Dhalman, as the game is called, is inspired by Yamashita's travels around the world and focuses on a young boy who must gather rare spices and earn money through street fights, to improve his family's curry shop. It is being pitched as a mixture of a Metroidvania and a restaurant simulator and will feature music from the former Mega Man Battle Network composer Akari Kaida. But before you go getting too excited, it's worth mentioning a few red flags that we've come across.
For one, the game is being worked on in collaboration with Minnapad, who previously partnered with the former Mega Man series producer Keiji Inafune and the ex-Tekken director Seiichi Ishii on a couple of as-yet-unreleased NFT games.
In addition to this, another red flag that we've come across is the character designs that have been shared so far, which seem to draw a bit too heavily for our liking from Street Fighter.
The character Nico, for instance, is a feral red-haired character from the Amazon that is reminiscent of Street Fighter's Blanka, Emilio is clothed like M. Bison, Mei-Ling looks to be a take on Chun-Li, there's another character that resembles Dhalsim, and Master Jiro is a blonde-haired martial artist like Ken. It's very deliberate and just makes the game seem like a knock-off, even despite Yamashita's clear enthusiasm for Indian food, music, and culture.
Perhaps the most misleading thing about the whole campaign, however, is the title of one of the videos being used to promote the campaign, which clumsily introduces Yamashita as "Street Fighter II creator". This could just be a simple translation error but seems to overexaggerate his involvement in the game (where he in reality designed the title logo and contributed pixel art for Ryu and Ken).
You can check out the Kickstarter here, if you want to find out more.
