During a recent interview with Famitsu, Producer Matsumoto and Director Nakayama revealed that development on M. Bison began after the completion of the base roster. Knowing this, it certainly makes sense why that questline had been teasing M. Bison’s return before the official unveiling.
Within that same interview, Matsumoto and Nakayama also touched upon how they’re trying to emphasize M. Bison’s martial arts skills more so than his supernatural powers this time around. It’s not mentioned in the interview, but it turns out that M. Bison is a practitioner of Lerdrit, a variation of Muay Thai martial arts utilized by the Royal Thai Armed Forces. As always, translations have been handled by our very own Nicholas ‘MajinTenshinhan’ Taylor.
Famitsu: It looks like his Psycho Crusher and Double Knee Press are as stellar as ever. Have there been any evolutions or changes to these moves since previous titles?
Nakayama: The biggest difference is between those very moves, the Psycho Crusher and the Double Knee Press. In previous titles, they were both charge moves but this time around, Psycho Crusher is still a charge move but his Double Knee Press is now a quarter-circle motion.
It’s still an advancing move and its benefits are basically the same, but because of the change we’ve had to tune a bit how it works.
He also has a new move called the Back Fist Combo. He puts a Psycho Mine, basically a bomb, on the opponent and it won’t disappear until M. Bison attacks, exploding a few frames later.
So when players have the Psycho Mine on them, they’ll get anxious and want to attack M. Bison. You can start a psychological battle like this. Also, when the Psycho Mine is attached on an opponent, some special moves will have different properties when they hit.
Matsumoto: Combos that use the Psycho Mine will probably get pretty long. He’s become a pretty aggressive character now.
Nakayama: His fighting style is to force his powerful attacks onto you with a specialized ground game.
Famitsu: Producer Matsumoto, as a M. Bison main, what do you think the points of interest about him are?
Matsumoto: He’s a pretty offensive character, and I feel like he fits the Street Fighter 6 system quite well. He made a pretty strong wait-and-see defensive impression in previous titles, so in Street Fighter 5 we decided to make him a bit more aggressive so we continued in that vein and made him a very oppressive character. His Drive Rush is pretty fast, too.
Nakayama: Producer Matsumoto has already been practicing with him a lot, haha.
Famitsu: Already?! The Drive Rush you mentioned, the full spring image of M. Bison from the trailer was very impactful. Usually, you’d be expecting him to teleport or something…
Matsumoto: We had a strong feeling that we wanted to make a new M. Bison for Street Fighter 6.
Nakayama: We wanted to really express the martial artist side of M. Bison. We wanted to reduce the supernatural side of his moves and enhance the actual fighting part of it. Because of this, he has no teleports. This is touched upon as well in the story mode, so please enjoy that.