Tokido’s first Akuma gameplay impressions after trying next Street Fighter 6 DLC early, unsure if the demon is a total powerhouse

Instead, he may fall more on the technical side in his new incarnation

There’s some players in the fighting game community who become intrinsically linked to a particular character they find success with, and in cases with a big return like this, people want to know how they feel about it.

Rohto|Tokido has now released a new video detailing his first gameplay impressions after trying out Akuma at the early preview event for Street Fighter 6 going on in Japan, and he has quite a bit to say about his favorite demon.

One of the first things he did was perform a walk speed test where he found Akuma was faster than Chun-Li, which likely puts him in the top category for movement in that regard.

As was previously suspected, doing throw experiments also showed that his total vitality will be around 9,000.

He walked away unsure of Akuma’s power with his new moves / abilities since the top competitor hasn’t learned how they can be fully incorporated into his combos and style.

Tokido feels Akuma’s crouch medium kick is pretty strong with roughly the same reach as Ken’s and maybe around a 7-frame startup like him too.

His heavy punch also similar to Ken’s and a good cancel button while forward heavy punch leads to a damaging target combo with some corner carry.

He notes Light Gohadouken has slow startup but short recovery while heavy is fast but more punishable and thinks they reach all the way across the screen unlike Street Fighter 5.

His red fireball has multiple charge levels and thinks Akuma was able to get plus frames on block with two-hit charged projectile.

Tokido thinks his new Shakunetsu Messhou special will be good near the corner with the potential for big damage and follow-up attacks perhaps similar to Ryu’s donkey kick. He says he looks forward to messing around with it more.

Super Art 2 has a short reach according to him, so it might miss when trying to use for punishes.

He’s not sure if Akuma can combo anti-air Shoryuken into Super Art 3, but notes that it looks to do a lot of damage.

As was noted by other at the trial, opponents can’t jump out of the Raging Demon startup if they’re already in range, and Tokido feels the raw damage is still very high at least 4,000 or so.

One potentially scary thing Tokido says is he was able to easily go from raw Drive Rush into Shun Gokusatsu, so that’s going to be something to watch out for.

At the end, Tokido walked away feeling Akuma might be a technical character that can’t be controlled easily and is focused more around high speed instead of raw power in SF6, but can’t know for sure without learning more about his new combo structure and how his kit all comes together.

It seems the damage could still very much be there though Capcom is putting more of an emphasis on being quick on his feet with even more options to go into than before.

He points out that this was on a demo setup pre-release, so some of this information may not be exact to how Akuma is when he launches later this month.

Tokido was also recently interviewed by Justin Wong where he had some interesting things to say about the whole new vs. old fighting game discussion that’s been going on.

You can check out Tokido’s full video below, which does include English subtitles. Those aren’t always the most accurate, however, so we’ve translated and put together the most interesting observations in the story here.