This one was intimidating.
There are a lot of Akuma videos on the internet, and many of them basically touch on the same subjects. The trick with this episode, and essentially how I want to do things, is to make sure that everything I record is verifiable and cited. We're lucky that we live in times when most of this info is starting to come out and can easily be obtained, but still, the Street Fighter series has a real problem with facts vs. "internet wisdom." So that was the first real challenge with this episode.
The other, of course, is length. I've touch on this before, but legacy characters like Akuma have a lot of baggage, so wrestling with how long these episodes should be is going to be hard. At just under 26 minutes, this is just about too long, and things are only going to be worse for characters like Ryu and Ken that have been around from the beginning and have a ton of things to talk about.
Here's the thing with YouTube videos: the creator suites that are available on the site give you tons of metrics- how many views you get, sure, but also how long people watch videos. This is important because you can tell with some range of accuracy when folks dip out of the stuff they're watching. A video close to a half hour long is far outside of this, at least for me, since the majority of people watching only tune in for about the first half of each episode. Honestly, that's fine for me. It seems people want more of the design and trivia info than gameplay (which, I guess, would only interest me, too), but I think the latter half is still essential viewing to get the scope of a character. But, again, that means you're sitting in front of a loooong video. One solution is to break them in half, but I don't feel as though you the viewer are watching a sort of "complete set" that way. Things even out, though. For every giant Akuma video, there's a 13 minute Necro episode. Some of the other characters (Q and Remy, I'm looking at you) are going to wind up on the shorter side, and this should balance the time for everything else. Whatever. Sorry for the long episode.
Some inside baseball: I recorded this and initially put it up for Patreon backers last week, but forgot the "time over" and "jab kill" animations, so I plugged them in this morning and uploaded it again to YouTube. Also, as I was getting footage for the next couple of characters, it turns out that Akuma is not the only character with silent rival dialog. Instead of re-recording the voice for that section, I tried to carefully delete some of it, which is why it might sound a little awkward when I get to the part about fighting Ryu in 2nd Impact.
Next up is a Bonus Episode about Bonus Stages. The plan for the series is to go through each character in order of column, and the end of each column is a good place to plug in extras. I've got the script mostly ready to go, and should record the voice for it tonight. I know I say this every time, but hopefully this means a faster turnaround time. Man, I need to get on a schedule...
Thanks again for watching!
