Ibuki Gets the Spotlight at the Super SFIV Blog

[video]

Looks like we've found the next few topics of discussion for the Super Street Fighter IV development blog. This week, Ibuki is in the spotlight. She'll presumably be followed by the other two recent SFIII confirmations, Dudley and Makoto, in the coming weeks.

The developer blog post features commentary from a Mr. Sano, Ibuki's battle planner, and director Taisaku Okada.

On how Ibuki came to be part of Super SFIV, Okada said that the SFIV series is meant to have the theme of "20 year reunion." They had Alpha characters in the first SFIV, and so, as a means of responding to SFIII fans, for Super SFIV, they decided upon a particularly popular female character from SFIII.

Okada feels Ibuki's charms lay in her looks. Many other games have cyber ninjas, or a ninja who wears normal clothing -- ninjas with a twist, in other words. Ibuki has a clear ninja form, with her hood and ninja attire. This alone could serve as a draw for players, Okada believes. Additionally, ninjas have a somewhat dated image, but inside, Ibuki is just a young girl.

Sano wants players to look closely at Ibuki's facial expressions. Even though her face is covered by a mask, she does have full facial expressions. They've worked hard to make sure that you can see her expressions -- when she's hurt and when she's happy, for instance -- based off just the areas that are showing out of the mask. Because of the limitation of being able to see only half her face, and the need to show her girlish features, Okada believes that for the designers there's no more difficult a character than this.

The SFIV Ibuki will apparently play similar to the SFIII Ibuki. Sano said that they're trying to make the character control as close as possible to her SFIII form. The feel of the control is the most important element that the character retains from SFIII, said Okada. Of course, because of the major differences between SFIV and SFIII, they do have to change the move timing and so-forth. However, they're making adjustments in order to make it so that the feel Ibuki players already have for the character from SFIII will be not be broken.

One particular addition for Ibuki is a high jump. She joins C.Viper as a character with this ability, and like Viper, you'll be able to connect into combos from the high jump.

Asked which character would be interesting as an opponent for Ibuki, Sano suggested Viper. Among other areas that match them, both have fast and tricky movements, he said.

Regarding the SFIII characters in general, Sano said that they're working on preserving one area of SFIII for the characters' appearance in SFIV. In SFIII, when the character's move fast, they leave an after image. The Super SFIV programmers and designers have worked hard to recreate that in Super SFIV. There was actually some concern initially that replicating this effect would cause the system to slowdown.

As always, I've only done a partial summary, without all the technical details, so be on the lookout for full translations from the usual sources.