FreestarWill Capcom's apparent fear of Rekka characters continue with Akira in Street Fighter 5.

Capcom's shown us time and again over these past five years that they do not want true Rekka characters running amok in Street Fighter 5, but there's at least one more option on the horizon who could change that up a bit.

Akira Kazama is slated to graduate from Rival Schools and join SF5's roster later this summer, and her short gameplay teaser contains a handful of clues as to how the developers are handling her transition to the big leagues.

One important note as we start here is that we need to point out that Akira isn't as much of a Rekka character in Rival Schools and Project Justice as she appears in her SF5 teaser, but we'll get more into that in a bit. Many of her combos shown appear to showcase multiple moves being chained together, so that leads to the question of just how much of that is locked behind her V-Trigger.

The same applies to her overhead kicks on screen right after.

Like Karin before her, most of the longer strings only appear to be active while using one of her V-Triggers, but I wouldn't really call them Rekkas in her original game.

Quarter-circle back and punch in Rival Schools makes Akira go into the Reflex Stance (otherwise known as Fractured Heaven Stance) which allows her to perform a number of different chain combos with different effects depending on the normals used after entering that state.

Reflex Stance itself appears to be on of Akira's V-Triggers considering she's seen striking the pose at the activation and before performing one of the combos, so the question there becomes do they still require specific normal inputs or are they simply motions / directions with the VT buttons. Before getting all bummed out about Reflex Stance, however, there is one option that appears to be an actual traditional Rekka that may work outside of VT.

Akira's Dancing Cyclone Kick special is shown to hit both the light and medium versions back to back, which she was able to do as a Rekka. This doesn't look to be a case like Karin's kicks either that'll change the amount of hits depending on the button pressed either because the next shot shows what looks like her heavy version that launches like an uppercut.

It's not exactly the flashiest Rekka around, but that's more than every other character can say they can do.

Karin's follow-ups were all locked behind her VT1 while Ibuki and Poison had there's removed completely. For now, it seems like Akira may actually have at least one Rekka option always at her disposal, but we'll likely need to wait until the Summer Update showcase to see exactly how she'll work in SF5.

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