Top 10 Lists: The Top 10 Most Unique Fighting Game Characters

Fighting games have a certain advantage not shared by many other genres of gaming (outside of sports games and some puzzle games) - nobody's really playing them for the story. For that reason, they can get away with a certain blandness as far as characters go. (Virtua Fighter springs to mind...) But sometimes fighting games decide to go the opposite route - they create some of the most unusual characters you could ever hope to see. Characters that, ironically, likely wouldn't work nearly as well in a more story-focused genre. The following are the ten fighting game characters I consider the most unique, unusual, or just plain weird. (A side note: for characters in multiple games, I picked the game I'm most familiar with.)

Our first contender is from that godfather of fighting game series, Street Fighter. In what may well be the last entry in the series proper, a character showed up with no backstory at all. The walking enigma known as Q has no real voice clips, no between-stage quotes, and nothing in the way of an explanation. His outfit consists of a suit, trenchcoat, hat, gloves, and riveted iron mask. In the original Japanese, all of his attack names even have the word for "temporary" attached to them, as if the names were only placeholders. While not as unique as the other entrants on the list, Q is likely the most memorable character from the last few Street Fighter games.

SNK's most famous and beloved franchise has had several characters who are... interesting, to say the least. (Not to mention some of the most irritating things to emerge from an artist's sketchbook - Bao, I glare in your direction.) It takes a lot of work not to fit in with this group, and Mignon accomplishes that. Someone apparently thought a young witch would be appropriate to the KOF universe, so we now have a pink-haired girl in remarkably large white boots who prances about casting spells. Even in a world where energy attacks are commonplace, hearing a high-pitched girl's voice calling out, "Divine Wind Spirits!" and knocking you down with a tornado is still disconcerting. Let us put it this way: Mignon stole the title of "Official KOF Magicial Girl" from Athena.

Sometimes the majority of a game's cast is eligable for the list. Such is the case with the Soul Calibur series - while many characters are relatively simple swordsmen and ninjas, we also have Greek warrior princesses, deranged French fencers, giant golems with warhammers, and Yoshimitsu. And then there's Voldo. According to the story, he's the bodyguard of a dead merchant who guards his vault (the Money Pit, not to be confused with an awful Tom Hanks movie). Appearance-wise, Voldo is one of the weirdest characters in history - he looks like he's wearing a bondage outfit in his main costume, wears a blindfold (as I recall he's blind and deaf), and while not a zombie (that's Cervantes) could definitely pass for one. He fights with two claws, and while his fighting style is unusual for the game it's in, it's still rather mundane. Still, just by appearance alone, Voldo is odder than any other character in Soul Calibur. And this includes Lizardman.

Yet another series that could fill out this list almost by itself, Darkstalkers/Vampire Hunter tended to vary between directly robbing classic horror films (Victor, Dimitri, Jon Talbain) and getting original (Lord Raptor, Rikuo, Hsien-ko). While the third game saw a certain extra degree of originality, with such characters as Jedah and Q-Bee, B.B. Hood (Bulleta in Japan) took that extra bit of effort to top them. Most games would have no use for Little Red Riding Hood. This one did... and then they gave her a Uzi. Children with excellent marksmenship really aren't anything new for Japan, but ones with cheery smiles as they do so aren't the most common apple on the tree. And how can you resist a cute little girl who can call out a pair of gunmen named Smith and Wesson for one of her super moves?

What is it about characters with claws that makes them stand out from rosters of the equally unusual? In a game with a Texan samurai, a San Francisco-born ninja, and a Frenchwoman in knight's armor - all of them anachronisms - Gen-an (or Genan, spellings differ) manages to stand out as the most eye-catching in the bunch. A small, green, hunchbacked fellow in sackcloth, his only goal is to become a king over demons. (For the record, he's not an oni - they have horns and carry clubs - nor is he a tengu; his species is left somewhat indeterminate.) He happens to be a cannibal, and he fights with a glove somewhat reminiscent of Freddy Krueger's. What truly sets him apart is that this little green whatsit is Mai Shiranui's direct ancestor - let us not even ponder how many beautiful women had to be added to the gene pool over the 200 years or so between them...

A cactus. A sombrero-wearing cactus. A sombrero-wearing, maraca-shaking cactus that can attack by sprouting baby cacti. One of his Hyper Combos involves pulling the opponent into himself and doing a crazy little dance while shaking said maracas. Something was definitely in the water at Capcom during that pitch meeting. To be fair, Amingo faced little competition from his own game - although Servbot and Sonson were definitely unique, they weren't exclusive to fighting games and thus ineligable - but fighting cacti tend to draw attention to themselves.

Fans have argued about who deserves to be in the Super Smash Brothers series since the first one hit on N64. While some characters just make us scratch our heads (Ness from Earthbound? Marth from Fire Emblem? Dr. flippin' Mario? The hey?), Mr. Game and Watch has an honest pedigree - he's the otherwise-unnamed hero from the Game and Watch games of yesteryear. Of course, this doesn't prevent him from being outright weird. For starters, he's two-dimensional - literally. All his movements have perhaps two frames of animation at best, and every noise he makes comes from his games. He's a walking nostalgia piece, making him both worthy of appearance in SSBM and worthy of entry on this list.

This is another game where about 9/10s of the cast could fit on this list, and it was a running battle between Bridget and Faust. Bridget, that little crossdresser, finally lost out because he seems made to draw attention to himself. Faust, meanwhile, does that as a matter of course. I can't think of many fighting game characters who wear snazzy suits along with a paper bag over their head. Along with that, his attacks include sprouting flowers from the ground, throwing miniature versions of himself, and disappearing only to open doors from nowhere into the enemy... as well as the occasional nuclear explosion. And to think he used to be Dr. Baldhead...

Games have had you play animals before. Fighting games have had you play animals before (there was Pojo in Mace: the Dark Ages, and arguably the entire cast of Primal Rage qualify). But few games ever give you the chance to play a Boston Terrier with a taste for coffee-flavored chewing gum. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure gave players that chance with Iggi, a small dog who could pummel full-grown men into the ground. Having a Stand (evil spirit) named the Fool backing him up probably helped. And how can I not include a character who has a throw involving treating the opponent like a fire hydrant?

I suppose one would have to expect supremely unusual characters in a fighting game based around the concept of giant monsters battling each other, but Kineticlops is the most bizarre of all. It (he?) is a giant eyeball suspended in purple, vaguely human-shaped lightning, after all. Reread that: giant eyeball in lightning. What propels it to the top of the list is that, out of the entire cast of its game of origin (most of whom could have qualified for the list), Kineticlops is the one without any outside connections - show a picture of Congar from the same game to someone and they'll say, "Oh, like King Kong?"; show a picture of Kineticlops to someone and they'll likely go, "What the heck is THAT?" On top of that, it's the best character to use in War of the Monsters - not having a physical body makes one surprisingly fast.

The fighting game is a remarkably flexible genre, capable of hosting everything from games with real people (the Def Jam games) to games with anime characters (the Ranma 1/2 games and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure). But when the creators decide to get creative, the situation can get very unusual. (Killer Instinct and Tekken barely missed getting characters on this list...) Let us hope that the future contains even more oddities in the world of video game characters - and that they remain at least somewhat playable.

List by True Darem (08/31/2006)

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