Tekken 8 Director Reveals How to Unlock Tifa In The Game

The former is synonymous with Square Enix, spending decades as the Final Fantasy series' brand manager in addition to co-creating Kingdom Hearts. While he no longer works at the Japanese gaming giant after retiring in May 2022, he's obviously still got some pull within the company. As for the latter, Nomura is, among other things, basically one of the creatives behind Final Fantasy, most recently serving as the creative director of Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

One way of interpreting what Katsuhiro Harada said is that Tifa's inclusion in Tekken 8 is all in the hands of the powers that be.

With that said, some players seem to think that they've seen or played as Tifa and Cloud in an older Tekken game, which isn't true. Both were previously playable in a fighting game but not in Tekken. Instead, most were likely talking about Ehrgeiz, a fighting game created and designed by Harada's predecessor, Seiichi Ishii. This fighting game, which borrowed heavily from the first two Tekken titles, featured six characters from Final Fantasy 7 as part of its roster, including Tifa and Cloud.

If you have a faint memory of playing Tekken as Cloud or Tifa in the late 90s or early 2000s, you were most likely playing Ehrgeiz.

Unfortunately, it's unclear when the first wave of post-launch Tekken 8 characters will arrive and how many season passes are in the pipeline. The only DLC character confirmed so far is Eddy Gordo.