Akuma’s Street Fighter 6 gameplay trailer dropped earlier this month and brought with it our first glimpse at what the legendary Shoto can do in the latest iteration of the long-running fighting game franchise. I think it’s safe to say that nearly everyone who watched that showcase walked away from it thinking that Akuma looks absolutely broken in Street Fighter 6.
Since then, though, Capcom has revealed a lot more information about what Akuma is all about, and one interesting detail about his air fireball had me wondering if the special move would actually be as oppressive as it looks and as it has traditionally been. This new footage from the Season 2 build of Street Fighter 6 shows the design decision in action, and from the looks of it, Akuma’s regular air fireball might not be quite as strong as we initially feared.
Now, the interesting detail Capcom revealed about Akuma’s regular air fireball in Street Fighter 6 is that the projectile will actually disappear if Akuma is hit while it is in play. Right now, we aren’t sure if this is the case for OD air fireball, but considering the OD version requires two bars of Drive Gauge to perform, I’d guess that this specific design choice only applies to the meterless version.
This is a very important change as Akuma traditionally has been able to jump forward and throw an air fireball, and in a game like Street Fighter 5, oftentimes we’d see the opponent try to anti-air with a normal or a regular uppercut. When this interaction happened, it wasn’t uncommon to see it result in a trade that would not only still give Akuma some damage out of the exchange even if the opponent read and reacted to the situation correctly, but would interrupt and stop the follow up juggle combo the defender could have gotten from their anti-air.
In Street Fighter 6, however, learning that the air fireball actually dissipates if Akuma is hit while it’s in play seemed to suggest that trying to anti-air him now when he tries it could result in the defender actually winning the exchange clean. Now we have footage of this exact scenario, and indeed, it looks like even a regular anti-air normal can hit Akuma out of air fireball and beat him fully without him stealing a bit of damage on the way out.
During jakenbakeLIVE’s preview live stream leading up to the AT&T Annihilator Cup tournament, we saw level 8 CPU opponents fighting against each other to show us some of the optimal play Akuma is capable of. One bout matched Akuma up against A.K.I., and in the following clip we have an example of Akuma tossing an air fireball for pressure and A.K.I. anti-airing him clean with her standing heavy kick.
At about 20 seconds into the clip, we see Akuma try to pressure A.K.I. with an air fireball from a forward jump, and despite the angle being fairly tight, she is able to hit a standing heavy kick and not only hit him out of the projectile, but get a punish counter and full combo as a follow up.
It’s worth noting that there could be a lot of factors here. For example, the way in which A.K.I. performs her standing heavy kick sees the normal swing upward from the ground, and it actually comes from underneath where the air fireball is at meaning it could just have been a perfectly spaced tool for this situation.
For characters like Lily who swings her club over her head and hits downward with her crouching heavy punch anti-air, I can’t help but wonder what this interaction would look like as she would be hitting downward onto the air fireball, essentially.
All of that being said, this instance with A.K.I. sees the fireball get to a spot where it would have definitely also hit her if this were Street Fighter 5. Despite this, she won the exchange clean here in Street Fighter 6, which very well could be the new design choice in full effect here.
If a lot of other characters can actually anti-air Akuma’s air fireball with more basic anti-air tools now, this cuts out a strong part of his offensive approach that we’ve seen in past games. This is also one of the factors we mentioned on the latest episode of Talk and Block as one of the ways Capcom might actually be trying to regulate Akuma this time around, and this clip definitely seems promising on that front.
As always, though, we won’t know for sure until we get our hands on Akuma and the Season 2 balance changes ourselves.
Akuma, the Season 2 balance update, and Outfit 3 for the DLC characters will all be launching together on May 22.