Street Fighter 6 director addresses Tifa, Ingrid’s role, and what’s next for World Tour mode

Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama explained why Capcom added Final Fantasy 7’s Tifa into the game, as well as their bold choice to stock Season 4 with so many new faces.

The leaks were real: Tifa Lockhart is Divekicking her way into Street Fighter 6 as the series’ first-ever guest character from a completely different gaming genre.

We got the chance to sit down with director Takayuki Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto at Summer Game Fest, where the two opened up about Capcom and Square Enix’s joint decision to collaborate on a guest character for Season 4.

Street Fighter and Square Enix had been in collab talks for three years

According to Nakayama, this partnership started three years ago at Tokyo Game show. In fact, the two entities had already been in talks regarding a possible collaboration before then, but the convention gave them the push to buckle down and “show support” for each other.

“As we moved the project forward, the conversation turned to adding a Final Fantasy character to Street Fighter,” Nakayama told us. “With the Final Fantasy VII Remake series underway, we looked for a character who uses martial arts — fitting the fighting game genre — and who was also incredibly popular at the moment. That’s really how the idea took shape.”

Street Fighter 6 is one of three major fighting games to bring in a character from a completely different property as of late; Tekken 8 shook the anime world by adding Baki antagonist Yujiro Hanma for its Season 3 DLC, while Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is gearing up to add Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro to its roster.

YouTube: Street Fighter

For Street Fighter 6, guest characters only make sense if they fit the Street Fighter universe; that is, they need to be martial artists, first and foremost. While Nakayama-san said no other guest fighters have yet been determined for SF6, he admitted there is a good chance martial arts-focused characters from other popular properties could potentially make their way into the game for future seasons.

“We haven’t decided on anything specific yet, but if a character is a good fit for a fighting game — meaning they translate well to that style of gameplay — then there’s definitely a strong possibility,” he said. “Conversely, forcing a character into a fighting game when they don’t fit that mold would be difficult — or rather, it would just end up feeling weird — so that’s not something we’d do.”

The fighting game community has been rife with speculation that Tifa’s addition to Street Fighter 6 must somehow be connected to Ingrid and her dimension-bending abilities. Nakayama praised fans for their “keen eye” for this detail and opened up as much as he could about what this means for the game’s story.

“The release is still a ways off, so I can’t go into too much detail right now, but Ingrid is a character whose backstory was reconstructed with the aim of expanding those kinds of possibilities. So… yes.”

Street Fighter 6 producer explains why Season 4 has so many new characters

Tifa’s inclusion in the game, as well as the addition of three totally original characters, begs the question of how the Street Fighter 6 team determines their DLC fighters.

Matsumoto-san explained that their decision to lean so heavily into new characters comes partially from Street Fighter 6’s relatively young playerbase in comparison to other Street Fighter titles, as well as the goal to strengthen Street Fighter as a brand, itself.

“First, we hadn’t released any completely new characters since the autumn following the game’s launch, so adding new characters was a priority,” he revealed. “Secondly, to strengthen the Street Fighter brand — not just Street Fighter 6 specifically, but the franchise as a whole — we felt that introducing new characters was essential. 

“And finally, the player demographic for Street Fighter 6 has skewed much younger; while the core player base used to be in the 35 – 40 age range, the largest segment is now between 15 and 25. We wanted to support these players by offering them a fresh experience, one where they can play with a sense of novelty and relate to the characters on their own level. That is the reasoning behind our strategy to bolster the roster with new characters.”

CAPCOM

The response to upcoming DLC fighters Arjun and Yasmine has been mostly positive. The Filipino fighting game community, specifically, is overwhelmingly excited about Yasmine’s inclusion as the series’ first-ever Filipina fighter.

“For Yasmine, the decision was driven by the fact that the Street Fighter 6 FGC has a strong presence of players, commentators, and tournament organizers with Filipino roots; we wanted to reach out to that community and also increase the number of players from Southeast Asia,” Matsumoto-san explained. 

“I had actually spoken to the director about creating a Filipino character like Yasmine, so it’s wonderful to see so much positive feedback coming from people in the Philippines. As for India, the country has a massive population, and we wanted to add a character from there as part of our future outlook to expand the Street Fighter 6 player base; looking at the reactions now, it’s great to see that the response from the Filipino community has been exactly what we had hoped for.”

What’s next for World Tour mode?

Along with Ingrid’s launch came news that World Tour Mode would no longer be receiving regular updates with each new character. This left players puzzled and concerned about the future of the game’s story mode, with many wondering if this has anything to do with Ingrid’s abilities.

“There won’t be any further updates to World Tour, but I’d like to keep the content maintained and perhaps convey some other narrative elements,” Nakayama said of the situation.

“That sounds great,” Matsumoto-san replied. “I’d certainly like to get the development team involved in that.”

Unsurprisingly, players have been itching for gameplay updates, patches, and even the inclusion of new mechanics alongside Season 4; compared to Street Fighter V, SF6 has not made big additions to its existing mechanics, with the Drive system largely left as-is.

Nakayama-san assured us that this is intentional, explaining that the game’s current state is already complex enough without adding any new tools.

“Honestly, I feel that adding any more [mechanics] would make the game too complex,” he told us. “We released it in a state where the mechanics were already quite refined, so we aren’t really planning to add new systems at this stage. That said, we are conducting various experiments. Still, I wonder if there’s anything we could potentially add down the line.”