Boss Character



A Boss Character refers to characters in the Street Fighter Series who are usually stronger than playable characters.

Description
Boss Characters tend to have higher attributes than playable characters. They tend to break character balance by not abiding to the norms of regular characters. Boss Characters can usually have the speed of fast characters like Ibuki or Cammy, have the HP of characters like Zangief and Abigail, and have high damage outputs like characters Birdie or Abigail, all without the hinderances that characters of each of their character archtype has to deal with.

Boss Characters can also tend ot have borderline broken attacks, Gill has super arts that can take about half of the HP bar on block. Gill's Super Arts tend to not be comboable like Urien's but they are much stronger.

In Street Fighter
Bosses in the Street Fighter series tend to have high requirements to battle. These can vary from game to game, like reaching the requirements to reach Akuma in 2nd Impact then beating Akuma with a Super Art to make him revive as Shin Akuma. In The Street Fighter IV Series, certain actions during your way to Seth can give you an extra battle against a boss.

Boss Characters tend to have weaker playable versions. Akuma is probably the most famous example. The playable version is explained as being weaker than his boss counterpart by holding back purposely during fights. Akuma tends to have slower fireballs, less damage, and slower specials than his "Shin" Counterpart.

Urien was created to be a weaker "Tournament Legal" version of Gill. In universe he is also stated to be inferior. He does overall less damage, his normals do not inflict "chip damage". and his Super Arts are much weaker and simpler overall. Urien does not have the "Ressurect" ability of his older brother.

Street Fighter II series
The Street Fighter II series is notable because in it's first iteration "The World Warrior" there are 4 playable bosses. These characters did not have requirements (other than beat the playable characters) to face and could not be used by the player at all. In this game Boss characters tend to have these similarities In the "Champion Edition" update these characters were toned down. Interestingly even the CPU uses the toned down former boss characters.
 * Most of their attacks register as feirce.
 * Their attacks tend to have very little recovery, this is notable in their "real" feirce attacks
 * They tend to be high speed (Vega and Bison both walk faster than Chun-Li)
 * Their Arial attacks remain active throughout their jump arc.
 * They tend to have 1 attack where they take double damage.

In Super Turbo a real boss character was added in Shin Akuma. This character can not be stunned and has faster projectiles than playable characters.