Morrigan Aensland is one of Capcom’s most iconic and popular figures despite hailing from Darkstalkers, a franchise that’s been conspicuously lifeless for more than a quarter century. Capcom and other developers have seized the opportunity to feature the sensual succubus across tons of titles including multiple appearances in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, the Teppen card game, Pocket Fighter, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Namco x Capcom, and a number of additional pieces of media.
Perhaps the most obvious crossover, a guest appearance in a main Street Fighter entry, still remains an unchecked line on Morrigan’s otherwise fleshed out resume. Given the landscape Capcom is currently in, however, it seems as though the stars are more aligned than ever for Morrigan to finally throw down with the World Warriors on their home turf.
Until recently there was a historical precedent that fully explained why Morrigan, Lilith, Lord Raptor, Felicia, or any of the Darkstalkers have never been in a Street Fighter game: no one had. Capcom made early exceptions (starting in Alpha) to include Final Fight characters in Street Fighter, but that was where the buck clearly stopped.
It wasn’t until 2020 that Capcom invited a character from a property outside of Final Fight to become playable in a main Street Fighter game, namely when they revealed Rival Schools’ Akira for Street Fighter 5.
The mold has been further broken here in 2024, however, as SNK’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui were announced as the first ever non-Capcom characters to be added into a Street Fighter game when they were both revealed as incoming Street Fighter 6 DLC. Though they haven’t gone as far perhaps as NetherRealm Studios’ moves to bring non-fighting game characters from popular culture into Mortal Kombat, the way for a character like Morrigan to join Street Fighter 6 is wide open.
Capcom has been including prominent Darkstalkers references in Street Fighter for a few years now as well. An entire alternate DS costume campaign rolled out back in 2018, and just this month developers added six special Darkstalkers-inspired color schemes into Street Fighter 6. As is the case with seemingly every such Darkstalkers endeavor, Morrigan plays a prominent role in both examples.
The Darkstalkers alt costumes available in Street Fighter 5
With all this on the table, it almost feels odd that we haven’t seen a Darkstalkers character (and it would almost have to be Morrigan, perhaps with one more guest by her side) in Street Fighter yet. As it turns out, we actually did get a form of this back in Street Fighter 5.
We recently unearthed some statements made by Takayuki Nakayama that heavily suggest F.A.N.G, a character first introduced in Street Fighter 5, started as an unused design for a modern Darkstalkers game that never wound up seeing daylight.
Capcom hasn’t been able to get a Darkstalkers game off the ground despite clear intentions to do so, and the multiple gestures they’ve made (in vain) to get one going arguably now serve, more than anything, to reinforce the notion that the franchise truly is dead.
Perhaps a successful campaign through Street Fighter is what the (un)dead franchise needs to gain enough momentum and public fanfare to actually bring a new entry to fruition.
Director Takayuki Nakayama recently explained that he and his team base their choices for new DLC characters more on general popularity than whether or not their move set is likely to gel well with the game’s established mechanics.
Part of us is intimidated to think about how mirrored Morrigans might manipulate Drive Rush, but if you’re ranking characters on popularity and their potential to bring in big bucks based on fandom and rapid recognition, Morrigan has to be close to the peak of picks.
We have no idea as to whether Capcom’s SNK Street Fighter guests mark an update to DLC character patterns, or if this is simply a one-time occurrence of clever cross marketing with the upcoming Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, but after the Season 2 character reveal it would not at all be surprising to see a Season 3 DLC lineup featuring the likes of Morrigan and maybe one other DS representative come alongside two Street Fighter legacy characters.
Plans for Season 3 may already be firmly in place, or perhaps only partially so. It could be that Capcom is waiting to see how Terry and Mai ultimately perform before they pull the trigger on additional guests, in fact, one might argue that a certain level of success in this avenue would all but guarantee more of the same. If that’s true, Morrigan has to be close to the top of the list of those next in line.
Editor’s note: The image of Morrigan in the banner is a Street Fighter 6 mod created by Mighty Noob.