Sodom (Final Fight)

Sodom (ソドム) is a video game character from the both the Final Fight and Street Fighter series of video games. He is an American Japanophile, and member of the Mad Gear gang.

Development
In the English-language localization of Final Fight for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega CD, Sodom was renamed Katana. The name change was repeated in the SNES version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 to maintain consistency. The initial name change was due to its reference to sodomy.

In the Street Fighter Alpha games, Sodom is an American character trying to speak Japanese, he is a comedic object of ridicule in his failed attempts at the language. In the Japanese version of Street Fighter Alpha, Sodom's inability to speak fluent Japanese is portrayed in his win quotes by having him use English words that are pronounced similarly to whatever Japanese words he's trying to say with a Japanese translation below.

Sodom wears tabi and geta, samurai gauntlets, blue jeans, body armor, and a samurai kabuto with a mask. On the front of his outfit, Sodom has scrawled the Japanese kanji shi (死), meaning "death". However, this kanji is not written properly, and actually has no meaning. He is never seen fighting without a pair of jutte or katana blades, making him one of the few characters to appear in the Street Fighter series to use weaponry. In the Japanese version of Final Fight, the katana are named Masamune and Muramasa.

In the first two Street Fighter Alpha games, Sodom uses a pair of jitte as weapons instead of his katana blades from Final Fight. However in Street Fighter Alpha 3, if the player plays as Sodom in X-ism mode, then Sodom will use his katana blades from Final Fight instead of the jitte.

Appearances
Sodom originally appeared in the beat-em-up game Final Fight, where he is the boss of the Subway stage. An underground wrestling promoter dressed in a samurai-style helmet and gear, Sodom fights the player in an underground ring in the Metro City's subway, wielding two Masamune blades.

Sodom's first appearance in the Street Fighter series was in the original Street Fighter Alpha. In the Alpha series, he is characterized as an American Japanophile, who is greatly fascinated by Japanese culture but misunderstands it. After being defeated by Guy in Final Fight, Sodom recognizes his wrong perception of Japan and travels there to re-educate himself. He develops a new fighting style based on Japanese and Western martial arts and trades his Masamune blades for a pair of jutte. On the front of his outfit, Sodom has scrawled the Japanese kanji shi (死), meaning death. In the first Alpha, he seeks to rebuild the Mad Gear gang by defeating his old rival Guy in combat. In his ending, he reforms the gang and holds up a poster reading "Mad Gear" (魔奴義亜). In his ending in Street Fighter Alpha 2, Sodom goes to a sumo ring in Japan to seek new members for the reformed Mad Gear and ends up being challenged by E. Honda. In Street Fighter Alpha 3, he seeks a new hideout for his gang and goes to claim Shadaloo's new underground base as his own when he learns about it from his former ally Rolento. He crashes his truck into M. Bison's to foil his plot. In Alpha 3 he regains his katana blades from Final Fight when the player selects him in the X-ism style.

Apart from the Alpha series, Sodom appears as a playable character in Final Fight Revenge and makes two cameos in Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix. In Mighty Final Fight, there are three Sodoms (or Katanas, as the character is called in the English version), known as the Three Katana Brothers.

For Capcom's 15th anniversary of Street Fighter, SOTA Toys released a series of action figures, amongst which was Sodom. The figure was fully posable with 16 points of articulation, and modeled after his Street Fighter Alpha appearance. Sodom was included in the UGO.com top 50 Street Fighter characters.

Reception
In the official poll by Namco, Sodom has been the 32nd most requested Street Fighter side character to be added to the roster of Tekken X Street Fighter, as of August 2012 raking up 3.49% of votes. Sodom was one of 10 characters Heavy.com wanted to see in Ultra Street Fighter 4.