Akuma's inclusion in Tekken 7 as a guest character from Street Fighter sparked perhaps one of the most interesting developments in fighting games this generation though things apparently could have gone even further.

A fan reached out to Tekken Director Katsuhiro Harada to ask him a seemingly random question wondering if Morrigan from the Darkstalkers franchise could appear in the Bandai Namco fighting game to which the Tekken boss surprisingly replied that she was once in the cards.

"To be honest, back in 2017 she was a prime candidate for us to want to bring in as a guest," said Harada in his response as translated by our own Majin Tenshinhan. "And we were extremely close to contacting Ono over at Capcom for official permission. We had full confidence in being able to do her modeling and animations and having it do justice to the source material, but as for her gameplay it felt like making it feel the way it should for her would take a lot of time so we ended up abandoning it."

Tekken 7 released on consoles back in 2017, so if Morrigan had been fated to join the roster as a guest character, it likely would have been as a DLC fighter choice for Season 1 or 2.

Instead, of course as history shows, Bandai Namco released / announced two other crossover fighters that year with Geese Howard from the Fatal Fury series and Noctis Lucis Calem from Final Fantasy 15.

There was also the vampire in Eliza, and while she is not a succubus like Morrigan, they do share some design similarities though of course the red queen predates T7 having first appeared in the free to play Tekken Revolution.

Fans have been asking about seeing Akuma's inclusion transform into something more like the Tekken x Street Fighter game announced all the way back in 2010 though Harada himself has recently said he doesn't see a place in the market for that right now.

The thought of Darkstalkers characters joining characters like Jin and Heihachi, however, likely never really crossed the mind of most of the fighting game community, and it's hard for me to imagine also.

It's kinda a shame that there's not at least some concept art or mock ups to look at for the idea, but it's very interesting to know that was actually given some development resources at one point.



Click images for Harada's full tweet