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.