From: Street Fighter
Genre: Video games
Who said it?: Narration for Ryu’s ending
The story behind the quote: Street Fighter II has a varied cast of fighters you can select. One of these characters is Ryu, a no-nonsense karate expert who travels the world testing his fighting ability. While the other people in the game have different motives for joining the tournament (Guile and Chun-Li wants revenge on M. Bison, the final boss in the game, E. Honda wants to prove the superiority of Sumo to the world), Ryu’s only motive is to test himself against the best fighters in the world.
In Ryu’s ending, a ceremony is being held to congratulate the winners of the tournament. However, Ryu, who has bested all of them, is nowhere to be seen. As the audience wonders where he is, the scene switches over to Ryu walking into the sunset. The narration states that he doesn’t care about the adulation of the crown, the glory of winning, or the prize money. All he was there to do was fight, improve his skills, and “the fight is all.”
Geek wisdom: People nowadays are focused on either the material gain for accomplishing a task or the accolades they’ll get for doing something. A lot of them don’t really enjoy what they’re doing. These are usually the same people that complain about their jobs and they just can’t wait to get paid since that’s the only thing that’ s keeping them there. However, there is a small percentage of people that actually enjoy what they do.
Finding a job that you actually enjoy doing can be difficult. But for those that do, they never really cared for the amount of their salary or the glory of success. Those things are just bonuses to them. Sometimes, its just the act of doing a good job that makes it worthwhile.
I beg to differ regarding the geek wisdom behind the quote ‘The fight is all”. I’ve finished SFII countless times with Ryu, and I never understood (at the times I finished, I was very young), the true significance of that quote.
After recently finishing the game once more, some fifteen or so more years later, I realized the meaning of that quote in my opinion. ‘The fight’ means the natural struggle of one to overcome obstacles. Thus, despite all the other fighters having other objectives, Ryu himself only cared about the fight, about breaking obstacles and overcome any boundaries necessary to make him reach his maximum potential.
In this scenario, ‘the fight’ is our life’s difficulties and problems. Thus, ‘the fight is all’, means that, at some point in our lives, nothing will matter beside keep on fighting. It wont matter this or that, ‘the prize’, ‘the glory’, only being able to actually survive that troublesome thing in our lives, being able to live, to fight with all effort in order to prevail, is that matter.
That being said, the fight is what we must keep doing. Sometimes we reach crossroads, we reach and abyss without hope, a nightmare in each we can do nothing, so, our only option is to fight, thus, in this case, absolutely nothing matter, only the fight, the thing we need to survive, because… the fight is all.