Street Fighter V Confirmed to Be Bison's Final Game

Over the long history of fighting games, there are few villains that are as memorable as M. Bison, or Vega as he is known in Japan. Fondly called 'Dictator' to avoid any misunderstanding about his name, Bison has been around since Street Fighter II and has served as the major antagonist in most of the Street Fighter games. 

However, we can now say with some certainty that Street Fighter V was the dictator's last outing, and he is unlikely to show up in the series again.

This was revealed, interestingly, thanks to a Twitter user called Scotia, who did his best to translate the official "Street Fighter V Climax Arts + Zero to 6." This art book features concept art for Street Fighter V, 6, and Street Fighter Zero. Most importantly, it features developer comments on all the Street Fighter V characters. These comments come from Ryuichi Shigeno, who was part of the combat design team for Street Fighter V, and Takayuki Nakayama, who served as the director of the game. 

While they made comments on every single character, the ones made on Bison were the most telling. According to Nakayama, the character design was made with the mind of an aging Bison who was at his strongest and who was also at his end. 

Bison doesn't appear in Street Fighter III or any of the games affiliated with that. Also, he supposedly died at the end of Street Fighter V when the Shadaloo base was destroyed. 

Bison, who is known for surviving the impossible (just think of the first Street Fighter live-action movie and the Street Fighter animated movie), might indeed come back, and that is the feeling of most people who interacted with the tweet. But, it is indeed possible that we could be saying goodbye to the dictator as there have been Street Fighter games that didn't feature him that did well. It will be interesting to see if Capcom goes through with this plan, and if they do, it would be pretty nice from a story progression point but also kind of painful from a fighting game fan perspective.

Whatever the case, you should give Scotia's thread a read, as it is full of great insight into all Street Fighter V characters, including why Rashid is dressed in white.