Building Your Own Roster Database
Unleash The Fury A Comprehensive List Of Street Fighter Characters isn't a single product you buy. It's a category of fan-maintained compilation projects that exist across forums, wikis, and personal blogs. I spent months trying to consolidate one myself because the official Capcom rosters for each entry don't line up the way you'd expect. The problem starts immediately. SFIII: 3rd Strike lists characters differently than SFIV. Then Street Fighter V reorganized the entire roster system, and Street Fighter 6 added a completely new set of mechanics tied to the Drive system that most compilation lists either ignore or handle incorrectly. I built a spreadsheet that tracked every character across all six mainline entries plus the two Alpha games and three World Warrior titles. The first thing I learned is that nobody has actually done this cleanly, and the people who claim they have usually left out the hidden characters or mislabeled the EX move sets. I ran into this specifically when trying to document the differences between Ken's Fireball input between SFV and SF6 — the Shoryuken tech changed, but most lists just copy-paste the old data.
Unleash The Fury A Comprehensive List Of Street Fighter Characters
Here's how to build one that doesn't suck, from what I learned after going down the wrong path twice. Start with a master character template. Every fighter needs at minimum: full name, fighting style, home country, debut game, special moves (with input notation), unique mechanic per title they appear in, tier placement per game version, and a link to a video source that confirms the data. The template should also flag whether a character is DLC, hidden, or part of a later expansion. I used color coding for this at first — yellow for confirmed, red for uncertain, gray for DLC — but that got messy after about forty characters. A simple status column is cleaner and easier to sort later. The notation system matters more than you'd think. If you write down Hadouken as QCF + Punch, you need to decide whether that means LP for the version with less damage or HP for the version with more. Most fans skip this detail and just write "Hadouken x3." That's why so many lists online are unreliable. I switched to the standard shorthand: QCF+LP, QCF+HP, QCF+LK, QCF+HK. It takes longer to fill in but it's actually usable when someone asks about frame data or recovery frames later.
When I was mid-way through the project, I hit a wall with the SFIV vs SFV character differences. Specifically, the Super Art systems changed how special moves were categorized, and some characters had entirely different move lists. Ken lost Dragon Punch EX variants in SFIV that he got back in SFV, but only after the Patch 1.03 update. Most lists just note "different moves" without specifying which patch introduced the change. I ended up cross-referencing the official Capcom website archives from 2011 through 2023, which required digging through Wayback Machine snapshots because Capcom deleted the old pages. That took about six hours. The workaround was finding a Reddit thread from 2014 where someone had already archived the patch notes by game version. The hardest section is the VS mode roster for SF6, because it includes characters from other franchises through crossover DLC. Jin Kazama from Tekken, Xiaoyu, and others appear in Street Fighter 6 via the Fighters Pass, but their movesets are ported over rather than adapted for the Drive system. Most comprehensive lists just paste their original Tekken moveset data without noting the mechanical differences. I learned to mark these as "ported, not adapted" and include a separate column for Drive-modified versions of each move. It's extra work but it's the only way to be accurate. Here's a partial structure that works if you want to start one:
Get the Full Details
Section one: Mainline entries. Street Fighter, SF2, Hyper Fighting, SFAlpha, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, SFIII, 3rd Strike, SFIV, SFV, SF6. Each gets its own sub-table with debut status, hidden/unlockable notes, and DLC flags. Section two: Move notation legend. Define every input symbol you use before listing any moves. QCB, QCF, DP, HTC, and HIC mean different things to different players. Write it down once and stick to it. Section three: Mechanic changes per title. This is the section nobody bothers with but it's the only thing that makes a list truly useful. How does Chun-Li's Lightning Kick differ between SFIII 3rd Strike and SF6? What changes with the Focus Attack system in SFIV? How does the parry system in 3rd Strike affect character viability compared to SFV's Super Art system?
Section four: External resources. Links to the official Capcom character pages, frame data spreadsheets from players like GatoBorrado and Taimai, and the Street Fighter wiki. Don't host everything yourself — curate it. The main failure mode for these projects is scope creep. You will keep adding characters from spinoffs — Street Fighter EX, Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition — until the spreadsheet becomes unmanageable. I capped mine at mainline entries plus Alpha and World Warrior. Everything else goes in an appendix. The alternative is letting the list become so large that nobody reads past the first page, which is basically what most wiki entries look like now. Another practical issue: frame data gets updated constantly. A move that has -4 on block in the launch version of SF6 might be -2 after a balance patch. If your list doesn't include a patch version stamp next to every special move, it becomes outdated within months. I add the patch number to each entry — SF6 1.1.0, SF6 1.20, and so on — and use a dated revision log at the top of the document.
If you're starting from scratch and don't want to build this yourself, the closest existing resource is the Street Fighter Frame Data wiki, which has been maintained since 2012 and gets updated weekly for current titles. It's not as comprehensive on historical entries, but it's actively maintained and the data is verified. There's also the SF6 Move List Spreadsheet by community member Zippster that covers every character in the current roster with patch-level detail. Both are better than anything I could maintain alone, honestly, which is why I stopped trying to update my own project past SFV and just point people at those instead. The one edge case I still haven't figured out cleanly is the handling of Rufus and Juri, who have asymmetric body-hitting zones in SFV that don't translate well to text-based lists. Their move names are standard but the hitbox data is unconventional. I just note the asymmetry and link to a hitbox video. Anything more detailed requires a visual tool, which defeats the purpose of a written roster list.
