Chances are good that if you enjoyed a Capcom game any time from 2009 onward, Yoshinori Ono was a part of its success. Ono was in the company for almost three decades. He began as an uncredited Music Producer for Saturday Night Slam Masters and stayed on the music side of things for quite some time. From there on he went into producer roles on games like Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams and Dead Rising.
It was during the production of Onimusha though that Ono pushed for unlockable costumes of characters from the Street Fighter series. This was in 2006, well into what is known as the “dark age of fighting games” where the genre wallowed in obscurity for an entire decade. The costumes proved so popular that Ono made a big push for a new entry in the series. From this came Street Fighter IV, the game that helped to revive the fighting game genre. Without that game, we wouldn’t have seen any of the other fighting game revivals we have had since.
From there, Ono ran Capcom’s rebooted fighting game division, which saw varying degrees of success over the years. Summer of last year, Ono announced he was leaving Capcom. Fast forward to today and we have learned that Ono will be taking on the role of president at Delightworks. The Japanese developer is most known for the insanely popular mobile game Fate/Grand Order.
Dear FGC, World Warriors.
On May 1st, I will be moving from Capcom to another company.
I'm going to be working at a studio that is a little different from the one I'm used to.
I'm also going to be looking at development from a different perspective than in the past. pic.twitter.com/Hch7kkGZA0— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) April 27, 2021
Where in the Fate timeline does Ono fit in?
Ono made the news on his Twitter today. He said that he will be stepping away from the fighting game community for a while as he focuses on his new, as of yet unknown, projects at Delightworks. Despite saying he is moving on from the FGC (fighting game community), this hasn’t stopped fans from hoping that maybe the developer is planning on a new fighting game in the Fate universe. The last such game was Fate/unlimited codes and that game is, uh, certainly unique. It is easy to see why fans would be hopeful for a new game after so long.
This is all wishful thinking of course, as we don’t know exactly what projects he will be working on in the future. We just hope that Jimmy, the Blanka toy Ono has carried around for years, has a place at Delightworks as well.
