Did it first confuse you when you heard about "canon" (Fighting games mostly)

I personally love it when a game has a storyline, and I love it even more when the game actually pays attention to that storyline.

Fighting games took a little while to catch up - Street Fighter did nothing to hint that it had a storyline outside the manual, and Tekken only hinted towards it until around Tekken 4 (before that, you had to go online to see what the hell the endings meant).

The best ones though from what I played where the "Soul" games - they had endings that fitted the character they where scripted and made sense, Bushido Blade also has endings - but I have no idea which is the "true" one, because I haven't played part 2. (and no - they can't all be true, as I'll explain later.)


If a fighting game has endings for its characters, they can't all happen in the storyline if you want to make a sequal - for example say Character A's ending involves him killing Character B, and in Character B's Ending Character A dies. They can't both be true - infact by the the time the sequal comes out it may even turn out that neither of these endings really happened (so both characters can be in the sequal) and one of the other endings was "The" ending - of course the other endings could be slightly true.

In "Soul Edge" (or "Blade" if your from the UK like me) one ending is "The" ending, and that ending is whichever character gets the sword at the end (you'll understand if you play the game) - all of the other characters have an ending that begins with them finding the sword (what they do with it depends on the character), and then have the rest of their ending. However - in the sequal ("Soul Calibur", actually!) we learn that only one character found the sword - the rest didn't, however some parts of their endings still happened - others got a completly different ending.

In "Busido Blade" each ending begins with the death of the final boss. Now, I don't know if he's dead in storyline, because I haven't got Bushido Blade part 2 (I do know that he's not in it, so he probably is dead.), but if he is - then only one of the characters could have killed him, therefore only one ending is the "true" ending - or the canon one.

Did it puzzle you at first when you realized that not all the endings really happen? Sometimes it gets a bit confusing - one ending in Soul Calibur shows a character dying (how exactly?) - but his death never takes place in canon, because he is never at the place where he dies (got that?) so in SCII - he's still alive.

Sometimes more than one ending can be canonical too. For example, in Tekken, endings like Panda's, Ganryu's or Lei's have nothing to do with whether they won the tournament or not. Panda's endings are usually about her rejecting Kuma's tokens of love and Ganryu similarly getting rejected by Julia. Lei's ending in T3 was just him doing a martial arts demonstration and in 5, it was him humourously apprehending a random crook.

There can also be instances of compromised endings and half-truths that all add up to a big canonical story. In Tekken 3, Paul's ending is canon because the story dictates that he DID defeat Ogre, but left in an excited fluster without realising that Ogre transformed to True Ogre, which was defeated by Jin.

I think it's always fun to try and guess who's ending is the canon. It is obvious most of time, but sometimes not so. In Tekken 5, Jin's ending was a fairly long one and he was also the main protagonist which usually indicates that it's canon, but the notion of him assuming control of the Zaibatsu and becoming pure evil seemed pretty farfetched at the time. We didn't find out that it was actually true until Tekken 6, which I think is also up for interpretation. I'm torn between Kazuya's ending and Lars' Scenario Campaign ending.

Either way, it looks like Jin has been written off. :(

Here I was expecting to see Mortal Kombat and then I read and I don't see Mortal Kombat I don't even

I really don't mind if a fighting game has a storyline unless it's a fighting game based off an anime or something. Storylines are nice but come one it's a fighting game storyline. It's gonna take three or four sequels for it to actually start getting good.

Canonically, the winner of Street Fighter II has never been confirmed, but Ryu's ending will always be the only one that really matters.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kawaii Ryûkishi

Canonically, the winner of Street Fighter II has never been confirmed, but Ryu's ending will always be the only one that really matters.

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Did anyone notice how much ground he covered in a single step while he's walking away. No wonder he won.

I find a lot of the non-canon endings (or the endings that are either here nor there) hilarious, one's that immediately spring to mind are Heihachi's and Xiaoyu's in Tekken 6, I lol'ed.