Q&A: YOICHIRO SOEDA

The Art Of Fighting artist looks back at the popular series

why does Art Of Fighting have a strong emphasis on story?

It is because Art Of Fighting was developed as a game turning around an evolving storyline rather than a traditional fighting game. The game’s story progresses as players beat opponents.

In order to emphasise the more dramatic aspects of the game storyline, Art Of Fighting features numerous dialogue scenes between characters, and cutscenes between stage transitions. At the beginning of the game development, only Ryo and Robert were planned as playable characters, but after some changes, we decided to allow more characters to be playable in versus battles.

unlike many fighters, Art Of Fighting limits your use of special moves. how did you reach this design decision? These conditions have been designed in order to emphasise the powerful and exceptional aspect of those moves. The ideas of charging your own Spirit gauge, and lowering the opponent’s by taunting them were decided from the early stages of the development.

Art Of Fighting has a famous ending, which cuts off as yuri is about to reveal the identity of the masked villain Mr Karate. we later discover that he is actually ryo and yuri’s father, takuma Sakazaki. why was this ending chosen, and was takuma always planned as the man under the mask?

It was decided from the early development stage that Takuma Sakazaki was planned to be the guy behind the mask. The Tengu mask was also decided at the very beginning of the game design. We actually took the chance to explain why Takuma Sakazaki became Mr Karate when we developed the SNES port of Art Of Fighting.