Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono on Street Fighter x Tekken, Fighting Revival

After giving several evenings, harmonious friendships, and my low blood pressure away to Capcom’s fighting games, I seized the ability to talk to Capcom Producer Yoshinori Ono about Street Fighter x Tekken, as well as his part in Capcom’s heritage of fighting games. For Ono, it’s refreshing to work at a Capcom that’s willing and able to put out fighters like this.

“More than anything it feels nostalgic, it feels like a return to the old days,” Ono said, via a translator. “I was involved with Street Fighter III back in the day, and I witnessed first-hand the lull in fighting games. To have had a part in the old classic stuff and the new stuff, and be partly responsible for bringing it back is a great feeling. It’s really cool that Capcom’s where we are right now as a result.”

Where they are right now is on the verge of releasing Street Fighter x Tekken, another cross-property fighter in the company’s long lineage. While you might be tempted to dismiss this fighter as another Capcom vs. entrant, they’ve worked hard to give Street Fighter x Tekken its own personality and flavor.

“I like to think of it as like having soccer players invited onto the baseball field. Even though they’re both fighting games… it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking all fighting games as one cohesive thing, they’re really quite different,” Ono said. “If you were to just bring soccer players to a baseball field and tell them to have at it, it wouldn’t really be fair to them. You have to make them feel comfortable, and you have to do that without scaring the crap out of the baseball players too. So you change the rules up a bit — tell the baseball players they’re allowed to kick the baseball now. There’s some concessions of the rules of both sports.”

Those concessions are mostly found in the game’s input and combo system. Basically, it finds a strange yet familiar middle ground between the aggressive, rapid-fire combos of Tekken, and the slower, more timing-intensive moves of Street Fighter.

“We’ve come up with the cross crush system for this game, which is to make the Street Fighter and Tekken players feel at home with how the inputs are executed. These are kind of similar in feeling to the Darkstalkers chain combos, if you can remember back that far,” Ono said. “Relatively simple inputs, quick, aggressive combos which should feel familiar to Tekken players, but also with an element of strategy in reading your opponent and guessing what they’re going to do, which feels very Street Fighter.”

I came to this game expecting some sort of predictive / defensive mechanic — something like the parry system in Street Fighter III or the focus attacks from Street Fighter IV. I realize now how Street Fighter-y thinking that really is, and part of the inclusion of Tekken is that this game is much more aggressive in design.

“You can start into one of these really aggressive combos, Tekken style, and then Street Fighter style decide ‘I need to branch off here because my opponent’s about to do something,’” Ono said. “It works in elements of both sides, but more offensive than defensive.”

This translates directly into the way people mechanically play the game.

“I think we’ve hit a nice middle ground between the two. Tekken players can play how they’re familiar with, basically like they’re typing on the joystick,” Ono said, quickly drumming his fingers on the table to illustrate. “Street Fighter players can do the combos familiar to them. But characters from both games can do both styles.”

In fact, Ono has seen fans of either game gravitating towards their respective style in Street Fighter x Tekken.

“If you break it down strategy-wise, Tekken players, who are more used to these long combos will probably start a combo and take it all the way through to the end. Street Fighter players — which are more likely to think strategically and predict what their opponent is going to do — might start a combo and cancel into a special move. I think you’ll see a difference in style between Tekken players and Street Fighter players, and in the characters they’re using,” Ono said.

As someone who has always admired high-level play and not necessarily had the time to achieve it myself, Ono’s comment about seeing players with different style made me curious about Street Fighter x Tekken and the tournament scene. Capcom’s made a solid showing in supporting the tournament scene with Street Fighter IV — would they be doing the same for this game?

“Absolutely, whether it’s online or offline,” Ono said. “When it comes to online, we’ll have modes that will mimic the tournament experience. Of course, we’ll also support the offline scene — things like EVO and ReveLAtions. We plan on having a support kit to make things easier for them to set up tournaments. We really feel that that scene is super important, so we want to continue supporting it.”

And when it comes to support, I had to ask about the arcade scene, even though I more or less already knew the answer.

“At the moment we’re not considering an arcade version, and I’ll tell you why,” Ono said. “The whole purpose of the game is to have a festival/carinval feel to it. What we mean by that is trying to invite everyone to the table: the more casual users that used to play Tekken 1 or 2 and stopped after that, and the people that thought Street Fighter IV was maybe a little too hardcore for them. We want to bring all those guys back, and the best way we think to do that is to release on consoles: PS3, 360, and Vita.”

If this isn’t your first time to the Capcom vs. rodeo, the mention of a carnival feel may have triggered memories of Capcom vs. SNK, which is the previous mashup the company has made with another fighting game series. Street Fighter x Capcom differs from that game in a very specific way, though.

“We’re planning something similar [to Capcom vs. SNK], but to outdo what we did before. I don’t want to talk too much about SNK, and I certainly don’t want to make it sound like I’m insulting them, but the good thing about Tekken is that it has the casual users, and not just the really hardcore fighting game guys.”

Thinking of the two games seems to poetically make a statement about fighting games in general, and more specifically Capcom’s role in that genre. Capcom vs. SNK 2 released in 2001, and was basically the last full-scale fighter Capcom was able to make until the genre’s renaissance with Street Fighter IV. Now that they’re back and squaring off against another huge competitor in the fighting genre, has anything changed between now and then?

“Things haven’t so much changed as evolved,” Ono explained. “There’s a lot more community outreach and a lot more communication directly with the users, which is a good thing. We always had some element of that from back in the day, but that’s definitely expanded. As far as what hasn’t changed, I think we still have this fastidiousness about game design and not wanting to put something out until its ready, and really sticking to our guns when it comes to design decisions. That hasn’t changed, and that’s part of something that’s at the heart of Capcom.”

That much is clear from playing a few rounds of Street Fighter x Tekken. With less than an hour of the game under my belt, I can’t claim the barest of proficiency with it. I can, however, see the deliberate design that powers the machine — this is (yet another) fighter made by masters of the craft.

“We’re able to do that because… we’re different from a lot of game companies in that the suits aren’t making the games. We aren’t businessmen, we’re creators — we’re creative people, and that’s why we’ve been able to maintain that Capcom flavor and that Capcom DNA for so long.”

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