Happy New Year! This is Tsukamoto.

We’re also gonna give it our all this year, so I hope you all stick with us.

As its a new year, I’m going to eat some mochi and tackle this new year with a lot of energy! First off this year, I’d like to talk about the stages with the design director Mr. Kamei, as well as the stage lead planner Kawasaki. We’ll talk about the design of the environments as well as how the stages were decided on, and various other things.

First, tell us how the stages were decided for Street Fighter 4.

Kamei:
As the theme of Street Fighter 4 was “back to the basics”, we wanted to keep the feel of the stages from Street Fighter 2, so we re-designed past stages such as China and Brazil. When talking about a re-design, its not just going from 2D to 3D - for example, in the China stage, as time as passed from Street Fighter 2 you can see development like more skyscrapers in the distance. So we’ve arranged it to match up with the global feel. For other stages, the concept of Street Fighter is “going to meet strong fighters all over the world,” so we set things to make the environments scattered all about the globe.

Kawasaki:
For the Street Fighter 4 stages, we got a lot of images from the designer Ikeno as well. Especially the European and African stages.

Tsukamoto:
We wanted to make character-specific stages as everyone had been asking for, but there were various things to take into account… But all members of the staff feel that we would like to someday make stages for all the characters, so if there is a chance for it we’d like to give it a try.

What are the characteristics of the Street Fighter 4 stages?

Kamei:
In Street Fighter 4, same as the characters we really wanted to exaggerate the feel of the stages and bring out an original worldly feel to them. In particular, we’ve really paid a lot of attention to the ambient lighting. For example, for evening stages the shadows have a purple or green color to them, and this brings out a special color which makes it a stage you won’t forget upon first seeing it. So even if you line up all the stages together, you won’t find a stage with the same colors. With Super Street Fighter 4 as well, we’ve chosen some different colors. Depending on how you line up the stages, there are some beautiful gradations (laughs).

The movements of the characters in the backgrounds of the Street Fighter 4 stages are pretty amazing.

Tsukamoto:
The first stage we completed was the China stage. When we talked to Ono about how to update it from Street Fighter 2, he said “In SF2 there were a lot of bicycles, but now there aren’t so many, so how about motorbikes?” At one time we did think about motorcycles, but as we feared they’re kind of difficult to understand.

Kamei:
Because they pass by too quickly (laughs).

Tsukamoto:
So for the people riding bicycles, before they just passed by ringing their bells, but we thought to make them fall off, get back up, complain - basically make them react.

Kawasaki:
When we first thought of how to make the background characters move, we hadn’t yet finished the stages themselves, so we could think about various interesting movements without too much restriction. Stuff like kids running in from the distance to increase the number of spectators, and the bicycle guy getting angry and lashing out. In the Street Fighter 4 China stage, in order to bring out the presence of the stage the battle line is pretty close to the wall of the house in the back. So if the bicycle guy falls down and gets angry, other characters aren’t able to pass and it becomes a traffic jam (laughs). As we don’t know when and where the bike will fall, we had to create limitations based on where the bike would pass through and where the other characters could and could not move. It became a lot like choreographing on a stage, so our lead designer put a lot of work into that.

Kamei:
When we were working on the arcade version we were pretty much just fumbling our way through it, so we had a lot of difficulty in getting the movements consistent. The China stage especially took a lot of time. And as it was the first stage, we had no idea how to do it. We didn’t know how many characters to have or how much motion they’d have. So we increased and decreased the characters and their motions multiple times (laughs). But then by the console version we had more experience, so there are move stages where we were able to fix the movements of the background characters. For the arcade we did all the motions by hand, but we were able to re-do it using motion capture.

So now give us a general idea about the new stages in Super Street Fighter 4.

Kamei:
This time, the first stage we completed was the India stage. A large elephant was absolutely necessary. So when we finished that stage well, for the first time we could see the potential of animal characters.

Kawasaki:
The feeling was, without an elephant it wouldn’t be an India stage. There’s a lot of yellow, going with the theme of India, and with some individualistic background characters we’ve created an image that will make people think ‘This is India’.

Tsukamoto:
For Street Fighter 4 there were many propositions made to get an India stage in. There were a lot of suggestions, such as on the bank of the Ganges River or in front of a Linden tree, but they were all eventually discarded. This time we’ve managed to take the things we wanted to do last time and compress them into the new stage. There’s a lot of little things going on in the stage, so it’d be nice if you could take a look while in the middle of your battle. Especially check out the old guy on the wall behind the vegetable stand!

The African (Savannah) Stage has also gotten a lot of good praise.

Kamei:
For the African stage, one of the background members drew a mean looking hippo right off the bat. As soon as we saw it, we knew it had to be in there! (laughs)

Kawasaki:
From the hippo we got the idea of “Animal Kingdom”, and then we had another idea of “Solar Eclipse”. When we showed Ono, he told us he wanted a mix of both, so it became what we have now. Its the same for the India stage, but at first the animal motif posed some difficulties. At a glance, the African animals are flashy and fun, but then you also get an unnnatural feel that makes them look like robot animals. But the lead designer really kept at it and worked hard, so they’ve become really living stages.

Kamei:
We didn’t use motion capture for that, it was all done by hand.

Kawasaki:
Because, you know, we can’t really put a hippo suit on someone and try do get some motion capture (laughs).

Tsukamoto:
The designer had always said “Let me make animals!”, and he really did a wonderful job of it! Its the work of someone who really wants to do it. For making games, if you get people together who really love what they’re doing they can make great things. So please take a good look at the animals that were made from this process.

How about the Korea stage?

Kawasaki:
The Korea stage is made a little differently from the others. Unlike stages before it, there’s a road that divides the screen left and right, so unlike a stage where if you go into the distance it starts to close off, it feels a lot wider. Also, the left and right sides of the road have different scenery, so as you fight the feel changes - we felt that would be pretty interesting. At first, we didn’t really know how to make a Korean feel, so that tripped us up a little bit. Also, as there are a lot of Korean stages in other games, we wanted to do something that wouldn’t be copying them.

Kamei:
The most famous motifs have already generally appeared in other games. And, something we haven’t really seen was a location that mixed the old with the current times. So in the Korea stage, there’s the temple on the right, and the modern buildings on the left.

Tsukamoto:
The right seems a lot like a festival. There’s shops and sales and what not. We looked at a lot of stuff in order to get the image of what we wanted to create. We also asked the Korean staff questions, so I think its a stage that represents Korea.

So now let’s talk about the Building (Construction) Stage

Kamei:
The gimmicks are interesting in the building stage. Its a stage we haven’t done before.

Kawasaki:
In some ways, the entire stage is a gimmick.

Image showing some of the stages that didn’t make it into SSF4.