Tekken X Street Fighter: story of an impossible encounter

According to the head of the saga of Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada, the long-awaited crossover game Tekken X Street Fighter is to be considered permanently canceled, with a stage of development stopped at 30% at the time of completion of the works.

The game, technically followed by Street Fighter x Tekken, was first announced 11 years ago and had to be launched on Xbox 360 e PlayStation 3. After a decade of almost total silence, also thanks to the translation of a declaration by Harada, a conclusion has been reached for this affair (unfortunately quite sad, especially for fighting game fans).

"We were working very hard on it, really", Harada reported during a meeting with Tekken 7 director Kouhei Ikeda. "I wish I could show you the models and everything."

As it turns out, both Chun-Li and Dhalsim looked great in their 3D model form in Tekken X Street Fighter, outperforming quite well la transizione dal 2D al 3D. Harada also boasts that most of the female characters "were excellently crafted."

Will we ever get to see the game?

It doesn't seem likely: "We wish we could show you our results, but Street Fighter belongs to Capcom", the developers said.

A risky bet

The signs of a less than idyllic development were already in the air for at least a decade.

Already in the 2012, Harada told The Independent that game progress was "not quite 10%, but close to". Not much more optimistic comments came in 2016 and 2019, when the director noted how the success of Tekken 7 didn't seem to give too much room for maneuver to the crossover project.

Surely the last nail on the coffin was represented by the Commercial flop of Street Fighter X Tekken, received in a lukewarm manner by both the public and critics.

So the reason is all here?

And above all, it was an idea that was enough to throw away a potential billionaire blockbuster that would have allowed the two Japanese companies to to found a new line of own publications?

Maybe not: digging through various surveys on the net (like this one) it is possible to realize that in reality the idea of ​​"contaminating" the philosophy of Street Fighter (where "philosophy" also and above all means the approach to gameplay) with that of a 3D game like Tekken did not please Capcom creatives, worried that the spirit of Street Fighter would slowly be lost and dirty when placed within a completely different frame.

For the record, actually Street Fighter had a moment of exit from "phase 2d" with the release of Street Fighter EX Plus (December 1996), also rewarded by two sequels, but probably in that case the producer thought he was still playing at home and following his rules. Capcom then redeemed herself by giving birth Street Fighter III: Third Strike, considered by many to be the best two-dimensional fighting game in history and no longer even touching a game with three-dimensional characteristics.

Such a story undoubtedly helps to shed light on the relations between two Japanese majors who have founded and structured a real genre. Even more, underlines how 2D and 3D gameplay have been and in a certain sense still are real hallmarks of a way of building the final product that the players would play.

In addition, we think according to a more "technical" element.

Do you realize what it means to transport a series of characters in three dimensions with a moveset designed to be two-dimensional? Here, as the colleague rightly notes Graziano (sensei much more experienced than me in the art of fighting), translate a roster of fighters designed for 3d, with a range of moves, movements, freedom of movement on the screen in the 2d cage it must be a nightmare.

Dead lens: games abandoned after years of development

The official death of Tekken x Street Fighter comes after nearly a decade round and represents an example of how painful and intricate these production processes can be.

Even without disturbing decades of production processes, the last few years have seen the decline of several games that are theoretically very promising years later. One example is Doom 4, the fourth episode of the Doom classic series, announced in December 2008 and slowly merged into the project of a reboot that would become the Doom del 2016. Special mention for a black legend like Scalebound, a project conceptualized by Platinum Games back in 2006, officially developed from 2013 to 2017 and then declared dead.

But basically, we're talking about an industry in which only a small part of the announced projects see the light and often dealing with the caudine forks of content cut or ruthless reviews.

One thing is certain: that of a failed and complete 2d crossover between Street Fighter and Tekken it really seems like a missed opportunity.