Well, personally I always thought of Ryu as the Shoryuken character, but it seems the world thinks of Ryu as the Hadoken character, while Ken is the Shoryuken character.

People would have been upset if we tried to change that up on them.

So this was a way to have the best of both worlds.

The Ryu who perfected his Shoryuken would use Shin Shoryuken, while the Ryu who perfected his Hadoken would use Shinku Hadoken.

That was for beginners. We wanted to make a weak Super Art so that players could give themselves a handicap.

I thought that players could say, "You want to fight? I'll use Denjin..."

So that's why we intentionally put weak moves in the game.


It's uncool to use hidden parameters to create handicaps, so I wanted to do it using the moves.

There were three things that we intentionally wanted to do.
1. A small number of characters.
2. Increase the potential of each character.
3. Help the beginner players.

We did things like changing the length of the gauge. We tried what we could.

Everyone is trying to help out the newcomers. Not seeing a whole lot of success though. lol

It took a lot of time to make even just one of the games in the Street Fighter III series. The tall body proportions were the number one culprit - the pixels were really detailed, and we didn't have enough people for the job.

Originally, we were only going to have Ryu, but since we didn't have enough characters, we added Ken.

Chun Li and 3rd Strike was what we wanted to do from the start.

Within that, the aspect that took up the most time was Hugo. Since he was huge, he took twice the time as the other characters. Just taking up that much space meant he took a lot of time to create.

Since both Hugo and Urien are pretty big, we wanted to use Giant Attack for the title. But the staff members on the American side asked us not to use "Giant" because it wasn't cool. We pushed it on them anyway, because the new characters were giants! lol

At first it was "2nd Edition". There weren't that many changes, and we wanted to get it out as quickly as possible.

But at the time, Mr. Okamoto was really into Evangel...well, let's just say a certain giant mech anime. He said "if we're going to say 2nd, then it should be 2nd Impact! Especially with you involved!" lol

I was like - gimme a break! I even fell over on the floor! But he said, "no way!" and that's how it came to be Second Impact.

I don't mind.

He's the son of the oldest child of the Sadamoto family, while I'm the son of the 3rd brother.

I can laugh about it now.


I worked hard on the strategy book for Street Fighter III, so when it came out I went to go take a look at it in the bookstores. And next to the strategy book there was the art book for that certain mech anime. They happened to come out on the same day. All of the bookstores had the two books sitting next to each other.

No kidding. Have to believe there's some kind of connection. I thought that was fairly interesting.