Street Fighter X Tekken and its doppelganger, Tekken X Street Fighter have identical struggles to overcome. Namely, how do you mix the two disparate gameplay styles together into a delicious fighting game cocktail?

Katsuhiro Harada, long-time producer for the Tekken series, recently addressed one of the major issues still facing the team: how to deal with fireballs in a 3D plane.

"Obviously, the Street Fighter characters will have to have their fireballs," Harada told the PlayStation Blog at this weekend's Evo 2011 event. "Ryu without a fireball just wouldn't be... right. Obviously we'll need it.

"When you look at executing a fireball in a 2D setting, it works almost like a jab. It keeps your opponent where you want them. When we bring fireballs into Tekken X Street Fighter, there are two different ways we could go. It could be used as something similar to keep your opponent in the place you want, or it could be some kind of special move or powered-up version of their techniques. We've not decided on what route we want to take with this yet."

Harada also addressed the still-unsolved question of dodging. "Another element to think about implementing fireballs in Tekken is, how do you avoid them? When you play a 2D game like Street Fighter, you obviously can't go back and forth in the screen - you usually jump over it. But in three-dimensional fighting games like Tekken you can sidestep. So do we want players to jump over fireballs? Or is it okay to sidestep them? That's something we're not decided on, we haven't had enough time to look into it."

Despite the challenges, though, Harada says much of the team grew up on a healthy diet of Street Fighter, and he's "really confident" that they can find a proper balance.

Finally, Harada confirmed stereoscopic 3D support for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Prologue, and coyly hinted that he'd be interested in developing a Tekken game for Vita at some point as well.

[Screenshot from Street Fighter X Tekken.]