After inadvertently causing a stir at last year’s E3, Capcom assured players that Chun-Li’s freakishly bouncy breasts were merely the result of a bug that would be fixed for the game’s release…
At time of writing, the much-anticipated fighting game Street Fighter V has only been available at retailers for a few hours, but players are already noticing something very peculiar about veteran series character Chun-Li. Namely, that under certain circumstances, the character’s ample bosoms can end up briefly flopping around all over the place as though they’ve been possessed.
The short but supremely weird sequence certainly looks more Dead or Alive or boob-fetishist softcore porn material than something you’d normally see in a Street Fighter game. In fact, Chun-Li’s suddenly pendulous orbs made news about six months ago when players taking a beta version of the game for a spin at 2015’s E3 event noticed that, sometimes, on the character select screen, the poor Chinese martial artist’s own breasts appeared to be desperately trying to punch her in the face.
At the time, a Capcom spokesman pulled some damage control, telling media and attendees that Chun-Li’s wonky low-gravity breast physics were actually the result of a glitch and that it would be fixed by release, but it would seem that said “glitch” remains firmly in place upon release.
▼ Here’s Eurogamer with a detailed and scientific analysis of the glitch
While the idea that some simple errant code could cause Chun-Li’s boobs to spin around like pinwheels in a clearly prefabricated animated sequence seemed painfully unrealistic at the time, the sequence — back then and as it stands today — certainly has all the trappings of a glitch. It only happens under specific circumstances (in this case when Chun-Li is selected by Player 2) and the exaggerated jiggle physics don’t carry over to actual gameplay.
So now gamers are left with a couple of questions. For one, what prevented Capcom’s dev team from fixing the glitch like they promised? But, perhaps more pressing: How is this even happening in the first place?
The most obvious answer seems to be that Capcom had originally intended for at least some female characters to have cartoonishly floppy breasts, but backtracked on the idea at some point during development. With numerous Japanese games coming under fire in the west (in the last year or two, in particular) for their exaggerated and sexist depictions of women, we wouldn’t be surprised if Capcom decided the extra, ahem, titillation wasn’t worth the potential controversy.
Source: Eurogamer
Image: YouTube/FluffyQuack