In the year since Street Fighter IV was first announced, producer Yoshi Ono has been spreading the good news, making sure that every gamer, and not just fighting enthusiasts, knew about Street Fighter’s glorious return to the world stage. It’s rare that even a few weeks have gone by, especially following EGM’s exclusive cover story on SFIV last December, without Ono sitting down with journalists across the world to discuss the game’s ongoing development and refinement on the road to its release this past summer. But excitement for Street Fighter IV, at least in the United States where only a scant few imported arcade cabinets are available to players, is at a perilous stage, somewhere between tense excitement and frustrated impatience. We’re ready to fight, and even though the fall gaming season is just swinging into gear, it’s hard to ignore Street Fighter IV’s absence from the landscape.
To tide over the faithful, Brandon Sheffield’s interview with ubiquitous Ono running on Gamasutra today has some of the deepest insights into SFIV’s structure yet to be published. The familiar territory of how SFIV has been built to bring casual players back into the fold is covered well here, but filtered through the perspective of the fighting genre’s most technical aspects. Ono also provides some fascinating perspective on the series’ history, particularly fighter’s-fighter Street Fighter III and why it’s taken some twelve years for that title to gain the respect and audience it has always deserved:
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