Street Fighter 6 has retconned the reason for Blanka’s signature green skin. Capcom’s latest 2D fighting extravaganza finally hit the streets late last week, setting sales records and earning widespread acclaim for shaking up the classic Street Fighter formula in many innovative ways. Street Fighter 6’s character roster reflects this ethos by featuring a mix of classic characters and new World Warriors like the agile Kimberly and the powerful Marisa.
Among the returning combatants in Street Fighter 6 is Blanka, a ferocious Brazilian beast-man who debuted in 1991’s seminal Street Fighter 2. Blanka was once a human child named Jimmy who was stranded in the Amazon rainforest after a plane crash. From there he learned to fight from the animals of the jungle (including how to generate electricity to shock his enemies like an electric eel) and became something of a myth, only revealing himself to civilization during the events of Street Fighter Alpha 3. Come Street Fighter 6, Blanka has taken a job as a tour guide, and assists the player in the game’s World Tour story campaign.
As the player befriends Blanka in Street Fighter 6’s well-recieved World Tour mode, he can reveal the secret behind his Hulk-like green skin. During an in-game conversation, he will explain that when he first came to the rainforest, he had to “borrow the power of the jungle” to protect himself from bugs. To that end, Blanka smashed flowers and grass into a paste he coated himself with, permanently dyeing his skin green in the process.
This is similar to his origins in the original Japanese version of Street Fighter 2, which claimed that Blanka’s green pigmentation was from the plants that he ate to survive in the Brazilian rainforest, but it's much different from other versions of the tale. When Street Fighter 2 was localized for English-speaking countries, Blanka's backstory was changed so that he was struck by lightning in the same storm that caused his plane to crash. This mutated Blanka, giving him not only his green skin but his aforementioned electric powers. Later Street Fighter games would build off this altered story by claiming that the “storm” was an assassination attempt by the criminal organization Shadaloo.
Now that Street Fighter 6 is out in the wild, it seems that neither of these past explanations for Blanka’s otherworldly appearance are entirely accurate. Instead, the fabled wild man got his green skin by painting himself with plants. This change in Blanka’s backstory has gained a mixed response from Street Fighter 6 players, but at least the mystery behind the character’s iconic look has been solved once and for all - unless Capcom decides to change it again in a future Street Fighter game.
Street Fighter 6 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
