With the recent addition of Akuma as the final fighter for Season 1, Street Fighter 6’s roster now sits at 22 characters. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama discusses how Ed, the penultimate combatant of Season 1, has become one of the most important characters in the franchise.
That might seem a bit unbelievable at first considering how Ed just started as a side character featured in Balrog’s story during the events of Street Fighter 4. Back then, we didn’t even know the kid’s name.
Takayuki Nakayama at one point mentioned a funny story about how Ed was mistakenly given his name. Ultimately, the team decided to just roll with it since they thought the name was cool for the character.
“From my perspective, Ed is actually a very important character in the series now.” — Takayuki Nakayama
While there was some anticipation for Ed to become playable based on the minor role he played in Street Fighter 5’s main story mode, A Shadow Falls, the reception to his actual reveal was probably best described as lukewarm at best. Needless to say, the character wasn’t exactly popular at major tournaments.
Regardless, we’ve already heard how Ed’s simple control scheme inspired Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6. During the Game Informer interview, Nakayama would once again bring this up to cite Ed’s importance as a character.
“From my perspective, Ed is actually a very important character in the series now,” stated Nakayama.
“He was actually the reason why we have Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6, because in Street Fighter 5, that was the character we tested out with simplified commands for specials, and that eventually evolved, and we learned from implementing him in Street Fighter 5, and we took those learnings to create Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6.”
One of the big draws to Ed in Street Fighter 5 was his simplistic control scheme. Players that normally had difficulties performing moves like the Hadoken or the Shoryuken, due to their motion inputs, now had an entry into the Street Fighter series through Ed.
At one point, Nakayama noted how he would take notice of one fan’s love for Ed on social media. What’s interesting is that this would ultimately inspire the development of the World Tour mode.
“He’s also the reason why we have World Tour,” continued Nakayama.
“When we were working on Street Fighter 5, and Ed was released, I was looking at my feed on social media, and I took note of someone who said they’re a really big fan of Ed, and they love how he looks, they love how he plays. ‘I feel like I could actually play a fighting game! It’s my first fighting game, and it’s so much fun!'”
As mentioned before, however, Ed wasn’t exactly the most relevant fighter in Street Fighter 5’s meta. This meant that the player often had to see Ed lose against other characters.
Funnily enough, the World Tour mode was how Nakayama ultimately decided to address this situation. He apparently felt a certain responsibility of appealing more towards this type of casual player.
“Street Fighter 5 doesn’t have a large-scope, single-player mode like World Tour,” said Nakayama. “And so they didn’t like seeing Ed get bodied by other players.”
“And because he or she loved him so much, I felt the responsibility of creating a new mode that shines the different characters in this master spotlight and doesn’t show them really getting hurt too much by other masters and characters. That was one of the big reasons we decided to make World Tour for 6.”
“I felt the responsibility of creating a new mode that shines the different characters in this master spotlight and doesn’t show them really getting hurt too much by other masters and characters. That was one of the big reasons we decided to make World Tour for 6.” — Takayuki Nakayama
Indeed, all of the playable characters in Street Fighter 6 get the chance to shine in World Tour as a possible master to the player avatar, and not at the expense of the other characters. Ultimately though, this does explain why the characters themselves have minimal interactions with one another in the story.
The World Tour mode is not necessarily for every type of player, but it turned out to be an interesting way of changing things up from the usual fighting game story formula. It proved to be a nice addition to Street Fighter 6, especially considering how lacking Street Fighter 5 was on features when it was launched.
Most probably would’ve never assumed this, but it seems that we have Ed to thank not only for the Modern Control scheme, but also for World Tour. Even if he’s still not the most popular character, he apparently had quite an impact on Street Fighter 6.
Based on what Nakayama has said about Ed, we should probably expect him to turn up more often in future iterations of the Street Fighter series.