Seeing one’s favourite video game characters fight each other has been something of a guilty pleasure that goes back decades. From bootleg arcade games that allow Ryu, Goku, and Michael Jordan to brawl, all the way up to Mugen, the fighting game engine filed with user-generated characters that encompass virtually everything you could imagine, these hypothetical matchups have been given life on the fringe of the fighting game genre. Of course, they aren’t always fringe. The advent of the guest character has made such “what if?” battles all too legitimate.

A Fighter’s History

It’s generally accepted that the first guest character in a fighting game was Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting as he appeared in SNK’s other flagship martial arts game of the day, Fatal Fury Special. We would soon after see Fatal Fury’s arch antagonist Geese Howard appear in a younger form as a secret boss in Art of Fighting 2. While they may have been the earliest guest characters, we hardly recognize them as such today. Rather than being a crossover between unrelated series, they established Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting as taking place in a shared universe, much as Capcom would later do with Street Fighter, Final Fight, and Rival Schools or Tecmo would with Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden (and possibly Nioh many years after). Regardless, the exchange of Ryo and Geese would plant the seeds for SNK’s more elaborate crossover in The King of Fighters, which added Ikari Warriors and Psycho Soldier to the mix.

Over the years, more guest characters would appear, often in a limited capacity. The manga character Gon, a slightly anthropomorphized dinosaur, was a hidden character in the PlayStation version of Tekken 3. Soulcalibur II famously featured three different guest characters depending on the console version of the game. Due to the limited availability of these characters, they didn’t make a large impression on their respective games. As parity between console and arcade games became the norm, and as multiplatform releases were expected to be equivalent in content, this attitude changed.

Fast forward to 2017, when Tekken 7 finally made it to consoles (the prior arcade release was geographically limited to Japan and South Korea and was frankly more of a beta build of the game). One of its most surprising inclusions was Akuma, one of Street Fighter’s most iconic villains. Informed members of the fighting game community knew this was likely a holdover from the likely-cancelled (now definitely cancelled) Tekken X Street Fighter, which would have been a full-scale crossover game between the two rival series. But insider knowledge be damned, this was exciting. Not only was this Akuma in Tekken, but he was poised to be a key player in the story rather than just being relegated to the sidelines.

How the community felt about Akuma did change over time. After the game had been out for a while, as people became more familiar with how Akuma played, they started to feel a bit frustrated. Bandai Namco’s efforts to bring Akuma to Tekken resulted in a character that felt completely unlike the rest of the cast, as he brought a lot of Street Figther’s mechanics with him. Beyond just having a projectile and the ability to cancel attacks into said fireball, ideas fundamentally foreign to how Tekken is played, Akuma also had his own meter to power up his moves. The end result was Akuma rocketing to the top tiers (a familiar sight for Street Fighter players) and having a threatening role in the game’s competitive scene.

It Gets Personal

Akuma was hardly the only guest character in Tekken 7. Several more were added, ranging from the somewhat sensible (the aforementioned Geese Howard) to the absurd (Negan from AMC’s The Walking Dead). There’s plenty to be said about those two, but there’s one in particular I want to focus on.

On November 12, 2017, a few months after the game was released, a trailer for the game’s latest character was released. It was, astoundingly, Noctis Lucis Caelum, the protagonist of Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XV. If ever there was a target audience for this character, it was me. I’m a big fan of Tekken and I still count Final Fantasy XV among my favourite games of all time. So how did I react to this trailer? All I could think was something along the lines of “This is stupid. Can’t everyone see how stupid this is?”

Akuma and Geese, despite whatever objections one may have to their inclusion, at least make sense on some level. They’re both characters from fighting games. Tekken is also a fighting game. They’re both martial artists with appearances, outfits, and fighting styles that fit right alongside Tekken’s cast. They’re denizens of worlds that are not too different from the world of Tekken. You can say none of those things about Noctis. He’s a prince of a fictional fantasy kingdom. He teleports. He wields a plethora of magically conjured weapons including swords, spears, and axes. He’s from an open-world RPG. He teleports. I know I already said that one, but it bears repeating. It’s a complete stylistic mismatch with no decent justification for his presence. Every out of place action just serves as a reminder that this crossover is merely a cross-promotional exercise.

When I realized how much I disliked Noctis’s presence, I realized how much I dislike guest characters broadly. I cannot simply applaud at the image of two things I like put together. I have some taste, some dignity, some integrity. Nonetheless, people have tried to tell me I’m wrong for this. I’m going to respond to these arguments in turn.

“If you don’t like it, just don’t play it.”

Would that it were so simple. I don’t think this is ever a meaningful defense against criticism (I’ll have to write more about that later), but even applied specifically towards guest characters in fighting games, it holds no water whatsoever. For one thing, anyone who bought the Season Pass expecting it to contain Tekken characters can’t exactly refund it when they learn their money is actually going towards guest characters. For another, even if I didn’t buy the Season Pass, that wouldn’t keep the guests out of the game. The way these things work in the present is that the characters are added via a patch distributed to all players and purchasing the DLC simply unlocks the character for use. If I didn’t buy Noctis, I would still be playing a game with Noctis in it. I would still fight against other players who choose him. Even offline, I would fight computer controlled opponents using Noctis. There’s no escape.

“It’s good business sense.”

I suppose I just don’t care about that. Microtransactions are probably also good business sense, and I certainly don’t need to like those. One could argue that guest characters are mutually beneficial for both the publishers performing the crossover and the players of the game, because in attracting new players, the playerbase grows. The guest characters in Tekken 7 have been cited as part of its strong commercial performance, after all. But despite my age, I may be a Gen Xer at heart, because this is what I regard as “selling out”. The product is being debased in the interest of profit.

“It’s fun! Can’t you have fun?”

At the end of the day, I simply don’t think it’s fun. Even if I ignore the business side of things, it comes down to putting a character in Tekken who has no good reason to be there and stick out like a sore thumb. It’s an unpleasant sight. And this necessarily comes at the expense of better things; the slot occupied by Noctis could have gone to any number of other Tekken characters I would like to see again. Whatever base desire I have to see different characters fight like a child pitting their action figures against each other is offset by my understanding that this is, ultimately, pandering. At some point, you need to say enough is enough.

The New Rules

You might be wondering if I think all guest characters are bad on principle. Indeed, I don’t particularly care for the practice, particularly given how omnipresent it is. But I do think there are ways to include guest characters that exhibit at least some tact. I’m going to lay down some rules, but first, I would like to clarify exactly what I mean when I say guest character. For one, I don’t consider characters from shared universes to be guests. I’m frankly not bothered by characters like Guy being in Street Fighter or Hayabusa being in Dead or Alive because at least as I see it, they aren’t guests. I also will be leaving dedicated crossover games like Capcom vs SNK or Fighters Megamix out of the discussion. Keeping crossovers sequestered in their own discrete entries mitigates the issues I described above and even provides an opportunity to sidestep aesthetic clashing if the art direction and game design are done sufficiently well. Furthermore, I’m going to be using some terms that I’ll define here to avoid confusion: Source game refers to the series a character originates from, and host game refers to the game that said character is appearing in as a guest. Now, without further ado, my guidelines for making guest characters as tasteful as they can be.

#1: The Aesthetic Rule

The guest character should look and act like a character that could feasibly exist in the host game. If the publisher of the host game is looking for characters to feature in their game, they should look to games similar to the host game rather than games that are completely disparate. If your game is a martial arts-based fighting game, other martial arts-based games are your best bet. You could also look to sources outside of video games, as long as you do not run afoul of the next rule.

#2: The Justification Rule

There should be a justifiable reason for the guest character’s inclusion that is not just “it’s good business sense” or “it will expand the player base” or similar arguments. Explain why the guest character is actually a good fit for the game. Is there some shared history, or an artistic influence? Start there, rather than starting with things that are popular.

#3: The Gameplay Rule

The guest character should play like the host game, not the source game. It’s fine to adapt elements of the source game for the character’s moveset, but they should follow the rules of the host game. Don’t port over entire foreign mechanics out of a desire to be faithful. Making a moveset inspired by the source game but within the boundaries of the host game is not just less garish, it’s also more interesting.

The Best-Case Scenario

With those rules in mind, you might be wondering if there are any examples I can point to of guest characters that meet all three criteria. I’m happy to say that there are! Dead or Alive 5 featured three characters (a fourth was added in a later version) from Virtua Fighter, and I view these as the gold standard for guest character design. Rule #1 is followed well; Akira Yuki, Pai Chan, Sarah Bryant, and Jacky Bryant all fit alongside the Dead or Alive cast smoothly, and understandably so. They’re martial artists in a game about martial arts. Their designs range from traditional to modern in much the same way Dead or Alive’s designs do. Rule #2 is also adhered to. The original Dead or Alive was built on the same hardware and software as Virtua Fighter. In essence, these guests were a tribute to the game that Dead or Alive was born out of. As a result, Rule #3 is something of an open goal. Dead or Alive has always controlled very similarly to Virtua Fighter, but the guests bring nothing with them that wouldn’t fit in, and they adapt well to the mechanics of Dead or Alive.

Conversely, Dead or Alive 4 features one of the worst guest characters of all time: SPARTAN-458, an ill-conceived crossover with Halo. I will not dwell on this matter.

The Bottom Line

I would prefer if there were no guest characters. Fighting games are just about the only genre that resorts to this sort of thing. Some shooters like Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone feature brand collaborations, but these are largely just aesthetic rather than fundamental parts of the game design (not that I care for either of those). If any other genres could have guest characters, I would think it would be hero shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends or MOBAs like League of Legends and DotA 2. But I digress. Guest characters are nearly omnipresent in fighting games now, from stalwart series like Street Fighter to much more obscure games like Under Night. Fighting games as a genre deserve better than to be a workshop for brand exercises. This means that we, as players, need to be more critical. Don’t just celebrate seeing two characters you like fight each other. Ask yourself why this is happening and if it’s really worth it.