Everything you know is wrong! Blood is raining from the skies! People are rioting in the streets! Cats and dogs are living together! Street Fighter and Tekken are getting two crossover games!

So, the original rumor that Namco X Capcom was the next big project between Katsuhiro Harada and Yoshinori Ono was actually a bit off. It turns out that we have to scale back our expectations a bit to the two most popular franchises by both those companies. The new projects, Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken X Street Fighter will still hold to all of the plans we previously heard about the Namco X Capcom project. There will be two versions of the game created, one by Capcom that uses the Street Fighter IV engine, and one by Namco that uses the Tekken 6 engine. Whoever’s name comes first in the title will determine whose engine the game is running on.

Street Fighter X Tekken was the one that premiered at Comic-Con this year. Yoshinori Ono and Katsuhiro Harada announced the game, and then gave the crowd a treat by actually playing a quick match, with Ono playing as Ryu, and Harada playing as Kazuya Mashima. Ryu was shown to have all of his moves from Street Fighter IV, however Kazuya was the more interesting adaptation. The short little side steps that used to move you through the three dimensional plane in Tekken are now used to duck under and around fireballs (in order to allow Tekken characters to close with projectile characters.) All of Kazuya’s combos were there, although they were remapped to Street Fighter‘s six button layout. Yes, this means that Tekken characters will have longer combos than Street Fighter characters, which may seem unfair, but they also get hit by damage harder. Kazuya was even able to send Ryu into a spinning stun-state to extend his combos.

An interesting aspect of the new game seems to be the ability to use tag-in ultras. Though not explicitly a tag-based system, the demo showed Ryu calling in Chun-Li who did the first part of her ultra before kicking Kazuya into a Metsu Hadoken. Later in the demo, Kazuya called in Nina Williams to hold Ryu in a stranglehold whole Kazuya prepared for a spinning uppercut. It was very pleasing to the eyes.

Work has only just started on this project, so expect it to come out either late next year or early 2012.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• The Tekken/Street Fighter Rivalry Continues
• Tekken X Street Fighter Is Falling Behind
• Namco VS Capcom and Capcom VS Namco Are Not the Same Game?
• Capcom Trolls Street Fighter X Tekken Announcement
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 First Details
• Tekken 7?