Akuma, the final character in Street Fighter 6’s Year 1 DLC plans, finally hit the game earlier this week. I had the opportunity to speak with director Takayuki Nakayama about the significance of Great Demon. However, in February, I sat down with Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto to discuss Ed’s addition to Street Fighter 6. During this conversation, Nakayama shared an interesting anecdote about how important Ed was to Street Fighter 6’s development.
When the team sits down to decide on characters, they think about balancing the roster not just by style, but by the regions and countries the characters represent. However, the game’s story – in Street Fighter 6’s case, the world tour – also plays a big role.
“From an outsider’s perspective, when you look at the characters themselves, you might think, ‘What’s their significance? What’s their relationship?'” says Nakayama. “But as you play World Tour and Arcade Mode, they somehow become more and more obvious.”
When Ed was initially announced as the third of four characters to arrive via DLC during Year 1, some wondered about his importance to the wider Street Fighter 6 game. However, he was merely a background character in Street Fighter IV before making his playable debut in Street Fighter V. But, according to Nakayama, Ed was actually one of the most important characters in terms of influencing Street Fighter 6’s development.
“From my perspective, Ed is actually a very important character in the series now,” says Nakayama. “He was actually the reason we have advanced controls in Street Fighter 6, because in Street Fighter V, this was the character that we tested with simple commands for specials, and that eventually evolved, and we learned from implementing it in Street Fighter V, and we took those learnings to create innovative controls in Street Fighter 6.”
While Ed was instrumental in developing the advanced controls, fan love for him on social media sent the development team on the path to creating Street Fighter 6’s most important mode.
“That’s the reason we have the world tour,” says Nakayama. “When we were working on Street Fighter V, and Ed was released, I was looking through my feed on social media, and I noticed someone who said they were a really big fan of Ed. , and they like how he looks, they like how he plays ‘I think I can actually play a fighting game, and it’s a lot of fun!’
However, Street Fighter V’s limited mode offerings, even after years of post-launch development, inspired Nakayama to create a new experience for players like this social media user. “Street Fighter V doesn’t have a large-scope, single-player mode like World Tour,” he says. “And so they didn’t like seeing Ed get fleshed out by other players. And because he or she loved it so much, I felt the responsibility to create a new mode that would spotlight that master. Shines the different characters and doesn’t show them. Really hurting from other masters and characters was a big reason we decided to do a world tour for 6.”
Street Fighter 6 arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, and PC on June 2, 2023. To find out why we consider it one of the best modern Street Fighter games, read our review here. For more on the making of Street Fighter 6, read our full cover story here. To read our history of the Street Fighter franchise in the lead up to 6, go here.