Sumo Media 2
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Sumo Media 2 E. Honda and Ganryu: How Sumo wrestling is treated in fighting games Fighting games are an interesting genre of video game when looked at from a story and lore perspective. They are by their nature ensemble casts, variety of fighters with an equally variety of fighting styles from all walks of life. A fighting game lives or dies on how good their characters are design wise, move wise, and personality wise. Some use boxing, others pro wrestling, others fictionalized version of real life martial arts, some just throw out whatever the hell the staff thought would look cool. And some fighters are sumo wrestlers. Street Fighter’s Edmond Honda and Tekken’s own Ganryu are an interesting series of contrast and comparisons. Their Personalities and roles in their respective franchises ‘E.’ Honda is generally portrayed as being larger than life, a strong willed, bombastic sort of personality. His personality from the Street Fighter Wiki is summed up thus (emphasize mine): “E. Honda is an honorable and friendly man who warmly welcomes people he sees as good; he is also ambitious in regards to displaying the strength of sumo to the world, and to that end he always gives his all during his training and fighting regimens. He also enjoys hot steaming baths between training sessions, his favorite spot being Kapukon Yu. Despite his apparent lack of agility and portrayals in other media as clumsy or silly, Honda is a very powerful sumo grand master. He takes both his sumo art and his "Rikishi" title very seriously, considering it a sacred martial art just like any other.” Ganryu, by comparison, is E. Honda’s mirror counterpart in a sense. Though starting off with noble desires in the first Tekken name to become Yokozuna and own his own sumo stable, by the second game Ganryu’s taken a bit of a leap off of the old slippery slope of morality. Though achieving the title of Ozeki as the youngest age in the sport, in the words of the Tekken wiki: “his immoral style (such as starting bouts with fire breathing and a fanfare whilst taunting his opponents, coupled with his bad gambling habit) lead to a dishonorable discharge and gave Ganryu the chance to join the crime world. “This path of life led Ganryu into pursuing one overriding purpose: to become the world's strongest man in a move that he feels is just and honorable. This, of course, led to his arrival into the first King of Iron Fist Tournament, where he was defeated by a one-time fan, Yoshimitsu. “Noticing his skill, Kazuya Misihima hired Ganryu once the former retook the Mishima Zaibatsu, paying the sumo wrestler more than enough to feed his gambling addiction. Ganryu is participating in the second tournament mainly as Kazuya's bodyguard, but he also has another motive: he hopes to build and own a sumo ring to impress his secret crush, Michelle Chang (whom he fell in love with after seeing her movements and physique), while gaining the Yokozuna title.” Despite both rekishi taking wildly different paths morally, the two aren’t too dissimilar in how their respective franchises have threated them as side characters. While E. Honda’s role in Street Fighter has general always been a minor one (he along with many staple favorites didn’t return to three, his role in four while playable is minor, and will be DLC if he ever does appear in V) Ganryu has had a more up and down relationship in terms of personal success. On the one hand he eventually obtain a Dojo in Hawaii by Tekken 5, on the other his attempts at love have fallen flat on their face. It speaks volumes about Ganryu’s lot in life that even a non-canon ending after being injected with the Devil Gene in 6 (Ganryu entered the tournament to garner interest for his struggling restaurant) his transformation is still played for laughs. Comparatively, E. Honda is treated a tad better in his own franchise. Sort of. Though still played for larger than life laughs in a sense E. Honda’s character still holds a fair bit of dignity game media wise (adaptions have not been his most dignified outings as a character). However, whereas Ganryu’s eventually made reappearances in later games and at least made comparative progress in life (anyone who sets up a sumo stable in Hawaii and tries to start up their own restaurant is at least doing pretty decent in my book), E. Honda’s story has just sorta… stopped. Did E. Honda ever succeed in getting sumo on the Olympics (ignoring that you need both male and female in the pro level to be accepted into the Olympics)? Will he even appear in V as DCL? Only Capcom knows and probably not even they have any real big plans for E. Honda’s character considering his overall minor importance to Street Fighter’s broad story. Though one could argue naturally, that being side characters such is their lot in life. Neither Honda nor Ganryu have the ‘main character’ status of Ryu or the plot importance of Chun Li so naturally as side characters their storylines, such as they are, aren’t put on as much of a spotlight by comparison. That is of course a fair point to make. My… point of interest is less that they are side characters, ensemble casts by their very nature have a spotlight that is somewhat dimmer on one person of the cast compared to the others importance wise. In a cast of five with only so much runtime to share between them in say, two and a half hour movie, at least two of the main cast is going to get comparatively less screen time not including deleted scenes or extended runtimes. Such is the same with fighting video games in that sense. But minor or not, it is the comedic take on their roles that I find interesting compared to the West’s general observations of the sport. In my last Sumo Media post I talked a great deal about the 2001 cartoon Super Duper Sumos (12k words worth, this entry will be nowhere near that ballpark length wise) and the cheap-ish humor they used when dealing with the premise of the show (words like fat, butts, and guts are used in every episode in some form or another). E. Honda and Ganryu are not the Super Duper Sumos. I don’t mean in obvious stuff like their made by actually Japanese companies who have at least a more accurate understanding of sumo then SDS’s liberal take on the subject. I mean more in how their comedic aspects are played up. E. Honda is on some level, a fairly serious (if not larger than life) character. He is, to borrow a quote Robert E. Howard when describing his most famous literary creation of Conan the Barbarian, a man of ‘great melancholies and great mirth’ (melancholies might not fit Honda’s personality per say but even someone like him has to have his down in the dumps days). In short, Edmond Honda is a larger than life figure in the same sense that Hercules, Kartos, Conan, and Doc Savage are. He, much like them, doesn’t need a truly complex or even deep reasoning for going out traveling the world and kicking ass. He simply does it to prove sumo’s strength as a martial art in its own right. In that sense, the man’s not unlike Ryu minus the fireball attacks. And yet, there’s an ironic, almost clueless aspect to Edmond Honda’s character. Street Fighter, being the middle of the pack of fighting games in terms of realism (not as realistic fighting style wise as Tekken, not as gory or lore heavy as Mortal Kombat but still has a sort of over the top cartoony charm all its own), has what can be summed up as a very liberal take on the martial arts genre (think of it less of real world martial arts and more like Wuixu genre with ki attacks thrown in for good measure). Naturally, this applies to E. Honda’s fighting style/gameplay. In order to prove that sumo is the strongest fighting style in the world, Edmond Honda developed his own sumo style through countless years of sweat, effort, and discipline. Ironically, a majority of his moves wouldn’t even be legal in a professional sumo match. The kicker, though, is that even when the likes of Dan Habiki and Rufus point this fact out to him, E. Honda ignores their points (possibly because it’s Dan and Rufus who are the ones pointing it out. When freaking Dan is poking holes in your fighting style, brother have you got problems). Either E. Honda honestly never thought about the implications of his fighting style and doesn’t like the fact that the style he’s developed can’t even be used in the spot he’s dedicated his life towards or he’s known it for years deep down and never wanted to admit it to himself afterwards. This could, as a friend of mine once theorized, ultimately amount to him not bother to admit sumo’s weakness as a fighting style/martial art to himself, perhaps slightly deluding his mind to think that his moves are in fact perfectly legal and that people just underestimate sumo out of hand (which, in fairness IRL, a lot of them do). Or I’m reading far too much into E.