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Street Fighter X Tekken
We’ve seen cinematic trailers from Street Fighter’s Tekken crossover,
but until Captivate we hadn’t had a chance to see the game in action.
After getting our hands on it, it’s clear that it’s a solid
interpretation of both games that doesn’t necessarily play favorites
with the Street Fighter side of things.
“The thing we
really want to do with this game is to put as many entrances, doorways,
gateways into this game as possible to let people play it,” says
producer Yoshinori Ono. “If you’ve played a lot of Street Fighter games
or Capcom games, you’re probably accustomed to this kind of gameplay,
this kind of control. But there are plenty of Tekken fans out there who
pretty much exclusively play Tekken who might be put off by the Street
Fighter style controls. The basic controls for the Tekken characters are
the same as Street Fighter—you have an eight-way joystick and six
buttons. Traditionally, Tekken has always been a four-button fighting
game; we’re accustomed to playing it with four buttons.
“The good
news is that players who are accustomed to Tekken can continue to use
those four-button combos in the same fashion by using the four buttons
to the left on the Street Fighter controller.”
The game plays as a
two-on-two tag battle, with selections from the Street Fighter and
Tekken universes. How has Ono decided which characters to draw from?
“The main thing for me is picking characters that did not exist in the Street Fighter universe,” he says. “They can do moves and combos that would never be possible in a traditional Street Fighter game. That was my base level for what I made my decisions on. Obviously, I wanted to fit in many popular characters as possible as well. We’ll have the bread and butter of Tekken, and there are probably a lot of others that you’re wondering, ‘Is he going to be in the game, because he’s pretty famous?’ The answer to that is ‘Probably.’”
The current roster includes Kazuya, Nina, Ken, Ryu, Guile, Abel, Marduk, King, Chun Li, and Bob.
The game melds elements from both of its sources. Ono says that each
offers a distinct experience, and that merging them has been an
interesting challenge. “If you look at a traditional Street Fighter
game, They’ve always been about gauging distance, judging distance and
waiting for your opponent to leave himself open so you can
counterattack. You’ll see really good players just jumping back and
forth before anybody throws a punch, whereas Tekken has always been more
aggressive, much more about throwing visceral combos right out of the
gate. So when we started making this game the first thing we thought was
what it would be like if we could actually combine these two styles. If
you had to wait for your opening, Street Fighter style, but once you
had that opening you could unload a more aggressive combo like Tekken.
So it’s going to feel unlike a traditional Street Fighter game, and it’s
also going to feel unlike a traditional Tekken game, while also
retaining enough of the recognizable features of each so that it’ll
definitely feel different.”
That difference is evident, for
example, with how Ryu’s fireball can be charged and held, firing only
when players release the punch button. That creates some interesting
fakeout opportunities, adding a nice little spin on Street Fighter’s
psychological game.
Ono says that Namco hasn’t meddled with the
game, and that they couldn’t if they wanted to. “The line of division
between the two games is drawn so clearly that if we wanted to be really
crazy and give Kazuya some kind of special move where he takes a crap
into his own hand and throws it at his opponent or they could replace a
hadouken with some kind of green fart projectile, we would be allowed to
do that,” he says. “It would probably create all sorts of other issues,
but contractually we’d be safe.”
Ok then.