Street Fighter II and Japan's Soft Power

For my media project, I chose to focus on Japan and emulate a personalized collage of Street Fighter, specifically from Street Fighter II, in Pixlr, encompassing the beginning of a fight scene with a few of the most prominent characters within the franchise. I chose pixlr as my medium because both pixlr and Street Fighter II are very create, engaging, and active means to express creativity, art, and skill. Pixlr was the perfect medium for my project because it exhibits how media and technology overlap and adapt with time just as Street Fighter has changed since its conception in 1987.

Street Fighter first came out in 1987 in Japan during a time of intense growth within the country. There were many salarymen, and Japanese companies were continuing to grow as many men entered the workforce securing careers in which they would apply a typical amount of work for a moderate amount of time, only to retire after with a sizable retirement in which they could comfortably live out the rest of their life having understood that they deserve this from working for decades prior to, but in 1989, Japan’s economic bubble burst altering and defined what Japanese culture is for outsiders. Salarymen were being laid off en masse, reducing the ability to engage in leisure activities and opportunities, and forcing many women into the workforce for the first time. While the leisure industry significantly diminished, the technology industry experienced immense growth as new advancements were creating many opportunities and possibilities for the select few that had a relevant degree in the highly competitive and rigorous field. Consequently, video games were also developing and flourishing in this time period because of their exportable and profitable potential overseas. Video games such as Street Fighter, Super Mario, and others became definingly Japanese as Japan struggled to grow their economy, highlighting Japan’s soft power and ability to capitalize on culture. In order to minimize the effects of the recession, Japan created a national branding campaign, exporting and capitalizing on Japanese culture overseas. This increased their economy as they gained a cultural influence around the world with specific products such as beauty, houseware, films, anime, food, and more. They also utilized transmedia, which is the ability of a creative franchise to be formed and displayed in different mediums. Street Fighter is an example of the use and profitability of transmedia as the franchise consists of video games, toys, figurines, appeal, food, film, anime, and more. because of its lasting impression on popular culture and display of soft power from Japan, that is why I chose to recreate a collage of Street Fighter II highlighting the Street Fighter Franchise and Japan’s influence of soft power as theme for the media project.

While using Pixlr, I had to adjust to many different learning curves as I have never used the application before. I began by uploading an image of the background from Street Fighter II, then I added many other pictures such as four prominent characters, Ryu, Ken, M. Bison, and Chun-Li. This was the most challenging aspect of the project because I had never used Pixlr before and my limited skills and computer crashes made this process more arduous. I used the Polygonal Lasso tool in order to crop out each character and subsequently add them from one image into the background image I uploaded. This was a struggle because many times the application would not work or my cut-out would not be converted to another image. I had to outline and cut out the image of every character over five times each because I was not understanding how to properly and sequentially adhere to the process. However, once that was successful, I managed to resize and distance each character so that it looked proportional to the two-dimensional background. After, I added the small “Street Fighter II” sign as a watermark to emphasis which specific game from the series that I am addressing, and I utilized the Layer Styles option in order to distort the outer glow of the frame to make it a more neutral tone. Finally, I used the text tool to write, “FIGHT!” as it appears in the beginning of every fight in Street Fighter, creating a black outline and then rasterizing the text. Then I added a gradient to the text from yellow to red and positioning it in the middle of the screen as it does in the games, which required me to look up many videos in order to complete. This was my process in emulating a fight scene from Street Fighter II. My design on Pixlr pays homage by replicating the iconic look of a fight scene in Street Fighter II which many audiences will recognize due to the franchise’s global impact through soft power and transmedia.