Tekken 8 Won’t Have Guest Characters Until Post Launch, Says Harada

Tekken series Chief Producer Katsuhiro Harada has said that Tekken 8 won’t have any guest characters at launch, so they can flesh out the actual game characters.

In a Tweet today, Harada quashed any hope that Tekken 8 would feature characters from other franchises- at least when the game eventually releases.

“We do not plan to develop guest characters first”, Harada confirms. “First of all, we are concentrating on “having more early Roasters (sic)” than other fighting game titles (In other words, increase the initial number of default characters). Even if we think about guest characters, it will be after the release”.

While this pretty decisively shoots down any chance of characters like Master Chief or Tifa coming to the title, it paints a pretty interesting dilemma for Akuma- while the character comes from Street Fighter he’s an actual character in Tekken 7’s story, meaning he wouldn’t necessarily count as a guest character per se if he appeared in Tekken 8.

However, even that would be stretching the producer’s words, and it’s pretty safe to assume that any crossover fighters will simply just be DLC,

Guest fighters can be a huge part of a fighting game’s identity- Mortal Kombat 1 had also announced the DLC for their title, featuring a myriad of crossovers like Omni-Man, Homelander and even Peacemaker.

Tekken 7 also featured various prominent crossover fighters, like Negan from The Walking Dead and Noctis from Final Fantasy XV.

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