Whew! Ken’s not divorced in Street Fighter 6

Street Fighter fans have been pretty worried about ol’ Ken Masters for the past few months. After artwork of Ken’s new look in Street Fighter 6 leaked, in tandem with some grim personal news for Ryu’s longtime rival, things were looking pretty bleak. But the good news is that, despite conjecture and rumormongering, Ken is not divorced from his loving wife in Street Fighter 6.

But the real story that explains Ken’s downtrodden new look isn’t that much better.

Back in June, when pretty much the entirety of Street Fighter 6’s roster leaked in the form of character art, Ken was revealed to be looking scruffy, grungy, and generally pretty depressed. It was a far cry from his bright, generally put together looks in Street Fighter 5 and Street Fighter 3, the previous two games in Street Fighter’s topsy-turvy timeline. Ken radiated real “divorced dad” energy in SF6, an impression that was compounded by a supposedly leaked storyline in which his wife, Eliza, had shown Ken the door and served him with divorce papers.

According to that (seemingly inaccurate) story leak, Eliza kicked Ken out and took the kids because of Ken’s obsession with street fighting, despite his comfortable station in life as the heir of a multibillion dollar hotel fortune. The real story, revealed as part of Ken’s new bio on the Street Fighter website, is quite different. Capcom explains that Ken is now the “ex-VP of the Masters Foundation” and that “accusations of orchestrating a criminal plot have forced Ken to abandon his family and business and go into hiding.”

So, things are still pretty rough for poor Ken, not to mention Eliza and their son, Mel, whose daddy is on the run and seemingly living on the streets. But who’s behind Ken being framed for a crime he didn’t commit? Shadaloo? The Mad Gear Gang? The Secret Society? Maybe Street Fighter 6’s story mode will clear things up when it launches next year.

Time Stamp:

More from Polygon