Street Fighter IV Volt [$6.99] launched back in June and although it played strikingly similar to Capcom's original Street Fighter IV [$4.99] on iOS, it did contain a few significant upgrades. Namely, it featured every character from the original as well as 3 new fighters and competitive online play via Game Center. We really loved the first Street Fighter IV so it wasn't surprising that we enjoyed the enhanced Street Fighter IV Volt even more in our review.

Capcom fed a pretty steady stream of new characters and features to the original Street Fighter IV, and their new iteration is gearing up to start off on that same foot. According to Andriasang and 4Gamer.net, the first set of new characters for Street Fighter IV Volt will be a pair of female fighters, Sakura and Makoto. Sakura is a long time favorite from back in the Alpha series, and Makoto first appeared in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and made a triumphant return in last year's Super Street Fighter IV on consoles.

There are plenty more screens of both Sakura and Makoto over at Andriasang.com, and as for what may be coming in future updates some enterprising members in our forums may have a lead on that as well. After digging around through some of the game files in Street Fighter IV Volt, they have come across a character list that includes every character already in the game plus Sakura and Makoto, and has spots for Evil Ryu and Fei Long too. This doesn't necessarily confirm those characters are coming, but it sure is a strong possibility.

There is also another character in Street Fighter IV Volt that was conspicuously absent from the original game, the long time fan favorite Akuma. You fight Akuma as a second boss character after M. Bison in arcade mode, assuming you don't lose a single round along the way. You can unlock Akuma as a playable character by playing and beating him with every character in Arcade mode or by playing 100 matches online, both potentially time consuming endeavors.

If you want to bypass all that, then there is a very easy way to unlock Akuma if you already have the original Street Fighter IV installed on your device. Simply fire up Arcade mode in Street Fighter IV Volt and at the character select screen tap on the characters in the following order: starting at Ryu, select Abel, Guile, Cammy, then end back on Ryu. Pause for about a second at each character, and when you return back to Ryu tap on him again to reveal Akuma, who will stay unlocked permanently at the character select screen from now on.

Unfortunately, my dodgy Google translating of the articles didn't divulge a release date for the Sakura and Makoto update, but we'll keep our eye out for it and let you know when it hits.

[Via 4Gamer.net and Andriasang]

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