Street Fighter V wasn’t always the stylized fighter it’s known for today. The newly released arcade fighting game was originally conceived as a game with photorealistic graphics quite unlike any of the game’s previous iterations, which have always been highly stylized with anime-influenced art direction.
Speaking in an interview with Game Spark and translated by FGC community site EventHubs, the game’s producer Koichi Sugiyama said that at the beginning of the project, Street Fighter V was planned to offer lifelike visuals. This idea was soon scrapped as the developers didn’t really like it.
“In the very early stages of development, we actually put together a build of Street Fighter V that was rendered in photorealistic graphics,” he said. “But when we did, we realized that it just wouldn’t be Street Fighter without the bold, anime-esque look and feel to the game, so we decided to shelve the whole photorealism idea altogether.”