After Tekken 7 opened the door starting with Street Fighter’s Akuma and Fatal Fury’s Geese Howard, it was only a matter of time before guest characters started appearing in Tekken 8 though nobody probably had who they actually picked first on their bingo card.
Clive Rosfield from Final Fantasy 16 just dropped as the last Season 1 DLC character for Tekken 8 this week, and maybe someday he’ll have more company from his home of Square Enix.
To coincide with the new update and fighter release, Tekken 8’s lead developers including Director Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda, Producer Michael Murray and longtime Tekken Project Director Katsuhiro Harada sat down with IGN to talk about Clive’s arrival and how the collaboration came about.
Even before the announcement came, Square and Final Fantasy were near the top of many fans’ lists for who could show up in the fighting game considering Bandai Namco previously worked with them to bring Noctis Lucis Caelum to Tekken 7 from Final Fantasy 15.
And though Clive was the newest protagonist for the franchise like Noctis was at the time, much of the attention and anticipation was aimed at a different icon.
Final Fantasy 7’s Tifa Lockhart seemed like a shoe-in pick for Tekken because of her martial arts based fighting style, popularity, release of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth this year and amount of requests the teams received about her.
But obviously that didn’t happen, as it was Clive who made the surprise appearance at The Game Awards 2024 and not her.
This unsurprisingly led to a lot of mixed emotions from basically all corners for both fandoms.
Clive is the one who was chosen and is now here though he may not stay totally alone forever.
IGN asked the Tekken devs if there was any considerations of other Final Fantasy characters besides the FF16 rep like Cloud Strife, but Tifa is not mentioned specifically.
Harada does not fully answer that question, but he does give a response that does leave the door open for hope (and maybe some cope).
“It’s not like we’re limited to one character from Final Fantasy,” replied Harada as translated by Murray.
“It’s not like we’re limited to one character from Final Fantasy”
“It might be cool if we had two. Who knows? It’s not something we can decade alone.”
So at the very least the developers don’t sound opposed to having multiple guests from a single franchise in Tekken 8. We just only know about the one so far though.
Square Enix being on board for giving out multiple Final Fantasy characters to a single title does already have some precedent too with Cloud and Sephiroth both appearing in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Sure, they both technically debuted across two different entries, but Square did still provide Smash Ultimate with 2 DLC characters with Dragon Quest’s Hero also in the mix.
And those Smash games were also co-developed by Bandai Namco and some of the same people working on Tekken 8 now, so those bridges have already been long-since built.
As for why they went with Clive over someone else in the first place, it sounds as though things quickly progressed in large part due to the Tekken team starting their talks with Final Fantasy 14 and 16 Producer Naoki Yoshida as their Square contact.
“We had heard that YoshiP from Final Fantasy 14 was going to be making 16, and we thought it’d be great if we could talk to him and gauge his temperature on [collaboration] subject,” said Murray.
“So then Harada began talks with YoshiP as the main contact, but then they were thinking we should really be playing the game and get all the intricate details before creating our side of it. Harada and Nakatsu actually met with the dev team early in-development build of the game to get a handle on it.”
Perhaps then if the Tekken team instead started their contact with the likes of Yoshinori Kitase or Tetsuya Nomura at Square, things could have taken a route towards FF7 and not FF16 though there’s no way to know for certain of course.
And nothing is going to stop people from asking for Tifa.
Final Fantasy 16’s Creative Director has also been requesting that Clive be made a more permanent addition to the Tekken roster moving forward.
As for what the future holds for Tekken 8 now that Season 1 content is wrapped up, it looks like Anna Williams is being teased as the first new addition of Season 2 next year.
But beyond that and some of Bamco’s early update plans, things are fairly up in the air though the game is very likely going to be supported for multiple years to come just like Tekken 7 was.
And that probably means at least a few more guest fighters will come spread across Tekken 8’s lifespan.