M. Bison may have been thought to be vanquished for good, but he’s coming back soon in Street Fighter 6 alongside Elena plus SNK’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui with some new tricks hidden under his cloak.
Not all of his added tools that look new in Bison’s gameplay trailer are actually original, however, with one of two in particular experimented with all the way back in Ultra Street Fighter 4’s Omega Mode.
Psycho Crusher finally returns as a regular special move again, and it can apparently destroy single-hit projectiles when timed correctly while the Overdrive version can outright ignore fireballs completely though that’s not all.
We’re also shown that he can plant Psycho Mines on the opponent similar to his V-Trigger 2 in Street Fighter 5 that’ll explode after a few seconds or if triggered by another move — but it looks like the bomb will disappear if Bison is hit.
What’s extra interesting is that if he hits OD Psycho Crusher on a mined opponent, the game will play an extended animation where he punches them to detonate the bomb and send them sky high.
It looks like he can also follow that up with an OTG combo / move to put on the extra hurt.
Nice to see that there’s still stuff from USFIV Omega that they try to use in SF6 #sf6 #streetfighter6 #sf6_bison #sf6_vega #sf6_dictator pic.twitter.com/UXYXxDKVuK
— b_HAUNT (@b_HAUNT) June 8, 2024
Well, this grab is almost identical to Bison’s Omega Mode counterpart, which doesn’t really have a name.
Like SF6, the Omega grab appears to be just part of the EX Psycho Crusher with some extra flourish though we couldn’t really find any extensions out of the move in the little bit of time we messed around with it — so the SF6 version definitely seems like an upgrade.
As far as we can tell, Bison’s never done this added attack before though he has done some similar things.
One of the dictator’s Supers in the first Capcom vs. SNK, Heartbreak Despair, has him throw the opponent after hitting them with a Psycho Crusher though he doesn’t use any Psycho Power with that final part.
Head Press is back too, but the way the stomp comes out also be a reference to how it appeared in Omega Mode too off of Death Flutter with the move seemingly stopping his momentum and dropping straight down at higher speeds — especially the Overdrive version.
His other Omega Mode exclusive attacks in Psycho Sever and Psycho Drain don’t appear to be back here, however, the latter likely served as inspiration for Bison’s VT2 grab too.
Omega Mode offered a different way to play the game when Ultra Street Fighter 4 first launched a decade ago with new moves and altered mechanics that seemed to serve as an experimental testbed for things to come in the future.
Even system-wide changes like more lenient links and reduced hard knockdowns would make their way into and be expanded upon in Street Fighter 5 (and technically SF6 too).
Obviously not everything from Omega made it into a full release like Ken’s kicked Hadokens unless that’s where they took the idea for Lucia’s moves from.
We did just recently see Capcom pull from Omega Mode too with them giving Akuma the command grab out of teleport from there.
On top of that, it looks like the devs may also be referencing Raul Julia’s portrayal of the dictator from the Street Fighter film (and probably Raoh from Fist of the North Star too).
M. Bison is scheduled to kick off Season 2 content in SF6 when he launches later this month on June 26.