07-25-2008, 08:39 PM
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#1 (permalink)
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RGFMod
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: BK/NYC/718
Posts: 9,792
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Akuma and Cammy confirmed for SFIV!?
Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono addressed fans yesterday at San Diego Comic-con, and hinted heavily at the inclusion of Cammy and Akuma for the home versions of SFIV!
Quote:
Street Fighter 4 Director Teases Console Additions
Street Fighter 4 producer Yoshinori Ono spoke today at San Diego Comic-con before a massive (and nearly packed) hall of fans eager to hear about long-awaited fighting game sequel. He began by apologizing for keeping fans waiting so long for SFIV -- it's been more than 10 years since the release of Street Fighter III -- and stressed several times that the new game is more a descendent of Street Fighter II than of III. In fact, it's clearly a game designed to appeal to old SFII fans from the ground up, which means the original eight World Warriors have returned along with the four Shadaloo bosses. It also means that despite the polygonal graphics (which Ono describes as "3D brushwork that brings the painterly style fans like into the game") the gameplay is strictly 2D; the third dimension exists strictly as an embellishment.
Ono touched briefly on the four new characters being added to the roster -- Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Abel, and Rufus -- taking care to emphasize the fact that they reflect Capcom's desire to cater to fans, despite the fact that SFIV aficionados have yet to entirely warm up to the newcomers. "Until now characters have mostly been designed in Japan," he said. "But since SFIV exists largely because of American enthusiasm for the series, we reached out to Americans to see what kind of characters they would want in the game. Thus Crimson Viper was born.
"Of course we love SF3, but if there's a problem with that game it's that we changed too much of the rule book and overcomplicated it," Ono admitted. "Here we're returning to the series' roots, to the things you remember, so that you can jump right back in without having to learn everything from scratch. It doesn't use the exact same rulebook, as we've added an appendix: The focus effects, which is a classic example of a system that's simple to use but difficult to master." He praised the Focus system's effects for its depth, claiming it works on different levels. An amateur can use it, while an expert can apply a more sophisticated approach with timing similar to SF3's parry system.
The event ended with the premiere of a new animated segment centered largely around Chun-Li, Guile and Cammy, presenting their motivations for becoming involved in SFIV and leading into the game's overarching plot. Cammy finds suspicion in the fact that M. Bison's Shadaloo organization was destroyed at the end of SFII, yet neither his body nor those of his lieutenants have been recovered. Meanwhile, martial artists are disappearing across the world, inspiring Chun-Li to hunt for the truth behind this strange turn of events. And Guile refuses to believe his friend Charlie is truly dead even though the military has determined to close the book on the search for him.
The arcade version of the game has hit Japan, but Ono spent much of his time talking about additions for the upcoming home version, hinting heavily at the inclusion of fan-favorites Cammy and Akuma. Both characters play a significant role in the anime sequences that are being created for the home version by Animatrix director Koji Morimoto and Gainax alum Jiro Kanai, and one would assume that Capcom wouldn't go to the expense of including these characters in the game's cutscenes without also adding them to the playable roster-- especially since both Cammy and Akuma were far and away the most-requested character in Capcom's online polls.
More enticingly, Ono also hinted that Ken and Ryu's master Gouken will at long last be playable in the series. "You may remember a certain April Fool's joke," he teased, referring to the classic EGM prank that led players to believe they could unlock the mysterious Sheng Long by performing a nearly-impossible sequence of events in the SFII arcade machine back in the day, a trick which is said to have inspired the creation of Akuma and the complex lore around Ryu and Ken's past. "Maybe we'll see the return of this." Gouken played a significant role in one of the anime clips aired at Comic-Con, primarily in flashback but also in what seemed to be a "current" video coda.
Even without Gouken, though, SFIV is absolutely shaping up to be a Street Fighter fan's dream game, crafted specifically to cater to their desires -- and based on the roars of enthusiasm from the Comic-Con crowd, doing a fine job of it.
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