Far and away the Street Fighter character with the highest tier placement record across franchise history is Akuma. The wildly popular demonic fighter has been one of the matter of fact top tiers in most games he’s appeared in, and more than once he’s been outright banned from competitive play for being so strong he makes the game feel pointless.
He’s now on his way to Street Fighter 6 and we’re all but expecting him to be among the best this time around, but SF6 is noticeably more balanced than virtually any other vanilla (initial) version of Street Fighter to date, and this next level of understanding by devs could mean a more fair Akuma. To shed more light on the matter we’ve produced a video exploring why exactly it seems Akuma is so consistently good.
First and foremost, Akuma wasn’t initially designed to be a competitive character, but instead to be a hidden final boss that provided a challenge reserved for those who got good enough to beat the entire arcade ladder without using any continues.
This is a significant and foundational part of the puzzle, but simply and quickly arriving at “he was designed to be top tier and so he always will be” isn’t all that satisfying an answer.
This hidden and overpowered boss was a massive hit, and so he was naturally brought back again and again, gaining new moves (such as the extremely versatile Demon Flip) and new perks to his existing techniques (which were already tuned up versions of the shoto archetype move set) in each new iteration.
Akuma’s bag of already powerful abilities has grown increasingly deeper over the years, making it easy for him to effectively mold himself to the particular atmosphere of most games he’s in.
His air fireball is almost always an incredible tool for space control, but even in his guest appearance in Tekken 7 (a game that naturally nerfs projectiles given its 3D nature) he’s been able to use other tools to rise to the top.
In our video we examine how Akuma has been able to specifically pull this off in certain games and take a closer look through his history in an effort to better understand this unique fighting game entity.
Naturally we turn our wonder towards his coming Street Fighter 6 appearance, and wonder if and to what degree the trend will continue.