The more I study about Sennin, the more I feel like the Street Fighter Plot Guide really wasn’t very thorough in Oro’s section. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me though considering I once argued with the author (Vasili10) that Gouki may very well be an Oni based on his description, and the author seemed loathe to accept the mythological implications. I consider that settled since Capcom created an “Oni” version of Gouki later, way after our argument (I wrote this 07/27/09).
So anyway, there is a thing called “Sennin” in Japanese mythology, which seems to perfectly describe Oro, and once again the author of the plot guide has completely ignored mythology and instead simply given the literal (read “lazy”) translation “aged person” and mentions he happens to be a hermit.
The Encyclopedia Mythica had this to say:
Sennin
by Micha F. Lindemans
The immortal spirit of a saint living in the mountains in Japanese mythology. This saint, a hermit, who has acquired so much merit by his asceticism that he can perform miracles, such as speaking after death, flying on the back of a tortoise or on a cloud, or causing a gourd to give birth to a horse. Sennings may speak to mortals in dreams or appear in the shape of ordinary men. They are accompanied by their familiars: a toad, a horse, or a tortoise.
So besides him being called a Sennin in Street Fighter III, they are both immortal, they both perform magic, they both are accompanied by tortoises,
and they both fly around on the back of something.
Seems like he’s obviously one of these mythological things to me, and I would think it would be obvious to anyone familiar with Japanese culture as it is a common Japanese character name.
Here is a better translation of “Sennin” than the one in the Street Fighter Plot Guide:
The Japanese term sennin is a loanword from Middle Chinese SenNyin 仙人 “immortal person”, known also as xian “immortal; transcendent; genie; mage; djinn; sage; hermit” in Daoism.
Here is a Sennin wikipedia article with more information if you are interested.
In googling I have found that their are also Sennin in Naruto, but I don’t know much about Naruto. Feel free to fill me in.
Disregard my article if you feel that it makes more sense that Oro is simply an “aged person”.
Update 04/30/14: I just found out that the author of the plot guide (Vasili10) was revealed to be a huge dumbass. Called it! [1], [2]
Not sure if noticed, but the picture you have above has him holding a peach, which in Japanese mythology there are peaches that immortals (Sennin) eat that allow them to stay immortal. It is another connection to the mythology.
Awesome, I did not know about the peach aspect, thank you!
That’s incredibly unfortunate. Kinda makes you wish that ceiling spikes were an acceptable solution to life’s problems, huh? Or maybe that’s just me.
Probably that’s just me.
Yup. Not many people, but unfortunately the guy who was left in charge of what was once a go-to faq. THE faq.
I’m confused, were there people who honestly couldn’t accept the possibility of supernatural things existing in Street Fighter? I mean, it’s a pretty fantastical setting as it is, I don’t see how you can accept ‘chi'(and the powers that come with it) as a concept without accepting even the faintest possibility of similar unrealisms. Oro being a saint, Goukakuma being an Oni(although to me, it’s more compelling to say that he’s a human who attained a level of power rather than just being a monster), these make perfect sense in a world with trenchcoat wearing robots, evil psychic dictators who build duplicate bodies of themselves, and Dan Hibiki.
So…
All this info gives me is simply that Oro can pretty much only be used as a plot device. Like you should use Darth Vader or the Emperor in the Star Wars RPG.
And Senjutsu shouldn’t be learnable.
Well yeah, Oro can officially go toe to toe with Akuma, with one arm tired behind his back. Crazy!
Never played with him since I never owned SFIII (because I’m a Nintendo and PC kid), but yeah, that sounds OP in RPG terms.
Considering that you need a insane amount of chi for some of the abilities Oro uses. Not to mention Oro keeps one arm tied to keep himself from killing you and can throw anyone into sub-orbit.
Now we’re reaching levels like the DBZ RPG (yes that one exists!)
I know.