Oh, how the mighty have fallen...
Once upon a time, World Warriors with enough skill and luck to have defeated Balrog, Vega, and Sagat, would be challenged to a final match with M. Bison, the supposed host of the Street Fighter tournament. He defined what it was to be a fighting game boss. He was fast, powerful, and a tad cheap, but not too much. He was a real test of your fighting mettle.
But that was a long time ago. These days, M. Bison is just another character who just happens to be the final boss most of the time. He's not even a high-ranking character at that. He's gotten slower, weaker, become a much larger target, and his special moves have changed so dramatically from what they once where that he is now just a shadow of his former self. He lost his ability to jetison across the screen with a normal Psycho Crusher and is given a slow and rather worthless fireball instead. His Scissor Kick, which would once cover the entire screen with lightning speed, in most games these days barely covers half.
What happened?
As the Street Fighter plot advances, supposedly we find out that Bison is more and more powerful. But though he may be a powerhouse plotwise, he's a pushover in actual combat. Street Fighter Alpha 3's Shin Bison gives him back a lot of power, but he is mostly a cheap version of his normal self. Why couldn't Capcom just make him more like he originally was? He was plenty of a challenge just the way he was. His "new look" has also grown quite old. It was kinda cool at first, but I find the older, slimmer, and capeless version of Bison to be much more intimidating.
I say this not as an M. Bison fan, but as a fighting game fan who enjoys a final boss who presents a challenge without going into excessive cheapness. These days it seems they just can't think up a tough final boss without making him ungodly cheap. Just look at folks like Gill and Shin Akuma. But a weak final boss is no fun either. It was truly awful in SFA2. Chun-Li's pre-Bison fight with Ryu was more challenging than Bison himself. It's just sad.
It doesn't help the fact that as the Street Fighter Alpha series progressed, Bison's story became more and more screwed up. The original story behind M. Bison is that "Never has a man been more cloaked in secrecy than M. Bison" and yet in the Alpha series we learn so much about him (most of which is incredibly stupid Superfriends-villain-style crap) he's not nearly as evil as he was in the SF2 series.
Even the Alpha games themsevles contradict Bison's character, particularly SFA3. In the earlier games, Bison was cold, calm, and calculating, not getting his own hands bloody unless absolutely necessary. But here, he fights people at the drop of a hat, even if they've just successfully completed something he assigned them to do. If you were trying to take over the world, wouldn't you want to keep your best, most successful underlings alive? I know I would.
Personally, I think Capcom should do to SFA3 what Konami did with Ultra's Metal Gear 2: Snake's Revenge: Just wave a magic wand and pretend it never happened. No Metal Gear fan is complaining about wiping Snake's Revenge from the Metal Gear canon, and I can guarantee you Street Fighter fans would be dancing in the streets if Capcom were to do the same with SFA3.
Fortunately, Capcom has gradually taken steps to return Bison to his old self. Perhaps the lunacy of SFA3 knocked some sense into them. In the Capcom Vs. SNK series, Capcom completely redrew Bison's sprite so he is now just like he used to be, and he is at long last his former self again. There's no talk of soul-swapping or host bodies anywhere to be found, either. Of course, there's still the matter of just how awful he still was in Marvel Vs Capcom 2...
The Street Fighter series has seriously slowed down in the last couple years, but the next time Capcom makes a new SF game, hopefully Bison will finally be as great a villain as he used to be, someone whom we can't wait to see Chun-Li bring down.
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