How Final Fantasy VII’s Tifa Arrived In Street Fighter 6

One of the most exciting announcements of Summer Game Fest’s 2026 live show arrived near the end of the stage presentation when Capcom announced its fourth year of downloadable fighters for Street Fighter 6. After showing off Yasmine, Arjun, and Bosch, we learned that the fourth character is Tifa, the extremely popular Final Fantasy VII party member. While Tifa isn’t the first crossover character to appear in the Street Fighter franchise, she could very well be the most popular.

“Tifa is a character that is beloved by all sorts of different games like RPG fans and general gamers,” Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama says. “While she does come from an RPG background that’s completely different from a game like Street Fighter, she does utilize martial arts in her moves and skillset, so we always felt that she would be a good fit into a game like Street Fighter 6.”

The developers had a mutual friend who works at Square Enix, and they had been talking about how great it would be to get Tifa in Street Fighter 6 and collaborate in some way. Then, at Tokyo Game Show 2025, Nakayama had the chance to present on stage with Final Fantasy VII Remake Trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi, and he broached the topic. 

Those conversations led to the moment on-stage at Summer Game Fest 2026’s live show, when those two reunited on stage to unveil Tifa as a Year 4 character in Street Fighter 6. “We were able to build our relationship from [that TGS presentation] and we kind of naturally thought that Tifa would be a great fit for the game,” Nakayama says.

Tifa, as she appears in Final Fantasy VII Remake

But it wasn’t just Hamaguchi giving the green light to Nakayama; Square Enix remained collaborative throughout the process of bringing Tifa to life in Street Fighter 6. “From their perspective, they had a lot of different ideas of what Tifa would feel like and look like in Street Fighter 6 or a fighting game, since she hasn’t been in one before,” Nakayama says. “The feedback we received from the team has been very positive. They’re very fast-paced in terms of responses, so that shows a lot of enthusiasm from them, not just Hamaguchi-san, but even [artist, writer, and director Tetsuya] Nomura-san has been involved in the review process, too. […] He’s been very helpful, even with the announcement trailer that we had. He reviewed that and was very involved to the very last minute of the production of that.”

When the news hit, reaction videos spread rapidly across social media. “There’s been a lot of great reactions, both on the US and the Japan side, as well,” Nakayama says. “We actually just had a Capcom Pro Tour event in the Dominican Republic called Blink Respawn, and we saw a lot of videos of people watching the announcement at the event and getting super hyped and acting like kids over there. And these are players who are trying to focus on their event! But yeah, they showed a lot of excitement for that.”

Tifa is all set to join Street Fighter 6 as the third scheduled character in the game’s Year 4 lineup. Yasmine is slated to kick off the season on August 3, followed by Arjun in the fall, Tifa in early 2027, and Bosch in spring 2027.

For more behind-the-scenes stories about Street Fighter 6, read our extremely in-depth cover story from just before the game was released, and then read Game Informer’s Street Fighter 6 review.