They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in some cases meaning bigger eyes and rounded faces. Street Fighter V producer Koichi Sugiyama and assistant producer Tomoaki Ayano spoke with 4Gamer during Tokyo Game Show 2015 on some of the work they’ve been doing on the upcoming fighter.
Producer Koichi Sugiyama as Chun-Li on the left and assistant producer Tomoaki Ayano on the right.
4Gamer starts out the interview by asking about their thoughts on the reaction from fans upon revealing Karin Kanzuki as the newest playable character.
“In spite of it being on a business day, there were loud shouts of joy when it was announced on the stage,” says Sugiyama. “After it was announced online, there was a bunch of comments on Twitch saying ‘Karin’s here!’ all over the screen, so I felt that there were a lot of people looking forward to seeing the character.”
4Gamer notes how professional players PR Balrog and K-Brad also happened to be at the stage, and how they were especially loud in happiness.
“Oh, they were! I heard them go ‘oh my God!’ and that made me really happy,” Sugiyama responds with a laugh.
Ayano notes that when Karin was announced, he noticed that it was Street Fighter V that was trending on Twitter instead of Karin, so he gave it some thought about how the announcement made the game as a whole a topic, rather than just the character. That said, he’d like for them to announce more characters in order to continue hyping up Street Fighter V.
4Gamer points out that when Karin was announced, a lot of people that commented about her face looking scary.
“Uhh, is she really scary?” Sugiyama responds with a laugh.
4Gamer then talks about how several gamers from Japan have mentioned how they weren’t able to get used to Chun-Li and Cammy’s faces when they were first revealed; however, as we’ve seen before in our earlier report, they’ve noticed some of the changes, particularly in Cammy looking a little cuter after each update. They ask if there’s been improvements made on their looks.
“Oh, you guys caught it?” asks Sugiyama.
“Good job on noticing that. It’s true that we’ve been changing them,” adds Ayano.
4Gamer asks if that means that they’ve been taking a lot of feedback from fans, and keeping that in mind while working on updates for the game.
“Well there’s definitely that, but considering that the game is in the midst of development, not limited to character’s faces—we’re currently continuing with various improvements on motions, frame data, and battle balance,” says Sugiyama.
Finally, Ayano says that when it comes to faces, there’s a lot that goes into play such as personal preferences, camera angles and frames, shadow angles, and more, so there are a lot of factors that can cause “illusions,” so to speak.
The assistant producer feels that what’s more important than anything for now is making Street Fighter V into a more complete product, but that said, there are possibilities of seeing some more changes in the character faces in the near future.
Street Fighter V is expected to release in Spring 2016 for PlayStation 4 and PC.
[Photographs courtesy 4Gamer.]
