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Tekken Producers Square Off Street Fighter. Street Fighter X Tekken (don't you dare call it "Street Fighter Vs. Tekken") made its playable debut at Capcom's Captivate press event last week. Katsuhiro Harada, producer of the Tekken series at Namco Bandai Games, is more than happy with the response so far. "Everyone's really excited about it," he told Japan's Famitsu magazine. "It's interesting how it's led to SF fans and Tekken fans interacting with each other as well not just in Japan, but worldwide. It made me glad we went through with it. People say that fighting games had their golden age in the 1990s, but really, there are far more tournaments being held now than there was even then. We'd like to bring that passion to new heights here."
Something that most net previews have agreed upon is that the Tekken characters feel sufficiently Tekken-like in this game, even though the action takes place on a 2D plane. "Our characters are always semi-photorealistic and done in the Japanese gekiga style," Harada said, "but with this game they've been given more of an American comic-like tough, from their moves to their expressions and outlines. That's something we definitely couldn't do. I've given them advice along the lines of 'People like this costume for this character,' but I'm not doing any pre-check on their work. All that is being left to Capcom, and I think it's for the better that I'm not interjecting anything midway. Letting them develop the way they want will help the game retain its Capcom-like feel."
"We've made the characters Capcom-like while retaining what made them good in Tekken," SF X Tekken producer Yoshinori Ono added. "I think gamers will be able to pick them right up without any break-in phase once they try the game out."
One question on a lot of gamers' minds is the changes made to the move list for SF X Tekken -- the new playable version showed off some new attacks for both SF's Ryu and Tekken's Nina. "Basically we've chosen moves for the Tekken characters that fans would appreciate, but they are getting new moves as well," Ono said. "We're always keeping in mind that things need to look 'Tekken-like' during this process. We want the move list to be just as all-star as the character list, so there will be moves for the SF characters that weren't in SFIV."
Will that also be the case for Harada's game? "If you tried using SF characters in the Tekken system, you'll find that there aren't nearly enough moves for each character, so I think we will beef up that repertory for everyone," he said. "It'll be a painstaking process, though. We need to portray the fact that Ryu's strong not just because of his Hadouken, but because he's this big, muscular guy who can fight you at close range. It wouldn't be Ryu without the Hadouken so that'll stay in, but every day I'm pondering over how to fit that into the game system."
One thornier issue in making this crossover is the fact that SF characters have tons of projectile attacks while Tekken's lineup has hardly any. "Generally speaking, we don't have any plans to add moves like that [to the Tekken characters]," Ono noted. "That could lead to characters with projectile attacks to have the advantage, though, so our plan is to have them cancellable in some way."
In Street Fighter IV, there were Focus Attacks that offered defense against projectiles a system that won't appear in SF X Tekken, according to Ono. "We took pains to make SFIV as accessible as possible, and that's something we want to further expand upon in this project," he said. "As a result, we want to keep the gameplay system from getting complex. The Focus Attack system was easy enough, only requiring you to press a couple of buttons at once, but we want to introduce something simpler and easy to use. As for what that is, I'd like to have people wait on that for a bit."
Street Fighter X Tekken is due out for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC next year.
