Let’s face it, if you played Daigo Umehara in Super Street Fighter IV you would lose. In fact, that is pretty much a universal statement. Outside of Daigo’s major competition, like Justin Wong, is there anyone that stands a chance against The Beast? How about Yoshinori Ono, father of Street Fighter himself? Yeah, no, not likely. In fact Ono at one point played a match against Daigo, a friendly match, just to see how Daigo would stack up against the very creator of the game he knows how to play so well. The result? Well yeah, Daigo creamed him. This is what Ono had to say about the whole ordeal.

We once played a so-called ‘friendly match’. He’s such a serious guy. He always studies the game to improve himself, but he has no sense of fun. I tried to inject some into him, saying, ‘You’re playing with the producer of Street Fighter IV, it’s a nice chance! OK, you shouldn’t let me win but at least let’s try to have fun together and show the spectacular things the game can offer…’ He replied ‘ah’ and continued to butcher me without batting an eye. He KO’ed me in few seconds…

Well OK, it’s Ono’s job to make the game not play it, so this isn’t all that surprising. However, Ono seems like a pretty fun guy. Does this just blow the whole world of “serious” pros open? Are we supposed to be “having fun” before we try to win? In fact, this all seems like a story we have heard several times before. Game designers develop a game with “fun” in mind and the game world starts screaming about balance and play tactics. Is there anywhere in the middle that the two worlds meet, or are we going to be having the “fun vs. skill” argument until the end of time?

It looks like that is the case actually. In a recent interview, Toshimichi Mori, designer of BlazBlue addressed some of the balance qualms fans have been having by saying his goal was to create a “fun game” not a “balanced game”. In the upcoming balance patch that will soon drop for the game, Mori is hoping to tweak characters so that they are the most fun to play, not so that they are the most balanced. Is this a good thing?

Well the question is, where is the middle ground between balance and fun? When does lack of game balance start making a game not fun to play? Where does “taking a game too seriously” start doing the same? Well, it’s not balance that sells video games, it’s fun, and many people are looking for balance in order to find fun. Perhaps we won’t find the “fun” in Daigo Umehara level seriousness, and perhaps we won’t find the “fun” in totally unbalanced games that can be easily broken. Perhaps Yoshinori Ono has the right idea: fun with just the right amount of craziness. You should be a philosopher Ono.

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