It's no secret that Street Fighter 3: Third Strike was a notoriously difficult game to play at a high level, and while it's beloved by the hardcore fighting game community, it almost spelled doom for the franchise in Capcom's eyes.

Street Fighter's executive producer, Yoshinori Ono, recently revealed during his big interview at EGX that even though he does enjoy SF3's parry system, he'd tone it down a couple notches if he could go back in time and start development over.

When Ono was discussing how Street Fighter 4 entered production, the longtime producer mentions that the title was largely built based on Third Strike at the beginning including the parry system, but the team felt like the input window for it was too narrow for most players to take advantage of.

They worked on expanding that original concept into something more unique and easier to execute for the masses until they ended up with Focus Attacks that could be performed at any time and could be cancelled out of.

That sentiment also carries over to Ono's feelings on the Street Fighter 3 series believing they may have scared almost everyone away with how different and extreme the games were at the time.

"It doesn't mean we think the parry system was bad," Ono explained. "It's great, but I think looking back I would've liked to maybe even in [Third Strike] make it so you can use it if you want to and it adds extra enjoyment to the game. But when it becomes a requirement for entry practically and you cannot compete on any level unless you master such difficult, precise inputs, then that's where I feel like we restricted ourselves to only an extremely core community."



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He goes on to say that doesn't mean those deeper parts of fighting games shouldn't be there for the core audience, but rather the net should be wider at the first steps for more players to have more fun right away while retaining depth for the ones looking for it.

The Street Fighter series almost took a more drastic turn around that time, however, as Ono also toyed around with the idea of turning the fighting game into more of a turn-based simulation title.

Parries were far from the only reason Street Fighter 3 wasn't as big of a success as Capcom was banking on, but most players probably wouldn't trade that system away for the hype that it dig bring to those that mastered it leading to events like EVO Moment 37.

We actually almost got easier parries in SF3 though according to its director Tomoshi Sadamoto. Originally parrying was going to work more like perfect blocks in other fighters being performed by pressing backwards instead of forwards. The development team at the time thought it was too simple and not risky enough for what it provided, so we ended up with the system we know today.