There’s now only just over a day left until Akuma finally hits the stage in Street Fighter 6 as the last DLC character of Season 1, but it seems that everyone will technically get to play him a bit earlier than that.
Capcom just announced an unexpected event that’s sure to bring a ton of chaos to the battlefield.
The developer will be holding a special “Twitch Plays Akuma” stream tomorrow, May 21, starting at 4 p.m. PDT / 7 p.m. EDT.
As the name suggests, the Twitch chat will take control of the demon in actual matches by giving the character input commands to perform.
The only way that Akuma’s going to stand a chance against any opponent is the fact they’re putting him in with the Dynamic control option, which drastically simplifies inputs to single buttons that change depending on the current situation.
It’s not stated what exactly they’re going to do with the new DLC character, but our guess is pitting him against the Arcade mode ladder and seeing if chat can complete all of the stages (while removing the ability to pause so they don’t just immediately quit out and cause havoc throughout the game).
Prepare for the chaos that is “Twitch Plays Akuma!”
May 21 at 4PM PT
https://t.co/GQrCaf4ubPControl Akuma with Dynamic Controls using commands in Twitch chat! pic.twitter.com/wWtEJKAD7n
— Street Fighter (@StreetFighter) May 20, 2024
This is obviously based on the trend started by TwitchPlaysPokemon, which tasked chat with beating Pokémon Red with everyone spamming commands and was apparently inspired by fighting games’ own Salty Bet.
The channel is still going today and is even celebrating its 10th anniversary by going through Pokémon Black/White 2.
Since 2014, people have implemented different ways for chat to interact with games, so we’ll have to see if Street Fighter will be controlled by consensus or utter chaos with inputs coming in on basically every frame.
Players won’t need to wait too much longer than that to actually use Akuma in their own games, however, with SF6 presumably going down for maintenance tomorrow night to get the game ready for the May 22 update.
On top of that, the new update will contain the game’s first major balance patch, new music options, Outfit 3 DLC, additional combo trials and more.
Twitch Plays Akuma is going to take place on the CapcomUSA channel, so we’ll see what utter nonsense that’s going to look like when it takes place.