Super Man

"Players are ostensibly selfish with their requests, asking for us to, essentially, make their chosen character amazing. I think we have generally handled these requests with the rebalancing of the game: the spread of character strength and weakness is perhaps the most even in the series history. But beyond this, often what players are really asking for is a sense of community, the knowledge that they are being heard.

"So a lot of what we've done with Super is to create mechanisms for building community, particularly in the online area. With this in mind we created the replay channel where you can share and upload videos of your fights, and you can invite your friends and watch and practice stuff together. All of these modes have been introduced to encourage people to gather and play together."

Much is made about Street Fighter tiers, the ranking ladder between each character based on how likely it is that a particular character will best another in the hands of two similarly-matched expert players. With this in mind, I ask Ono how much the team concentrates on balancing the characters to try and get an even spread between the tierings?

"I think that one of the most important things about Street Fighter is that each of the characters is distinct and they all have particular opponents that they have advantages against and disadvantages against," he says. "If we had, say, 40 characters who all played the same then there'd absolutely no point in having that many options. Everyone would just always just pick the random button.

"I think it's really important that each character is different in relation to others. So while we want to make the game consistent across different characters - and we certainly spent a lot of time examining characters that were too strong or not strong enough - that has to be balanced with also making the game interesting and varied. It's a difficult balance to strike, but I'm confident we've done our best here."

The day ticks by to a soundtrack of stick clicks and KO announcements. Player after player I speak to expresses enthusiasm for the update, applauding the quicker pace, the favouring of more offensive play, the easing of Ultra damage to encourage players to take more risks and the spread of new characters and the way in which they change the flavour of the whole experience. The overwhelming sense then, is that Ono's best is good enough.