All of these crossovers could have interesting implications on the stories in Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury going forward
While crossover games and guest characters have been a thing in fighting games for a long time, these instances often take place in a “What If” scenario that didn’t actually happen according to a fighting game’s canon, but that has started to change in recent times.
Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury have all brought in characters from other storied fighting game franchises — and made some of these recent appearances part of the official story canon.
Given how lackluster a number of fighting game stories are, you’d assume these appearances would be as cookie cutter and bare bones as possible, having little to no impact on the overall plot.
However, in recent times the developers of Tekken and Street Fighter have done a solid job — in respect to the fighting game genre — of honoring and replicating these characters’ stories and attributes in the other games they appear in.
For example, in Tekken 7 it’s explained that Kazumi saves Akuma’s life at some point, and in return for doing so, she asks him to hunt down and kill both Heihachi and Kazuya.
While Kazuya and Akuma merely fight, the Satsui No Hado user actually manages to Raging Demon Heihachi, but like pretty much everyone else, Heihachi survives the process.
Geese Howard also appears as a playable guest character in Tekken 7, tying the Bandai Namco franchise into SNK’s Fatal Fury, although you may wonder how Geese is still alive after dying in 1995 release of Real Bout Fatal Fury. Perhaps he had more scrolls in his possession.
While these characters may share a universe now, the rules that govern their inclusions and abilities often remain a mystery.
Moving onto Street Fighter 6, Terry Bogard remarks that it has been about 20 years since he last saw Ken, and that he’s fought Ryu a number of times previously before.
So while it’s the first time Terry was playable in a mainline Street Fighter game, he’s known these two fighters for a good amount of time.
Throughout Terry’s World Tour dialogue in Street Fighter 6, he openly talks about his past story lines in the Fatal Fury games, from defeating Geese Howard to adopting Rock Howard.
What I’m getting at here is that these are not randomly spawned instances of known characters who have haphazardly been put into a new fighting game franchise — but are generally well thought out and researched inclusions of fighters from other games entering the picture.
While it’s unknown at this time exactly how Street Fighter’s Ken and Chun-Li will be portrayed in the new Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves game, given Capcom and SNK’s very strong relationship in recent years, and how talented and thorough the developers are making this new game, it should match the other major guest appearances we’ve seen not that long ago.
It’s a pretty awesome time to be a fan of fighting games, as for the first time ever, Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury all share the same universe, which makes these official crossovers possible in mainline games.
The question becomes if we’ll ever see NetherRealm Studios enter the picture, as they’re the developers of a franchise that many fans would like to see included in the mix, Mortal Kombat.
After all, it was back in 2019 that we learned about a proposal of putting a Street Fighter character in Mortal Kombat, but that it was rejected.
Reportedly there were many people at Capcom that felt Mortal Kombat wasn’t a good fit for their characters. Perhaps this proposal may be revisited again in the future considering recent developments.
Source: Event Hubs
