Street Fighter 6 Director Talks FFVII Collab, Roster Diversity, and Upcoming Movie

One of the most popular and beloved fighting game franchises, Street Fighter continues its dominance with the sixth installment. Originally released three years ago, Street Fighter 6 has received numerous updates and content drops, most of which come in the form of exciting new and revamped fighters from across the series. With the announcement of the collaboration between Final Fantasy VII and Capcom, not to mention a handful of new characters coming over the next year, the competitive fighting game has never looked better.

At Summer Game Fest this year, we were able to sit down with Street Fighter 6’s Producer, Shuhei Matsumoto, and Director, Takayuki Nakayama to discuss year 4 of the beloved fighting game, not to mention talk about the upcoming movie.

Speaking with Shuhei Matsumoto and Takayuki Nakayama

Tifa is a big collaboration between Capcom and Square Enix. How did that come to be?

We’ve been talking to the folks on the Square Enix side for about three years. That’s around when the initial conversation started. We talked about, it would be great to do some sort of collaboration between the two teams, and Tifa’s name eventually came up as potentially one of the candidates.

And at the TGS event, where they had a chance to talk to the Final Fantasy VII Remake team, we were able to narrow down and focus more on the final results of this collaboration. It has been on an ongoing communication and working towards this day.

At the Live Show, one of the loudest moments was when Tifa showed up at the end of the trailer. How did it feel to see that reaction amidst so many announcements?

Nakyama-san was on stage, you can’t really hear the audience too much. It was hard to see and hard to hear, so it was hard to tell, but Matsumoto was also in the audience, and he was able to see the reaction from the attendees and on social media people seemed pretty excited, too. Overall, they’re happy with the response they’ve got.

Talking about the other characters, what went into the decision to have virtually all new characters for this roster, compared to past years when it has been a mix of classic characters and newcomers?

The last new character that was introduced into Street Fighter 6 was named Aki. She appeared roughly two years ago, and ever since that we have been adding more characters that appeared in previous titles within the series. We were thinking about, maybe it’s a good time to start introducing brand-new characters into the game, and expand the brand a little more. Especially because we’re seeing so many newer players joining the game, and we wanted to represent other territories.

Places like India and the Philippines where both Arjun and Yasmine are from. India has a growing population of gamers that we want a new character to represent that particular region. And Yasmine is a character from the Philippines. There are a lot of people within the fighting game community with Filipino roots, so we want to satisfy that particular region also.

How do these characters differentiate themselves from the rest of the cast? What makes them unique?

Because they are brand-new characters, no one knows who they are, it is a challenge to get people to recognize them, since they don’t know anything about them. Using Yasmine as an example, she is a new character from the Philippines who utilizes a martial arts style that hasn’t been represented before in the Street Fighter series, so we feel confident that it will bring a new experience to Street Fighter fans.

Are there any favorite characters from past games you wanted to bring back that didn’t make the cut?

To answer simply, we would love to bring characters from the past rosters and the past titles within the series. Obviously, we have limited time and budget, it’s hard to represent absolutely everyone. Within those constraints, we tried to maintain diversity when it comes to region, gender, fighting style so it doesn’t create an overlap with any existing characters. Those are the things we tried to be mindful when selecting who’s the next person to come.

Based on community feedback, are there any plans to adjust or possibly remove throw loops?

We can’t say we’re going to fix this or we’re not going to fix this, or we’re going to look at the big picture and make certain tunings as we see if it makes sense for the game. We have made certain adjustments in the past when it comes to battle systems like parry or we made it so you have to input a directional in order to get a perfect parry to successfully execute.

There are no specific plans we have to share right now, but we’ll continue to monitor the scene and see what is right.

What went into the decision to end support on the World Tour Mode?

We would love to continue building the World Tour, because we love the mode and the characters, representing each of the new characters. But, due to certain constraints, we weren’t able to do so moving forward after the release of Ingrid.

However, one of the intentions of the World Tour mode, it could be a unique mode that could stand on its own, but it’s something that could get people who aren’t super familiar with fighting games to get more comfortable, and eventually able to grow into a fighting player. We feel like, it’s been a few years since the original release of Street Fighter 6, and a lot of people were able to get hands-on with World Tour and to learn the basics of it. In that sense, we feel that we were confidently successfully able to get those players on board.

With the upcoming movie adaptation of Street Fighter, how involved was Capcom in collaborating with the studios?

To speak on how involved, it was mainly Makayama-san in working with Legendary studios. But he was there from the very beginning, even from the initial contractual stages – almost eight years now. He was also very much involved with the script writing process. He had a lot of back and forth with what would be good and what wouldn’t be good for a Street Fighter movie.

Eventually, he was able to establish a relationship with the director of the movie, and he understands what the fans are expecting and what they don’t want in a Street Fighter movie. They were able to have ongoing conversations and the communication went very well with the studio.

Overall, he was very involved from the get-go, and it should be something you should look forward to.

Released June 2, 2023

ESRB T For Teen Due To Mild Blood, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence