Ultra Street Fighter IV’s Decapre Is Meant To Appeal To Newcomers

Ultra Street Fighter IV will bring a new character to the Street Fighter IV series—Decapre, a clone of Cammy created by M. Bison. While most of Decapre’s normal attacks function largely similarly to Cammy’s—with her “High” attacks resembling Vega’s—the consensus from professional players is that she plays very differently from Cammy, once you begin to dig into the rest of her move set.

Visually, however, Decapre does share a lot in common with Cammy, both in terms of her character model and some of her animations. Siliconera got in touch with Ultra Street Fighter IV assistant producer Tomoaki Ayano to ask just why Capcom picked Decapre specifically, given that she’s so visually similar to Cammy and that the fan reaction to her has been 50-50.

“The Street Fighter IV series already boasts a huge line up of popular characters from the franchise, but one thing it seemed to be missing was a presence from the Dolls, which is a group that includes popular characters like Juli and Juni,” Ayano replied. “Some of the Dolls—Enero, Santamu, and even Decapre herself—make a brief appearance in the animated short we made for Super Street Fighter IV.”

“We wanted to draw them deeper into the story, so we looked into bringing a Doll into the fold as a playable character,” Ayano continued. “We settled on Decapre because she plays an important role in the stories of Cammy and of Shadaloo itself. When users finish Arcade mode as Decapre, they’ll be treated to a substantial bit of story told in high-quality animation that delves into angles of the story that we hadn’t touched on in the SFIV series until now.”

My next question was why the development team decided to make Decapre a “charge character,” when they could have opted to make her easier to pick up for newer players instead. Loosely speaking, charge characters are characters that involve holding the stick in one direction, then quickly moving it in the opposite direction while attacking. Examples of this would be Chun Li and Blanka. Not the easiest characters to learn, in my opinion.

Ayano, however, feels differently.

“Actually, we wanted to introduce a character that would interest newcomers, which is why we went with charge moves,” Ayano shared.

“In fact, charge characters were originally conceived as a way to bring a second style of play to users who were after a simpler control scheme. This hasn’t changed since the era of Blanka, Chun-Li, and Guile as they appeared in Street Fighter II.”

He added, “Keep in mind that [Decapre’s] move set goes deeper than just charge techniques as well. She has a move called the Rapid Dagger that is executed by repeated button presses, for instance. She’s actually rather easy to control and I think she’ll prove to be enjoyable for users of all skill levels.”