Like most people, my reaction to Tifa Lockhart’s inclusion in Street Fighter 6 was one of pure excitement. While I didn’t shout loud enough to be heard in space, I did cheer and throw my hands over my head in delight when she appeared after those other three Year 4 DLC fighters on the Summer Game Fest stage. Â
However, a few Street Fighter faithful were worried that future SF6 content would become a carousel of guest faces. While Tifa isn’t the first guest in SF6—SNK’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui featured in Year 2—she is the first ever Street Fighter character to originate both outside of Capcom and outside of fighting games.Â
At Summer Game Fest, SF6 director Takayuki Nakayama told me that incorporating Tifa, and by extension, three brand-new characters alongside her, allows the team to challenge themselves with “new things other titles within the series have never done,” with the goal of making Street Fighter appealing to players who have never experienced it before.Â
This doesn’t mean, however, that legacy characters will be left completely out in the cold. “While we do continue to respect the existing lineup and existing characters within the series, and we want to continue including those,” Nakayama said via a translator, “we felt like [Year 4] is a way to get people who may not necessarily feel comfortable playing a Street Fighter game, or even a fighting game, to really feel comfortable doing so.”Â
The idea goes hand-in-hand with their overall strategy of making sure Street Fighter 6 and, by proxy, Street Fighter overall, can last as long as possible. “Guest characters are something we can leverage and build upon to make sure the series is still alive 10-20 years down the line,” Nakayama said. “We feel like we need to do this in order to make sure that this is a series that keeps thriving and people continue playing.”
In Tifa’s case, while she hasn’t been in a traditional fighting game before (and before you correct me, Dissidia and Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring are far from “traditional” fighters), her battle style rooted in martial arts made her easy to translate. “There were plenty of reference materials to pull from when selecting moves that would fit,” Nakayama said, “and Square Enix has developed other games like Ehrgeiz that we could pull from as well.” (OK, maybe Ehrgeiz does count after all.)
Nakayama did clarify, though, that while the team used every reference made available to them by Square Enix, Tifa’s portrayal in SF6 “is mainly the Tifa that appears in the Final Fantasy VII Remake series.”
Nakayama mentioned that Tifa’s inclusion in Street Fighter 6 has been roughly three years in the making, with discussions beginning around Tokyo Game Show 2023 just after the game had launched. While the team didn’t have Tifa in their sights when discussions with Square Enix began, it quickly became clear she was the best option. “It was pretty organic how we landed on Tifa,” Nakayama said. “It just makes sense because she is a character that uses martial arts in her skill set, so it was kind of like the perfect fit for our game.”
I did also ask about the implementation of Materia mentioned by FF7R producer Naoki Hamaguchi on the SGF Live stage, and used Shulk’s ability to augment his style mid-fight in Super Smash Bros. as a possible comparison point. While I didn’t get any solid answer, with Nakayama saying “Tifa is not going to come out for a little while now, so I can’t divulge too much right now,” he did volunteer that she’ll “probably be different from what you’re imagining.”
Based on the response to this latest trailer, the team thinks they’re heading in the right direction; they spent the bus ride back to the hotel from the Dolby Theater watching reaction videos they could find on social media. As Nakayama told me, “it’s hard to pick a favorite, but we can confidently say we saw every single one of them.”
