Street Fighter (1987)/Ken

Overview Movelist Matchups Strategy Misc

"Alright!"
Ryu (リュウ(隆) Ryū, "Prosperous", "Plentiful", "Abundant") is the main protagonist of the Street Fighter series. He is an experienced martial artist, highly focused on his training, aiming to become the strongest he can.
Ken Masters (ケン・マスターズ Ken Masutāzu) is the deuteragonist of the Street Fighter series. Similar to his longtime best friend and rival Ryu, Ken's goal is to test his power against many different fighters and strives to become stronger, but holds more restraint due to not wanting to jeopardize his family life.

Both are referred to as "Shotos", considering their fighting character archetype, and they're the only playable characters in the vanilla build of the game.
Ryu is the best character in the game, and is banned in SF++. Ken is an upper mid tier in SF++ and just definitively worse than Ryu in vanilla.

Ryu's Shoryuken is fully invincible, where as Ken's is vulnerable for the first 4 frames, although he can block during them. Also Ken's Medium Kick has significantly more start-up although this is hardly relevant as this move is rarely used anyways.

Since Ryu with perfect DP inputs is fully invincible, it is impossible to create consistent counter play against a good Ryu in vanilla or SF++. As with practice it is not that difficult to chain perfect DPs. For this reason Ryu is banned from SF++ standard play.