#necalli

been a while since i did one of these so here's my first dragon showcase of 2024 :)

caelum / shrike

necalli / dune

F.A.N.G in Granblue Fantasy.

The event was called Granblue Fighter V and it was the 2nd collaboration with Street Fighter. The first was Granblue Fighter Ultra. This event ran between April 15, 2016 through April 25, 2016.

Rashid and Karin were playable characters and F.A.N.G and Necalli were enemies. M. Bison appeared too.

In Ultra Granblue Fighter, Ryu and Chun-Li were playable. M. Bison (Vega, Dictator) and Sagat were enemies.

Here’s the entire story for Granblue Fighter V. Listen to their glorious voices 💜💜

For translations, go here: https://gbf.wiki/Granblue_Fighter_V/Story#Ep._4-1

For the FANG fight scenes, I complied the animations I could find from various different videos on YouTube. Credits go to chokottosister and Hiroshi Sora.

Although still voiced by Shigeru Chiba, his dialogue delivery is different from the original SFV version. In SFV, he doesn’t say “Shishiruirui” when doing his Critical Art, but in Granblue he does. Here’s his sound clips from SFV for comparison:

If you want to see art of other characters, go here. Playable characters are in Character. NPC/enemies are in Character/Lore/NPC/etc. Just type their names in the search bar under the categories. Bison is Vega btw : https://gbf-img.com

For sprites go here. Playable characters, go to Characters/Human (2015 and 2016). For enemies/NPC’s, go to Enemies/Humans (easiest to find it from Oldest first) : https://mizagbf.github.io/GBFAL/

Natlan's official outfit for Necalli 2025 @yukinanokuro

I wanted to make an outfit appropriate for my only character (at the time) from that region.

I'm making another of his relatives, also from Natlan, uwu. I'll upload it here soon too!

Necalli original post

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I like his moveset, I enjoy wild man characters and I liked the idea of a character who could bring back some of the face-biting inscrutable beastman mystique that Blanka had to shed (not that Blanka doesn't bite faces or does vicious attacks anymore, but it's different than when you first meet him). I still think he had one of the more well-done incorporations of the V-Trigger mechanic via the transformation. I also like his design, not one of my favorites, but I do like it. I feel like it was really hampered by really wonky hair physics and the game's artstyle, but I could see it working gangbusters if he was introduced in SF6.

Necalli's one of the few fighters unanimously considered a dud (and might be the only mainline character who wasn't even a little retroactively embraced? Even Rufus, Falke and Ingrid have their shooters) but I honestly think the problem wasn't with him as much as it was the writing for SFV being garbage and them being unwilling to commit to the hype they built for him. I think Necalli had plenty of individually cool components that could have amounted to something cool, maybe even great, if he actually even remotely mattered outside of being a boss fight for Ryu.

I love G, infinitely better than Necalli, but I call bullshit on him being supposed to be the Final Boss, they hyped up Necalli as someone who could devour Bison and gave him a Saiyan form and stamped V all over his body. He was clearly meant to be the guy, and if G was being hyped up to play a role in A Shadow Falls, I guarantee he would not be so fondly remembered. The same thing happened with Necalli, everybody was onboard with the Pillar Man mystery box until it was time to open it.

His Story Mode, and the version of him that exists in the Story Mode, honestly should have been what they went with for the guy, it's part of why him being dissappointing soured people.

I think he could have worked pretty well as the resident Weird Monster of the setting, and that's not exactly a niche anyone else is filling.

He is an "Emissary of the Gods" who shows up every few hundred years to seek out and consume the strongest warriors, and frankly you could get a lot out of unpacking just that, that not only does are the gods of the Street Fighter universe just as obsessed with battles as everyone else in this world, but they created a horrible monster to be summoned by combat and fight the worthiest warriors for, why? To honor them? Prune them? Punish them for excessive fighting? Cut monsters like Bison down before they get too strong, or push them towards new heighs as he did with Ryu? What is he for?

He can possess animals, and enter dreams. He can expand and balloon his flesh into gross fleshy Tetsuo/Majin Buu mutations in order to absorb people, and that never shows up in his gameplay, in fact none of his weird powers do except for that V-Skill where he barfs on the floor. He is summoned by conflict and his drive is to kill and devour the source of said conflict. He seems barely sentient but apparently has a "hidden genius". He can inflict a literally paralyzing fear and is surrounded by a noxious gas that "pollutes" the souls and turns the infected into beings like him that seek other souls, and that literally never shows up in-game, ever, apparently that was just for a blog post.

Is it too much? Probably, yeah, but it's something. It's a lot of somethings instead of a literal nothing. He doesn't do anything much for Ryu's story arc, he doesn't even do anything for Akuma's currently abysmal kill record, because by the time Akuma kills him, defeating Necalli is the least impressive thing to do. If you're gonna pull the trigger on having a guy this full of strange powers and prophecies and mystery boxes as the villain you put front and center on the advertisement, the least you can do is try to deliver on them. It's kind of confusing that they didn't even try.

I feel like you could even maybe salvage the dude if you just leaned on the weirdness. Apparently one of the Udon comics established he is "a conceptual being who is tied to the aspect of conflict, and cannot be destroyed by normal means as long as there is a universe where conflict exist"? Okay, lean into that. Make it so that he is Necalli, plural. As in, there's multiple of him, maybe one's not that strong on his own, but nobody's ever had to fight several at once and all of them trying to kill and absorb you into the collective. Maybe he is a viral sickness that comes up again and again all over the world, that was supposed to only happen every few hundreds of years but has been happening more and more frequently ever since Bison darkened the world, or maybe ever since Street Fighter tournaments became the thing the world revolves around, maybe ever since Ryu got a taste of the dark side and mauled Sagat for it.

He is not the answer, but a cancer at the heart of battle, waiting for the next warrior who falls victim to their own strength, the next person to be corrupted by the Satsui no Hadou or Psycho Power, a persistence predator biding his time until the warriors are too weak to fight him off, and then he'll take the souls that belong to him, or maybe even come from him, if he's to be believed. Because really, WHY is there a Necalli? Why would the gods sign off on this existing? Could it even be they were right to do so, given the role he played in awakening Ryu's potential so he could stop Bison? Is he a sickness or a cure, and what does it say about our beloved World Warriors if the fabric of the universe deemed it necessary to sick such a horrible thing on them?

This guy could even allow for a Street Fighter equivalent to a zombie apocalypse, if they even incorporated that toxic soul gas thing into anything we see in game. It might not the best idea, but it's something? Anything? Anything better than what he did for sure.

Idk man, even if he was never going to be a particularly interesting Final Boss, you can't dissappoint on such a scale if you never promise, and for a hot second, Necalli WAS promising. There was an excitement around him and around the things built up for him. That's more than I can say for a lot of other characters. I'd like to think a Mortal Kombat character who somehow found his way into Street Fighter is an idea even a little worth salvaging.