How Playing Online Made Me Hate Ken From Street Fighter
How repeatedly playing against the same character online can cause you to despise them and have a sports level dislike of their player base.
I’ve talked about playing Street Fighter II as a four-year-old and playing Ken due to him wearing my favorite color red. While I didn’t become a big SF player until Street Fighter 6, Ken was my second favorite SF character after Cammy for many years. I remember looking forward to his scenes in Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie as a child and playing him as part of my second team in Marvel Vs Capcom 2 (my main team was Jill, Gambit, and Cammy). After having relatives move to Las Vegas and deciding to enter SF6 for my first ever EVO in 2023, I started playing a lot of SFV to prepare.
I originally played SFV when it released in 2016, but I didn’t like how barebones the initial product was and rarely played it. Coming back to the game in 2023, I still didn’t love it. I spent hours with SF6’s beta and played a lot of Guilty Gear: Strive, yet my time playing online was brutal. I already realized being the best among my friends that don’t play fighting game didn’t mean I was good, but after many hours of playing SFV, my highest rank was briefly achieving the lowest tier in Silver division: Silver 1.
Almost every time I logged in to play an hour of SFV, there was one character I was destined to face, and that character was Ken. In most SFV games, Ryu is the official protagonist, but playing SFV online you’ll see the blonde, American, red wearing, character that shares a fighting style with him way more often. It’s not just that you’ll play Ken, then Ken, followed by a non-Ken player, then another Ken that made seeing him get on my nerves, it was the way Ken players played. Most Ken players — especially lower ranking Ken players — are why the saying “I didn’t pay to block” exist. The moment someone decides to become a Ken main they convert to the religious belief that the best defense is a good offence, and the best offense is never not pressing a button and making sure your opponent doesn’t get a chance to play the game they also paid for.
There were so many times I regretted turning on SFV seconds after the round starts and the Ken I’m playing against does a spinning kick known as a tatsu and then follows it up with an jumping uppercut known as a dragon punch. As a bad player that didn’t take the time to learn how to defend or counter my opponents moves, I would get hit by one or both moves and instantly become the latest victim to this Ken’s flowchart. And by flowchart I mean a sequence of moves that they do every match with no concern for how their opponent responses to it.
After repeatedly being bullied by Kens and constantly shooting fireballs when I meant to do uppercuts the few times, I attempted to use him, I sworn off ever playing as Ken again, and entered Street Fighter 6 with Mannon and Chun Li as my characters. While the game was new, the type of players I faced online were not, and the battle royal of Kens returned. The biggest difference between SFV Ken and SF6, was SF6 was better and was capable of transporting your character into the corner anytime they landed single hit. Despite him being better and playing against him even more than I did in SFV, I didn’t hate the character nearly as much. A lot of this had to do with me being a better player in SF6 than I was in SFV, so I was capable of beating the low ranked and aggressive to the point of getting themselves killing because I blocked their obvious wakeup super or OD Shoryuken Kens that use to destroy me before. I began to think that my hatred of Ken was immaturity on by part and that it was wrong to complain about a character and the people that play them, but then I bought Mortal Kombat 1 and went against Johnny Cage.
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Like Ken, I was originally a fan of Johnny Cage. I watched the first Mortal Kombat movie as a kid and enjoy his character in that, I also liked his role in MK1’s story mode, but online he was a demon that had more mix-up potential than any other character. Not only was Johnny Cage one of the best characters in the game when MK1 released, he stayed top tier for the first year of the game. Anytime MK1 received a new patch, I would quickly scan to see if Johnny Cage got nerf, and almost every time either nothing changed about him or he got a slap on the wrist that allowed him to stay the best in the game. Eventually, I accepted I needed to do something I never did before. Use practice mode to learn how to block and counter Johnny Cage’s oppressive attacks. While this did help me improve as a fighting game player and make win the occasional match against Johnny, it didn’t lower my hatred towards another character I use to like.
With Ken, I literally couldn’t play the character well, because I struggled to do his moves consistently on Classic controls and my pride wouldn’t allow me to play Modern. There’s no doubt in my mind that I could do well with Johnny, if I chose to use him, so why didn’t I just dump my main Meleena and play Johnny? At some point, playing fighting games turned into rooting for a sports team, and playing Johnny would be like dropping my favorite NFL team the Eagles and becoming a fan of their rivals the Cowboys.
After tens of hours of playing the same character, I found myself attached to them and winning with Johnny wouldn’t feel as good as winning with Meleena. Unlike using a gun in a Halo or Call of Duty game, it takes time to learn how to do a character’s specific combos. If you use the same character long enough, transitioning a random hit into a damaging combo becomes instinctual, and those instincts don’t always to a new character, so I would likely be taking a step back before taking a step forward.
In Tekken 8, I played Jun and she was a very good character when the game released. Unlike Ken and Johnny, Jun was nerfed into the ground and was a bottom ten character a few months later. It didn’t take long to realize that Jun no longer carried me and I had to carry her or fight ways to win against better characters. I was completely willing to dump Jun for a better character, but due to life circumstances at the time and each Tekken character has around one hundred moves, so I accepted that I wasn’t talented enough to learn a new character in the amount of time had to devote to playing Tekken 8. Despite Jun being bad, I performed better than expected at my second EVO in 2024 — I went 0–2 in SF6 at my first EVO, but that will be covered in a different story — going 3–2 and could’ve advanced to the second day, if I had any clue how to fight against another bad character that almost no one used online in Lars.
The Tekken 8 experience showed me that jumping on bandwagons isn’t necessarily. Tekken 8 also has it’s Ken/Johnny in Dragunov, and despite wanting to play a better character, I didn’t consider drop Jun for him. Just like Ken and Johnny, Dragunov became annoying online rival whose team I refused to join. Due to me fighting so many Dragunovs online and being force to figure out ways beat him with Jun, I managed to win against the Dragunov I was matched up against at EVO.
The personal rivals that develop between you and a character is something that’s not unique to fighting games, but feels more personal than any other genre of games. While I may not be having fun fighting them, my hatred for that character is enough to inspire me to keep playing and improve, for no other reason than to ruin the day of people that choose to the pay the most popular/overpowered characters in the game.
