I promise this will be the last in this mini-series about Street Fighter II and the various punchalikes that followed in its wake. I have a post in process about Secret of Mana, I swear. But first? Something about boobs.
All the talk in the previous post about Fighter’s History made me think back on all the other one-on-one fighting games that featured casts that brought whole Epcot Centers of international stereotypes to duke it out. One lesser-known entry in this genre that made its way into my local pizza parlor was Martial Champion, a 1993 Street Fighter II clone from Konami that is perhaps most notable because the company hasn’t really been known for this fighting games. I’d guess the “Tekken meets Animorphs” series Bloody Roar is the longest-lived of any of Konami’s attempts at the genre, but Castlevania Judgment is probably the best known, imperfect as it was. Martial Champion is a fairly bog-standard Street Fighter II clone, however, and it’s actually most surprising how little Konami attempted to reinvent the one-on-one fighter with its attempt at it. Of course, 1993 also saw the release of Super Street Fighter II, so not even Capcom was attempting anything daring aside from packing in new characters; super moves wouldn’t be introduced to the series until 1994 with Super Street Fighter II Turbo.
If nothing else, Martial Champion offers fighters from a few countries that hadn’t been represented in Street Fighter or in other of these types of fighters. There’s Avu, a burly guy from Saudi Arabia who wields a scimitar. There’s Mahamba, a Kenyan guy who fights with a spear. And there’s Chaos, a scantily clad woman from Egypt who basically looks like she’s wearing a “sexy Cleopatra” costume from Spirit Halloween.
Let’s just say that whatever she’s doing in Martial Champion, fellow Egyptian fighter Menat did it better in Street Fighter V, if more than two decades later.
But here’s the thing with Chaos: There was something about her name that bothered me for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Because I’d played Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog both, I had specific associations with the word chaos. In Final Fantasy, Chaos is the surprise end boss of the first game and, in the series at large, an embodiment of cosmic ruin and disorder that exists in opposition to the elemental crystals that keep the world in balance. In Sonic, the Chaos Emeralds each hold power, and if you collect all of them Thanos-style, something good happens — including granting a super transformation starting in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
I tried to formulate a game series-spanning explanation for what this all could mean. Since the Martial Champion Chaos has a fireball move where she shoots a gem-looking crystal, was there a fundamental connection between energy and gems that I was missing?
Nope. Not at all.
Here’s what I missed. Also included in Martial Champion’s roster of international weirodes was a rather unusual representative of Hong Kong: a jiangshi who actually predated Hsien-Ko’s debut in the second DarkStalkers game by a full year.
This hopping zombie’s name? Titi. Which doesn’t sound particularly Chinese, I’d say, or all that appropriate for zombies, hopping or not.
That’s because in the original Japanese version of the game, this guy was Chaos, and the Egyptian girl who’s dressed like a sexy Cleopatra costume was originally Titi — which, now that it’s pointed out to you, should seem like a pretty clear allusion to a different female Egyptian ruler, Nefertiti.
Without having read an explanation from anyone who led the English localization of Martial Champion, here’s my educated guess as to what happened. Titi’s name might have worked fine in Japan, but given the fact that she’s showing a little bit of skin, someone realized that name sounded just a little too much like the word titty, which did not fit the image Konami was striving for with this game. (Shades of Puck-Man, for sure.) However, it’s always cheaper and faster for a video game localization team to work within the assets provided with the original, Japanese version of a given game, and rather than rename the Egyptian girl, draw her a new stylized name for the versus screen and have the announcer come back in to record a new voice sample, it was easier to swap names with another character whose costume didn’t have a prominent boob element.
This meant that Rachael, the blond American ninja fighter, was definitely out of the running.
So while Chaos was an odd pick for the Hong Kong zombie character, it made about as sensible of one for the Egyptian girl. And attaching the name that sounded like titty to the skinny freak with claws wouldn’t make anyone think it was an anatomical reference.
Problem solved! And with a minimum of fuss, too.
I did mention this in the M. Bison-Vega-Balrog section in my write-up on the history of all the character names in Street Fighter II, but while most English-speaking fans seem to know that the bosses of the game, minus Sagat, traded names, some people don’t realize why. If Capcom was worried that their African-American boxer character looked so much like Mike Tyson and thought changing the name was the easiest possible fix, the quickest way to do that play do-si-do and move around the assets that already existed. Balrog came out okay, Vega maybe came out better off, but M. Bison got stuck with what he got. I’m sure whoever made this decision back in the day didn’t think that three decades later, the international version of the series would still be stuck with a madman dictator character named after a bovine native to North America. Funny how things work out.
Miscellaneous Notes
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how the Chaos Emeralds came to be called that. For one thing, emeralds are green and only one of the seven Chaos Emeralds is green — two if you count the cyan one as falling within the acceptable variation. But I’m not sure what the chaos is doing there aside from sounding cool. I guess you could argue that the special stages that Sonic has to enter to obtain the emeralds in the first game are a much more chaotic experience than the rest of the game.
Or is it just that “Chaos Emerald” sounds inherently cool? Regardless of the reasoning, the name stuck, even with the series lore revised the emeralds to be a source of the power to transform into Sonic’s super form.
I don’t know what the North American promo flyer for this game is supposed to be saying but it’s definitely not “play me.”
And finally, I wanted to shout out some of the character design in Martial Champion. Some of the fighters look like giant dorks, it’s true, but some of them seem cool enough that they couldn’t have lived on in a subsequent Konami title. Most of all, I am struck by these three characters, who are dispassionately watching in the background of the game’s France stage.
How have these two mod black women come to befriend a local martial artist? Are they a throuple? Where have they come from? Where are they going after this? Where is their game? This are the questions that Konami refuses to answer.