BST|Daigo Umehara is known as “The Beast” for good reason with almost 30 years of fighting game tournament experience under his belt at this point and probably more wins than he can count.
During one of his recent streams, Umehara talked for a bit about the Street Fighter Alpha 3 days and how he was basically socially pressured to change his main characters.
“Is Dhalsim the one you quit because he was too good?” Daigo begins by reading a fan question. “That was Dhalsim in [Alpha] 3. I played quite a bit of Dhalsim and Zangief in Alpha 3. With both characters, people stopped playing me. So I was like, ‘Guess I’ll drop them.'”
Although at first glance, this may seem to be something of a humble brag from the longtime pro, but it sounds more like his opponents were more worried about the characters themselves more than his individual strength.
“If your character was too good, people would call them ‘trash’ and wouldn’t face you,” he continued. “So you had to pick a character that’d get you matches. I’ve still retained some of that mindset. I think ‘No one is going to want to face me with this character.’ I find it hard to pick such characters” — he says while practicing Ken combos in Street Fighter 6.
Umehara’s chat then asks him if that’s why he avoided playing top tiers like JP and Luke in SF6, but he responds he didn’t even realize how strong they were at the beginning and believed Ken to be stronger.
This is obviously Daigo’s version of the story, so we don’t truly know how accurate that portrayal is though from the “house rules” we’ve heard and known about at arcades in ’90s America like throws and Supers being “banned”, the same types of situations were probably happening at Japanese game centers too.
Funnily enough, Daigo admits he may not have the best foresight for knowing how good a character is going to be at the beginning and says he felt confident in Ken’s strength in SF6 because Rohto|Tokido, Victrix|Momochi and SNB|Fujimura all started out with the Shoto too though he says they’ve all since dropped him.
That’s okay for him, however, because Umehara says he’s still having fun with Ken in SF6 and likes his style and flow, so he may have ended up playing him no matter what anyways.
After that, Daigo is contacted by a fan who claims to be in the hospital with liver failure asking the pro for a match from his Steam Deck to which the legend obliges after some confusion as to what that system is.
This MericaMan, however, set their games to five rounds and first to infinity, but Daigo says he’ll give him a best of five.
You can check out Daigo’s new video below to get the full Alpha discussion and match against MericaMan though be sure to turn on English subtitles to know what’s going on.