Has Street Fighter been dumbed down for 3DS?

This whole concept is prone to misunderstanding, especially by the hardcore elitists. We're not changing the game in any way. All we're doing is permitting some small things so players who've never played might enjoy the basic concept.

We want people to play against each other, even if it's just button mashing. But with the touch panel and the set moves you can almost play as if you know all these moves. This is the first experience we're going to provide. It's almost like a packaged gift to these people.

Once they get the feel of playing, naturally, they will want to improve. They will think, at this point if I do this I tend to win. Or, this person can't deal with this.

Then they will start to understand why Guile has so many frames he has to charge to do Sonic Boom. That is his strength as well as his weak point, and you have to add that to the strategy of playing this character.

If you just start taking about, if you want to play Guile you have to think about six frames of charges, people who've never played the game are not going to get it. They have no idea a strategy even exists in these games. They just want to play and beat their friends.

We want more people to feel the fun of playing fighting games with other people. After doing that they might start thinking about their play strategy. Really, for hardcore elitists, they don't even need to look at it. They can just say, yeah, we're too good to see that bit. Fine. Don't look at it.

But it's there for people who've never played a console or arcade version of Street Fighter. That's the misunderstanding I was scared of, that people were saying Street Fighter's changing itself to adapt to hardware. That's not true. We're just widening the entry.

To be honest, I don't know where this is going yet, whether the answer is Street Fighter x Tekken or Street Fighter V or Darkstalkers. But what I wanted to construct is a world where no matter what your gaming background is, or your experience is, you can play reasonably on the same stage together.

It might almost be like PC games. No matter what kind of PC you have, you can play the same game. You might be helped by these add-ons, such as extra equipment.

In the 3DS' case you might be equipped with the Lite mode and the touch panel. But once you're in the game it could be a Pro player against a six year-old.

If it was the arcade fighting game that result would be apparent in two seconds. The pro gamer would just thrash the kid and that would be the end of it.

But if the kid was equipped with all these things, he might last a minute. He might actually put up a fight without the pro gamer even realising. Once the game is over it's like, oh, he lasted a minute. Good on you. Shake hands and you find out he was a little six year-old.

This is the sort of world I'm trying to head to so everyone can play on the same grounds. It's quite exciting.

This concept is unique to digital entertainment. If this was real football, I could never stop Beckham's shot. Even if I was equipped with a powered suit I probably couldn't. But in a digital world, everyone could be enhanced. Stoic pro players who don't want any of that – fine. They've got their skills to rely on.

Some people may not get to that skill, or they just don't have the time. But they still want to play competitively, For those people we will provide these enhanced skill sets so you can put up a fight with people even like Daigo.

If I play Daigo normally he beats me in five seconds. But with all this help I can put up a fight. And for Daigo it's another challenge because he can then have this fame of beating all these people even with their enhancements. Whereas people playing with enhancements can say, I've lasted a minute with Daigo. OK, I used a little bit of help, but I did it. It's a win-win situation.

The difficult part with motion control is you have to be physically fit. If we start making people compete on grounds of how fast they can move their arms, we'll have to start selling the game bundled with Red Bull.