Of all the iconic techniques in Street Fighter, one stands above the heap as the single most powerful: Raging Demon. The reason? It not only sees the victim attacked with countless physical strikes, all of which are potentially deadly, but also attacks their very soul with a karmic force fueled by the weight of all their sins in life.
This move is practiced primarily by one character, Akuma, who strives to be the most powerful fighter on the planet. The thing is, as powerful as Akuma is, he’s actually landed Raging Demon a handful of times (both in and seemingly outside of canon) and almost every victim has, for one reason or another, walked away from the encounter. Continue on to see whom and how.
The surprising ineffectiveness of Raging Demon is the topic of one of our latest video explorations wherein we go back through the handful of times the maneuver was used (even when Akuma wasn’t the one behind it) and didn’t really do its job.
It doesn’t take a ton of critical thinking to tease out the reason Demon doesn’t actually finish off most fighters, as Capcom wants to keep its characters around so they can be used again and again in future games.
That said, some of the instances are just too egregious to let slip by without pointing a finger or two.
We’ll cover just one here before you jump into the video, and that’s the case of M. Bison. As the big bad guy of the series, Bison has a lot of people gunning for him and you do kind of want to be able to kill him at the end of games for the sake of satisfying story bookends.
It’s fairly forgivable to have Bison go down and then bring him back a la horror slasher icons, and Capcom even set the character up to legitimately do this as he has a ton of clone bodies that he can transfer his soul between.
As we mentioned, though, Demon doesn’t just kill the body; it also kills the soul. What’s more, it attacks the soul with a ferocity based on the sins and evil one has committed in life, meaning Bison would likely experience the most powerful version of the attack relative to virtually anyone else in the SF universe.
This interaction went down during the events of Street Fighter 2, which happens to be one of the most hazy, conflicting, and least fleshed out parts of the Street Fighter timeline, but even if it’s not canon, Akuma hitting Bison with Demon is an iconic moment for the series that Capcom all but said “just kidding” to.
There are quite a few more ways characters survived dying 1,000 deaths which you can hear all about in the full video below.
For what it’s worth, we’re still extremely happy to have the badass move that is Raging Demon as an ongoing part of the Street Fighter story and gameplay, but that said, Capcom might want to play up its potency when Akuma joins Street Fighter 6.