It’s been 11 years since Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen first hit consoles back in 2013, and fans finally have a full-fledged sequel to sink their teeth into.
To help celebrate the big launch this week, Capcom released a special illustration for Dragon’s Dogma 2, which longtime Street Fighter fans may find quite familiar.
The new illustration was penned by legendary Capcom artist Daigo Ikeno, who’s worked on the art for Street Fighter going back to the 3DO version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo as well as Darkstalkers, Capcom vs. SNK and multiple other series with the developer.
It’s not an exact copy, but Ikeno’s work pretty clearly pays homage back to the Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers promotional art that has Ryu standing front and center and surrounded by the growing cast of world warriors.
This time, however, they have the Arisen and a bunch of other Dragon’s Dogma characters and monsters making up the piece with a ton of style and detail.
Although many of their poses are different, one character is sitting on the cyclops’ head almost identically to how Cammy does on top of Zangief and Balrog, and she has nearly the same hairstyle too with the long bang hanging down and a braid (but not two).
Ikeno wasn’t the artist who originally made the Street Fighter illustration, though, as that was handled by another fighting game icon in Bengus, who himself did a new take on the artwork back in 2017 too.
You can take a look at the illustrations individually as well as side-by-side to try and see any other similarities in the gallery. It could be just coincidence, but there is a warrior towards the back that has a striking resemblance to Sagat.
Click images for larger versions
If it wasn’t known before, the post confirms Ikeno served as the art director for Dragon’s Dogma 2 like he did the first game although he did say at the start of 2024 that he was going to be taking a step back from game development.
DD Director Hideaki Itsuno also has a lengthy developer history with fighting games going back to Rival Schools, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Capcom vs. SNK and more, so we’re curious how many references he put into the action RPG like we’d see in Devil May Cry.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC where it currently sits with an aggregate review score of 86 on Metacritic, however, the game is now facing some criticisms for added microtransactions and performance issues, which Capcom says they’re working on.