With the upcoming January release of Tekken 8 and the announcement of several characters, I wanted to talk about how one character in particular helped start my craze for fighting games. Tekken 3 was one of the first games I played and Eddy Gordo was the first character I chose in a fighting game. Second to King, but that’s another topic for another day.
Coincidentally, the latest character reveal, Victor Chevalier would remind me of Eddy Gordo. Victor was an all-new character announced for Tekken 8, a cool French assassin with guns, swords, knives, and other ninja goodness. What intrigued me was the small interview featuring his voice actor, Vincent Cassel.
A well-known French actor, Cassel states in the interview that he was a long-time fan of Tekken. Wouldn’t you know that his main draw would also be Eddy Gordo and that would be his main reason for being a capoeirista? It’s a very interesting interview so feel free to check out the character reveal for Victor as well!
The year was 1998 and I was turning six at the time. I've never grown up with a Sega Genesis or Nintendo and the Sony PlayStation was the first console I would have. Primarily, this was because I thought it was cool to see someone like me who, at the time, was wearing some pretty nice braids at the time.
It was nothing in comparison to the locs that helped Eddy become the face of Afrocentricity not just in fighting games but in video games in general. From his fashion sense, pairing basketball shorts with some Jordan 13s to later wearing high fashion, to his fighting style, I've always associated Capoeira with a regal fighting style that represented an important piece of history in the African diaspora not to mention Afro Brazilians.
But six-year-old me didn't associate Capoeira with its history quite yet. Eddy was a character who could "breakdance" and do cool sequences with ease. It wasn't until I saw the fighting style in other games did I truly appreciated the style. Christie Monteiro from Tekken 4, Echidna from The Bouncer, and Jo from Ehrgeiz were other characters that I noticed who used this style.
Capoeira looked as elegant of a martial art for the ladies as it did for the men in action games. In this regard, it's paired with characters who have carefree spirits. Street Fighter's Elena is a perfect example of this as she's arguably the most peaceful character in the series. She even made Akuma smile.
For others, it's more than a “dance,” but a declaration of survival. Capoeira had its origins in the streets where self-defense was outlawed. Masking the fighting style as a dance among practitioners, it became a deadly art that held its own against other armed forces. Capoeira is more than a style that incorporated “dance-like moves,” it was a weapon.
Going back to Eddy Gordo, his entire purpose in Tekken was fueled by revenge. To avenge the murderer of his parents, Kazuya Mishima, while also having to serve a sentence for the very crime he didn’t commit. Tekken 6 was arguably his largest role as he joined the Mishima Zaibatsu on the promise that Jin Kazama would find a cure for his terminally ill capoeira mestre. Fueled by revenge for his family and grounded by his capoeirista family in Christie Monteiro as well as his mestre, capoeira was the tool that represented these familial bonds.
In other fighting games, lately, capoeira hasn’t been shown as much as an individual fighting style but more as a supplement for other martial arts. Dee Jay, Jamie, and Rashid from Street Fighter 6 are not capoeiristas but each uses moves from the art and incorporates them in their own original fighting style. Jamie has an Armada Kick, or a “circle kick,” yet is based more on drunken boxing. Dee Jay is a dancer and Rashid does parkour, both of which use acrobatic moves that happen to share with capoeira.
Even The King of Fighters has had its share lately with the return of Yashiro in KOF 15. Some of his moves, specifically his crouching sweep, utilize some aspects of capoeira as well. The SNK titles have also had their fair share of capoeiristas. Momoko and Zarina are the two main examples from The King of Fighters, but Bob Wilson and Richard Meyer existed in Fatal Fury long before Eddy Gordo's debut.
I mentioned earlier that Echidna from The Bouncer was a capoeira practitioner but there was also a 3D Capcom brawler beat-em-up that featured a capoeirista too. Beatdown Fist Of Vengeance had Lola, a hitwoman whose goals aligned with eliminating the corruption plaguing the city streets. What I found out about most capoeiristas in video games is that most are goal-oriented, hired as muscle yet with motives to “make change from within.” Lola and Eddy were similar in their goals, especially Tekken 6.
On the other side, most capoeiristas are fun-loving individuals who wish to spread the joy of the art through fighting. Elena and Christie are the poster daughters of this mentality, with the two of them even having an interaction in Street Fighter x Tekken. Capoeira has always been my favorite fighting style due to its complexity and its influences sprinkled into other forms of fighting. Whether it’s legitimate martial arts or “capoeira moves used for a ‘breakdance’ character” (cough Lucky Chloe), capoeira will forever remain a head-turner in action games when used properly.