Super Man

I ask whether Ono has been surprised by the demand for an arcade version of Super Street Fighter IV, especially from Western markets, where the arcade community is sparser than in Japan.

"I'm very aware of the voices calling for an arcade version of the game. Obviously the western arcade market in comparison to that in Asia is extremely small, so despite the volume of calls for an arcade version, they tend to be coming from a small niche.

"Am I disappointed that an arcade version appears financially unfeasible? Of course. I would love to be far more forceful in delivering m arcade machines to the Western market. But that's just not the landscape we're living in any more."

Here again, Ono seems causally dismissive of anything that is designed to explicitly appeal to hardcore fighting game fans, such as those who are eager for the arcade version. I ask him how the changes introduced to Super Street Fighter IV are working to appeal to an even broader audience.

"I'm so eager to invite new people into the game," he tells me. "I guess that's the reason the new characters we've picked all play quite differently from those seen before. We could easily have picked another Ryu-style character, but that's not going to help in attracting new players and in my opinion we've got more than enough 'shotos' already. We were eager to put new styles in the game, to broaden the flavour."

Work started on Super Street Fighter IV just 11 months ago, after the Championship Mode update was introduced to the vanilla game. A team of 110 staff worked on the core game (many more if you include the character intro and outro movies), 35 per cent of them in-house at Capcom and 65 per cent outsourced.

The main priority for Ono and his team was to perform a general overview and overhaul of the game, making play smoother and slicker. Next, the focus fell onto the Online modes and, when the team was satisfied with the setup there, they finally moved onto rebalancing all of the characters, tweaking the offensive and defensive stats for individuals based on data from the past year of Street Fighter IV play around the world and from the requests they heard from fans.

When it comes to Street Fighter it seems as though everyone has their own ideas about what features should be introduced and what should be discarded. I ask Ono how he decides who to listen to in all the conflicting noise. "Obviously I am not almighty," he says, with a chuckle.

"There is no way to reconcile all of the various requests the community makes of us. But what my team and I can do is to listen to what's behind the things being asked for. Often, when you look at what people are really wanting for the game, you find the requests are fundamentally similar. I try to identify these similar requests, link them together and provide a solution.