Tekken 8's Final Fantasy 16 Collaboration Has Roots That Go Back Decades

ign.com:

It’s fitting that in the year of the 30th anniversary of the original PlayStation, two of the console’s biggest franchises — Tekken and Final Fantasy — are collaborating once more. The two names are nearly synonymous with the PlayStation brand, and more than that share a development history not many know about.

“I guess we can talk about [it] now since so much time has passed. Back around Tekken 3, a lot of our staff left the team and actually went to Square,” Tekken executive producer Katsuhiro Harada reveals in a sit down interview with IGN. Given Tekken 3 was in development during 1995 and released a year later, there were likely several ex-Tekken staff lending their 3D development skills to what would likely have been the only Final Fantasy game in production around then: the seminal PlayStation RPG, Final Fantasy 7.

“We’re both titles that were synonymous with PlayStation and also the kind of high-level 3D graphics [both series had] at the time were similar,” Harada continues. “And although we were making different games at that point, [the ex-Tekken developers] were still our friends and people we worked really closely with. So [at the time I thought] it would be interesting if we could work together again sometime in the future. It just turned out that it took a lot more time than I initially thought.”

So here we are, decades later and the Tekken and Final Fantasy brands are going head-to-head on friendlier terms. Clive Rosfield, the protagonist of Final Fantasy 16, will be the latest guest character joining the Tekken roster. He’s only the second Final Fantasy character to ever join Tekken, following after Final Fantasy 15’s Noctis, who made an appearance in Tekken 7.

You might be surprised to hear that this collaboration between Final Fantasy 16 and Tekken 8 began much earlier than expected. So early, in fact, that Final Fantasy 16 was still in the middle of development when Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada reached out to FF16 producer Naoki Yoshida