Street Fighter Art and Design: Part 2
The influence of the Capcom art and design staff cannot be understated. Shoei, Bengus (AKA CRMK), Sensei, Ikeno, Akiman, Edayan and Nishimura Kinu are among the most revolutionary artists in the game industry. In particular Sensei, Akiman and Bengus' work in polishing the SF II characters set a standard by which all fighters were to be measured for almost a decade. These characters became international symbols for fighters and although characters like E. Honda and Guile were added to give Western audiences someone to play or laugh at, in the end all of the characters were embraced by the global gaming culture.
You can place most of the SF II cast at just about any era in the modern world and international audiences would instantly be able to tell who they are and what they are about even if they had never seen or played the Street Fighter game. You really cannot do the same thing with characters from any other fighting game title (Japanese or American). If you were to take Ramon, Angel and Yashiro out of the King of Fighters (KOF) universe and place them at any other time in this century audiences may give you a number of mixed reactions. Even Japanese audiences 10, 20 or 30 years ago might not have thought that the characters looked trendy or cool at all. American audiences would be at a loss for words. None of the characters really looks like a fighter, a fashion model yes, but definitely not a fighter.

Unless you knew something about Japanese history or were really into martial arts then you might not be able to make heads or tails of the characters in the Samurai Spirits series. The characters in the Guilty Gear and King of Fighters games are heavily inspired by Japanese pop culture and thus not originally designed with an international crowd in mind. While the American Mortal Kombat series started off with traditional character designs, eventually later games strayed into a Western ideal with regards to those characters.
The cancelled project Capcom Fighting All Stars (CFAS) featured classically designed characters like Ryu, Chun-Li and Haggar. Capcom was going to introduce three new characters and villains into the SF universe that looked right out of the King Of Fighters lineup.
Even the new character names sounded trendy, D.D. was nicknamed the Goddess of Thunder (that's right I said Goddess not God) or Fierce God, Ingrid was nicknamed the Eternal Goddess and Rook was the Rengoku or Fallen Angel. In essence these hip characters were not fighters but fashionable gods. You should be able to tell right away that the new characters do not have a timeless quality of traditional SF design and instead appeal to the j-pop character design saturating fighting games today.

The KOF characters are above, Billy, Kula and Benimaru. To the right are the characters from CFAS: D.D. Ingrid and Rook. Were they separated at birth?

If you repeated the same experiment when comparing the characters from SF and KOF and applied it to the new characters in CFAS you would most likely end up with the same result. When compared to Ryu, Chun-Li and Guile none of the new characters really looks like a fighter but instead a fashion model. These visual clues are just one problem with fighting games today. The lack of tangible and believable plot behind the characters and their purpose are also hurting many fighting games.

Art & Design P. 1, Art & Design P. 2, Art & Design P. 3