Once again, everyone missing the point.
I bet.
It's not about story. It's about placing stuff in their setting.
it's not about story, see... its about
story!
Thanks for explaining that Blanka is a wild beastman. I seriously couldn't see that for myself just by looking at him.
I'm saying that a lot of fighting game characters leave a lot of stuff open to interpretation, for everyone to interpret differently. That isn't strong character design.
These designs actually go out of their way to answer the most important questions for you as soon as possible. In Dhalsim's case, you can instantly tell his archetype, his fighting style and even some points about ingame playstyle: he won't fight like normal people and physical strenght isn't his forte. These are the most important questions for a fighting game, and the first ones that come to mind when you see a character select screen for the first time. Any more than this and every character would have to come with their autobiographies tattoed on their faces so you can know everything about his past at first glance.
The funny thing is how fighting games typically go completely out of their way to tell you more small details about their characters even if you are totally uninterested in Story Modes or game manuals. Usually every character has their own taunts, victory poses and winquotes, intros, stages, themes, signature moves and there are always one or two moves where the character practically takes a break from fighting just to strike a pose and show you how evil/cool/serious he is(e.g: every ultra animation in sf4).
The iterations that Vega went through are not standard practice. Final result is mix of the first iterations, which isn't how things are done if you want something to stand out.
Seems to me that the team didn't know what to include, and just drew a bunch of "cool looking dudes" and then settled on something. To me it seems like a descision that was made because of time constraints.
It seems like this to you but you don't know shit because that text on wikipedia is ridiculously vague and undetailed. ALL we know is 1) he had many iterations and 2) these iterations contributed to the final version.
Unless you believe "standard practice" means a character will come out perfect the very first time you sketch him on paper, then yes, this is standard practice.
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