If there was one player who was conspicuous by his absence from the last day of Street Fighter V at Evo 2017, it would have to be Cygames Beast’s Daigo Umehara. The fighting game legend has missed his second Evo top 8 in a row and has generally not been as dominant in Street Fighter V as he was in the previous game.
At Evo 2017, Mark “BornFree” Sheridan (with Zhi Liang Chew translating) got the chance to get together with Daigo for an interview. In the video below, Daigo talks about a number of topics, not just limited to Evo. They even go as far back as ELEAGUE, where Daigo talks about his match with Eita. The latter’s style of Ken play really got under Daigo’s skin in that match which resulted in him dropping his usual defensive style with Guile in favor of going head to head with Eita’s Ken. He admitted to enjoying getting emotional in that match and that the crowd enjoyed it as well. Additionally, the match reminded Daigo of an old-school, man-on-man battle of wills from the arcade days, and he promised to himself that he would remember that feeling moving forward.
Moving on to other events and other players, he talks about his match with Echo Fox’s Tokido at Red Bull Kumite. Specifically, he mentions how he didn’t want to exit the event in an unsatisfactory manner, this is why he turned up the offense against Tokido in that match.
Daigo also moves even further back to the past, talking about Alex Valle with whom he had a legendary rivalry back in the turn of the millenium. Daigo considers Valle to be the strongest Ryu player he had faced at the time, and it was thanks to Valle showing him what Ryu could do that he started playing the character that’s now so closely associated with him.
Of course, this isn’t all that they talk about. Daigo also talks about the future, including which characters he wants to come back in Street Fighter V – specifically mentioning Gen, Rolento (who he played in Street Fighter Alpha 3), Evil Ryu, and Sagat, the last one of which he wants for Bonchan. He also talks a bit about other games such as Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, Arika’s unnamed fighting game, and Dragon Ball: Fighter Z.
Source: BornFree