Street Fighter x Tekken: the Killian opinion

Jin was very strong. I'll say that. I didn't much like Jin and I didn't much like losing to Jin, so I gave up and stayed very busy with a lot of other fighting games.

But to me it feels more immediate and up close. That may be an artefact of the fact I'm using more of the Tekken characters. But Marduk has a nice long-range grab that's really quite fast. That's dangerous at range. The Tekken characters definitely have some ranged options, but not in a Dhalsim or even a Guile or Ryu way.

The touchstone the team is working from is this liquid feel, although I don't feel that's quite brought to bear in the game yet. It's getting there. You remember in Street Fighter IV they had this ink thing, which only emerged towards the tail end of the game. It wasn't very inky at the beginning. They're looking at different liquid touches as well as what you've seen, to match the gameplay with what you've seen in the trailers.

To me it seems brighter and dirtier. Like, a little grungier, almost. That's an artefact of the backgrounds that are finished. The destroyed landscape, with the Cyberbots mechs running around, definitely lends itself to a grungy feel because it's destroyed buildings and rubble.

And then the Dino Crisis touchstone, with the dinosaurs and fences. That also has a slightly destroyed look to it. It's not pristine.

I don't think it's that different. Even the Tekken characters have Street Fighter-style special moves. A number of them. Those will all be there.

So in some ways you can think of them as Street Fighter characters, but they've also got these Tekken-like abilities. Kazuya can do some of his traditional tricks and mix and match with Tekken-style combos.

The way I push that into my Street Fighter brain is to think of them as unusual special move inputs, which is really what they are in Tekken. It's no different than a Street Fighter special move. It's just a series of buttons. Same thing here.

It's fun for me to watch people coming at it more from the Tekken perspective, because they slide into that bit of it easily. I've blocked off things I would associate with Tekken as, this is just an unusual special move input, rather than a whole new way of approaching it. I hope it works out well for both sides. It hasn't caused me any problems.

And there are a lot of hybrid combos. In Tekken, you never begin a combo by jumping in at somebody. That's a pretty big thing in this game. Jumping is still an important technique.

So, you begin with the jump in, do maybe some Tekken strings, cancel into a special move, followed by a Tekken string and something else from there. And that's not even to begin cancelling in between the two characters.

For me, in my little lizard brain, I've boxed the Tekken stuff as an unusual special move. But ultimately it's no different. There are a lot of similarities from a broad fighting game standpoint, or a game theoretical standpoint, between Tekken and Street Fighter, although the controls are quite different. That's what keeps people in their respective camps.

I've been pretty excited with what the team has done to try and bridge that. Talk to the Tekken hardcore and see how they like it. They'll have a bit more of an adjustment than the Street Fighters. It's set in a primarily Street Fighter engine, but with plenty of Tekken flourishes that will make them feel right at home.