It’s been revealed that Nier: Automata’s 2B was being planned as a Tekken 7 guest character at some point, according to a new revelation by the game’s director. Guest characters in fighting games aren’t anything new and have become increasingly more common in the last decade, in titles such as Tekken 7 and Mortal Kombat 11, the latter of which recently added Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo to its roster.
While guest characters do provide a new and refreshing experience to the game as well as a marketing opportunity for both the game and the source material the guest character is from, some of them may also become either a benefit or detriment to the gameplay. While some guest characters make the game slightly more challenging with their unique mechanics, which was the case with Akuma and Geese Howard when they joined Tekken 7’s roster, others just don’t look and feel right to be included in the game, such as Yoda and Darth Vader’s appearance in Soul Calibur IV.
As for Nier: Automata’s 2B, Tekken 7’s director Katsuhiro Harada responded to a Tweet asking him about whether 2B would be the next guest character in the game. In his response, Harada revealed that 2B was actually being planned as a guest character in Tekken 7 at some point but the debate on whether she should be included in Tekken or Soul Calibur instead emerged. In the end, it looks like the latter series prevailed as 2B was added to the roster of Soul Calibur 6 several years ago.
Interestingly, the battle for 2B as a guest character isn’t the first time Tekken and Soul Calibur had some connection with their characters. The connection between the two games actually goes way back to their beginnings as one of Tekken’s mainstay characters, the sword-wielding Yoshimitsu, was also added to the Soul Calibur roster and became a mainstay of that series as well. The seemingly implausible appearance of the character across both franchise’s titles was explained to be due to the name “Yoshimitsu” being a title that was handed down rather than being the name of one single person, making it possible for a Yoshimitsu to appear in every title of each series.
The revelation that 2B could have possibly been included in the Tekken 7 roster is an interesting bit of fighting game history. If she had ended up in Tekken 7, she would be only one of a handful of characters in the game that wields a weapon of some sort. That being said, the number of weapon-wielding characters in Tekken 7 has actually increased lately with the release of Kunimitsu.
Source: Katsuhiro Harada/Twitter