Street Fighter 6 has been dealing with a problem of its own making for about a month now, after it put fan favorite fighter Alex in an incestuous relationship with his second cousin/adopted sister Patricia, much to the dismay of longtime fans. Capcom said it would be addressing “misleading” text in Alex’s story that might have led to all this discomfort, and even released a short story trying to cover its decades-old tracks. Now, the long-awaited patch is out and it does…absolutely nothing.
The patch notes don’t get into the specifics, as they merely say that the text of Alex’s World Story segments has been “adjusted.” But looking at the game itself, it seems that the change is to one line of dialogue in which Alex tells the player about growing up with Tom, his first cousin once removed and the father of his future bride Patricia. In the original version, Alex explicitly tells the player that Tom is his late mother’s cousin, which would make his daughter Patricia Alex’s second cousin. How could Capcom possibly hope to “fix” this whole thing with years of established backstory establishing that Alex and Patricia are blood-related? It can’t, and it barely tries.
Now, Alex refers to Tom as “a distant relative of my mom or something,” which is hilarious not only because it doesn’t change or contradict anything from before as it still confirms the familial relationship between these people, but because calling someone’s cousin a “distant relative” is incredibly disingenuous.
Capcom’s approach to handling this unforced error has been to try (and fail) to retcon Alex’s history rather than just scrapping the incest storyline that has put a pretty unfortunate stain on the character’s legacy. At first, my biggest question was: why is the company so invested in maintaining this storyline that it would repeatedly try to undermine Alex’s backstory in an effort to make it less objectionable? But now, I’m just wondering why Capcom has been so laughably incompetent in “fixing” it. At this rate, it doesn’t look like Capcom is going to just scrap the whole thing and not make Alex a cousin kisser, but the damage is pretty much done already. This is going to follow Alex forever.