The sun is setting E. Honda’s mural for bathhouses design 30 years after it first appeared.
This week, video game publisher Capcom released Capcom Arcade Stadium for the Nintendo Switch. Among the titles available in the downloadable collection, there are several iterations of Street Fighter II, including the original 1991 game, 1992s Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fightingand 1994s Super Street Fighter II Turbo.
However, players get ready to rumble into character E. Honda’s bathhouse stage in the game’s Capcom Arcade Stadium versions may feel a little different from what they remember, and no, it’s not because technology has advanced and made the art of pixel art games less impressive than at the time, but because the rising sun and its rays disappeared from the background painting of the stage.
▼ E. Honda’s stage in Capcom Arcade Stadium
In the original versions of the games, the gray sun will also light up in alternating colors of red and yellow when the round is over.
It has now been changed to the entire left half of the mural which changes color as a solid block, as shown in these screenshots.
い ら な い い 修正… ね pic.twitter.com/74H5z0VO0G
– め め (@pomegd) 18 February 2021
The change should not have come as a complete surprise, as the official previews available before the game’s release showed Honda’s sunless background. In addition, when Honda was added to the list Street Fighter V in 2019, Capcom also falls into a modern, polygonal version of him Street Fighter II bathhouse, and a sun was present in the mural, but without the variety of rays.
No official reason was announced for the change, but the most likely explanation is that Capcom wants to avoid a negative reaction in other parts of Asia to the rising sun images. Especially in China and Korea, vocal groups associate the symbol with the Japanese army and the occupation of World War II. The issue is complicated for many reasons, and not least, although the Rising Sun Flag was flown by the Japanese army, the symbol was not created for or used exclusively by the military, and therefore does not apply to most Japanese citizens. necessarily had a militaristic or imperial feeling. However, Capcom apparently decided that it was not worth the risk of risking a setback on Honda’s background, and so the sun was completely scrubbed out of the mural, even from the version of the games sold in Japan.
Sources: My Nintendo Store, Twitter / @ pomegd via Hachima Kiko, YouTube / Street Fighter
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Add images: My Nintendo Store, SoraNews24, YouTube / Street Fighter
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