It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Sagat is one of the community’s more popular Street Fighter characters, leaving his absence in Street Fighter V all the more perplexing. Executive producer Yoshinori Ono recently addressed this topic during an interview with Famitsu.
“There are many characters that perform similarly [to Sagat]. For this launch and its next update, we wanted to have a good balance of characters,” Ono explains, according to Siliconera translations. “Since we didn’t want to just blindly increase the number of characters, it was a bitter decision that had to be made.”
Of course, there’s still hope. While plans for the second round of post-release characters have yet to be finalized, Ono specifically mentions Sagat and Blanka as fan favorites folks may want to look forward to.
For more on Capcom’s decision to unveil Street Fighter V’s entire 2016 lineup, check out the rest of Siliconera’s report here.
Source: Famitsu via Siliconera, Hachima, tip via Kurushii