Arguably the strongest and undeniably the most badass move in Street Fighter, the Raging Demon, is also one of the franchise’s most iconic. The special Super that’s most often used by Akuma is said to literally murder the victim’s soul, and while animations and the amount of life the maneuver tends to lop off track with that sentiment, its utility leaves something to be desired.
Enter Theory Fighter and his recent examination of the maneuver from the days of Street Fighter Alpha (the first time players could actually use the move). Continue on as Theory Fighter shows us why Raging Demon isn’t all its cracked up to be on a more technical level.
The unique maneuver has a unique input, to begin with, as in the world of quarter circle and charge motions, Demon is performed with the unusual lp>lp>forward>lk>hp sequence.
Though shortcuts have made this a little easier to pull off in later games the nature of the input makes it so that Akuma will toss out a few normal attacks beforehand, thus making it especially difficult to take advantage of its instant-grab feature as foes in or block stun will be able to escape.
There are ways around this, of course, as Akuma players have been buffering Demon’s input behind other movements (such as jumps) for years, but even with the proper set ups Theory Fighter argues the move isn’t usually worth going for.
We’ll let him articulate all the rest of the details from here, but would love your thoughts on Demon in the comments after. This examination is widely restricted to Street Fighter Alpha, and perhaps further examination to see if Demon got better across Akuma’s many subsequent appearances would be interesting.
We actually put Demon under the microscope from a more canonical perspective, and came to a similar conclusion in that it really doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to. You can check out our story on all the times Raging Demon didn’t work for more.