Capcom surprised everyone with the announcement that Street Fighter II Turbo would be remastered and re-released for the Nintendo Switch as Ultra Street Fighter II: The The Final Challengers. Thankfully, Street Fighter Series Producer Yoshinori Ono sat down with IGN last week to discuss how the Switch remake of the fighting classic came to be, as well as the difficulties in updating it for a modern audience.
Produced to honor the franchise’s 30th anniversary, Ultra Street Fighter II will include the arcade game’s original sprites, as well as the high definition character art created by Udon for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Besides tweaking the graphics for younger players, Ono was most concerned about rebalancing the characters while still retaining that spark that made the original game so memorable in 1991:
“The balance for the original Street Fighter II Turbo in the ’90s was OK for that time, but whether it matches the times now is a bit questionable,” Ono explained. “We didn’t want to do a complete overhaul, because then the situation would be, ‘Well, why don’t you just play Street Fighter 5?’ We wanted to keep some sense of what it was like playing in the 90s, but also retune it to match the era now.”
“We’re still in the middle of making the final touches, in terms of the tuning, but we hope we can find something that lands in between. Something that’s nostalgic, but also new at the same time. There are hands-on events here and also in Tokyo, and we see a lot of parents and children coming to play together. We observe and see how they’re actually reacting to it.”
The developer also confirmed that Capcom wants to release Ultra Street Fighter II “in close proximity” to the Switch’s March 3rd launch date. However, an official date is still very much up in the air and, regardless of what Ono wants, we don’t know exactly when Ultra Street Fighter II will be released.
Finally, Ono said that Ultra Street Fighter II is only in development for the Switch, but that “if [it] sells extremely well” he’d consider bringing it to other platforms.
