Yoshinori Ono on Final Fight's Poison: She's supposed to be mysterious

Attention Poison fans: EGM just (well, yesterday) posted an extremely interesting interview between its own Eric Patterson--you may remember him as Shidoshi from the old Diehard GameFan magazine--and Capcom's Yoshinori Ono.

"Poison" by Speeh

Rather than pick Ono's brain about his upcoming 360, PS3 and Vita brawler, Street Fighter X Tekken, Patterson picks the producer's brain about one of that title's key cast members: Poison, the lovable female thug who first appeared in Final Fight.

The highlight of this fascinating tête-à-tête, in my opinion: Ono seemingly backtracks on his earlier assertion that the fuchsia-coifed character is trans- gender. (In late 2007 he told EGM that "in North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual. But in Japan, she simply tucks her business away to look female.")

While chatting with Patterson, however, Ono said, "Capcom’s official stance has and will continue to be that we don’t have a stance technically. It’s supposed to be mysterious; if people want to talk about it on forums or what not they’re welcome to, but we’re not going to give you a straight answer because, well, there isn’t one. We deliberately want to make it a mysterious thing—that question of what’s at the core of this character. At the end of the day, we don’t have an actual canonical answer to that."

That's not the only eyebrow-raising comment included in this Poison-focused Q&A. Read the rest of them by checking out the full interview here. You may also want to check out this NeoGAF thread, which was started by Patterson and features a number of interesting insights.