Sagat Isn’t In Street Fighter V Because “There Are Too Many Similar Characters”

During an interview with Famitsu, Yoshinori Ono answered a few questions on the upcoming title, Street Fighter V, including why we haven’t seen or heard of Sagat yet. [Thanks, Hachima.]

Why Sagat Won’t Be Appearing:

“It’s because there are many characters that perform similarly. For this launch and its next update, we wanted to have a good balance of characters. Since we didn’t want to just blindly increase the number of characters, it was a bitter decision that had to be made.”

“I understand that there are also many who wish to see other characters besides Sagat, such as Blanka and more. There’s a possibility that we may add more characters in some form later, so please look forward to that.”

What Was The Plan Behind Announcing 6 Additional Characters At Once?:

“After thinking about post-launch services and looking at it from an e-sports point of view, I don’t think that it would be fair [for players] to not know which characters will be added, not know which characters to practice, which makes it difficult to properly choose counter-picks. So, we decided to do it that way.

“For the time being, we have no plans on releasing any other characters in 2016 outside of the six [DLC] characters that we announced.”

Street Fighter V will release in February 16 for PlayStation 4 and PC.