When I heard there was a big coffee table book about character design coming out—with legendary Capcom artist Akiman credited in the byline—I knew I had to pre-order it immediately. There are few topics that could possibly be more aligned with my own personal interests! But something about the book made me hesistate….

Not to judge a book by its cover, but the main image adorning this thing was Ryu’s 3D model from Street Fighter V. The cool design sketches in the background, seemingly from SF2, were exactly the kind of thing I wanted out of the book. But SFV? Not so much. Because let’s be honest: SFV just kind of sucks, and its character designs are part of the problem. Eventually though, I gave in and ordered it.

Well now that I have How To Make Capcom Fighting Characters: Street Fighter Character Design in my hands, I can confirm that it is indeed a mixed a bag.

First off, just as we feared, the book is primarily about SFV. The first two-thirds (207 pages) are entirely devoted to Capcom’s flagging flagship fighter. This is disappointing, because again SFV sucks. But surprisingly, it’s also kind of interesting in a way, because you get to see all the alternative designs they didn’t use in the game. Now you can imagine if F.A.N.G. wasn’t the dumbest character ever, or if Abigail’s design hadn’t been botched beyond salvation. It’s almost like Capcom included their own cautionary tales in character design.

Once you get past the SFV stuff, there is some truly great material in this book. However, much of the remaining content is historical interviews with designers of Capcom past. While these interviews are not uninteresting, the discussions do seem to lack any coherent structure. It’s basically just game directors and artists talking randomly about whatever they can remember from back in the day. Now I actually do enjoy that kind of thing, but I kinda doubt most readers will.

Where the book really shines is in its Character Reference sketches and translated reprint of Akiman’s "Anatomy: A Strange Guide for Artists". These pages are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this stuff, basically the whole reason I bought the book (even though the latter is easily accessible online in the original Japanese). This is what I came for!

However, even in the Character Reference section, I still feel let down by this book. See, plenty of game sprite drawings are included from Final Fight and SF2, which is awesome. But for SF3 they’ve only included the rough sketches used for post-match screens and endings in New Generation. No game sprite stuff from SF3 and nothing at all using 3rd Strike characters. Where the hell are the pattern references for SF3? It’s like Capcom’s single greatest work of all time! Not to mention the fact that if you already own a SF art book, you probably have all these SF3 sketches already.

Speaking of the missing SF3 material, there are ZERO design documents from the Alpha games (see what I did there?), which seems especially odd. There’s also nothing from any related Capcom games either. No Pocket Fighter, Street Fighter EX (although they do interview ARIKA’s Akira Nishitani), Rival Schools, Darkstalkers, Star Gladiator, Power Stone, Red Earth (War-Zard), Captain Commando, etc., etc. It’s not like I expected them to include design documents from even half of these games, but what has been included here feels pretty sparse.

Sure, Akiman’s anatomical reference guide is almost reason enough to buy this book. But the rest feels almost lazy. If you are a huge Street Fighter fan—especially if you love SFV somehow—then this book might be worth it. But if you’re more of a SF Alpha or SF3 fan, be forewarned: This is 20% killer, 80% filler.