Needless to say, Street Fighter is one of the most recognizable names in the fighting games genre. The series has been running for an impressive 28 years and doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. A man who has seen it through almost from the very start is long-time Capcom employee Yoshinori Ono.

Ono started his journey with Street Fighter with SF2 and is now the executive producer of the upcoming title. We sat down with him to pick his brains about the series, Street Fighter V, and more. Here’s what he had to say...

IGN: Street Fighter has come a long way since the arcade days of the 90s. How has your journey been so far with the game?

Ono: I’ve been at Capcom for 20 years so I’m one of the longest standing employees. I joined at the time Street Fighter 2 came out and I was on the team for Super Street Fighter. At the time I was working on the music sound of the game. I was also on the Street Fighter 3 team but it wasn’t until Street Fighter 4 that I was able to become the producer of the game, and of course I’m the producer again now on Street Fighter 5.

I’m really happy with the journey I’ve had with Street Fighter across the ages and I feel extremely lucky to have been able to work on such a fantastic series for so long.

This is actually a perfect segue into my next question. You’ve had multiple job titles throughout different SF series. You were a sound manager, a sound producer, a producer, and an executive producer. How were these roles different from each other in terms of your level of involvement with the game and influence on it as well?

Well one of the biggest changes is back in the days of Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter Alpha, and Street Fighter 3, I was staying overnight at the office 4 days out of 7 per week and it was incredibly intense. Now with Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5, one of the best things I like about them is that I get home by 9pm.

Well obviously, that’s a bit of a joke, but if I wanted to take a bit more serious approach to the question… Basically it’s the difference between directly getting my hands on the physical creation of parts of the product and, with moving towards producer and now executive producer, by overseeing the whole product. Especially now that I’m executive producer of Street Fighter 5, it means I also have additional responsibilities above producer such as working with people in sales, marketing, and PR for the title. So my distance with the “shop floor” so to speak has certainly gone further with each of these roles, but it also means I’m dealing with a much wider range of people who are involved in the company in order to get the product out there and try and make it sell well. So it’s been a really fun challenge for me.

Which role did you like more?

It’s a tricky question. It’s like asking me whether I like melon or strawberry better when I think they’re both really tasty. It’s really hard to choose one to say this was my favorite role. Working physically and directly on the game and then working on the product a whole… there are different satisfactions and a sense of achievement that you can get. Whenever I was working on the game directly, me and the team, we were just really trying to do our best and make the best game we could and just create this product. That sense of achievement was very good and it was a real one.

Then when you work as a producer and executive producers, you have to look at how to take the feedback that you had from the market from the previous titles and the opinions of users, especially in the Internet era more than ever with everyone’s opinion being online and you can sort of see the sway of things. You have to look at how you can implement this into the next game and that’s another kind of fun and another kind of challenge that I’m really enjoying.

It’s difficult to nail one down. But, like I said, if you were gonna force me to answer this question, I’ll go back to what time I can get back to my house at 9pm and I’ll choose my current role.

Well here’s a question that will be easier to answer: do you have a favorite Street Fighter character?

I’ve always said over the years as people have asked me, my favorate characters are Cammy and Rainbow Mika. Mika in particular has not been in the series for a long time and over the years I’ve heard many many people say to me “Bring her back! Bring her back!” because she only appeared in one game. Now she’s back! I really hope people can see that I wasn’t ignoring them, I was just finding a way to bring her back into the game. It makes me very happy to see her return too.

Definitely! A lot of players are happy as well, for sure.

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media like Facebook and Twitter saying “Well done, Ono!”. It makes me happy to see what kind of perspective people have on me while saying that and it’s great to see that people are happy to see her back.

Fantastic! So that makes the players happy, but here’s a question that might not. For Street Fighter 5, you’ve chosen to partner with PlayStation for an exclusive PS4 release. Were you ever worried that this would upset Xbox or Nintendo players, especially since it’s never going to come out on other consoles?

Last year, I think it was on the 5th of December, I was in Las Vegas for the Sony conference where we announced the game and announced that it was going to be PS4 exclusive. Within 60 seconds my Twitter feed exploded with people typing the “F” word at me in various iterations. By this time, it’s settled. Either they’ve gotten tired of typing it or they’ve somewhat come around to see why we’ve partnered with Sony this way and why we’ve gone through a platform that lets us have cross play between the console and the PC version.

I’d like to think that hopefully in the meantime some people might have bought a PS4 and they’ve realized it’s a great platform. Or maybe once they’ve heard of the exclusivity they’ve gone and bought one to play Street Fighter 5, who knows?

I’m sure a lot of people have. Street Fighter is a very very big brand and a lot of people would love to play it, especially since you’re using the PlayStation 4 technology to its fullest. What were some of the technical aspects of the PlayStation 4 that you were excited to incorporate into Street Fighter 5?

I think that this generation in particular, it’s not so much that there’s a huge difference of power between the PS4 and the other consoles, it’s just that other things like the services, the OS, the flexible online system… These are the things that we really wanted to have at our fingertips. Street Fighter has been online since Street Fighter 4 so of course it’s very important to keep that part of the game on. We’ve been very pleased with what the PS4 online capabilities have allowed us to do with the game.We started an online beta recently and some players have been disappointed that they didn’t get a chance to connect up to a match yet but we’re putting it out there so that we can work hard so the connectivity is where we want it to be by the time that the product launches. I think hopefully when people get the game in their hands they will realize that this is what I was talking about when I said that that’s the kind of stuff we need to have to make Street Fighter 5 work.

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