According to series producer Katsuhiro Harada, Morrigan Aensland from Darkstalkers was considered as a guest character for the game, but the idea was dropped after realizing making the character could take a lot of time.

Within the last few weeks before Tekken 7's release, Bandai Namco released 8-bit videos animated by Dutton Films acting as recaps of the previous Tekken games.

The gender of Leo has been brought to question over the past several game. While Harada has confirmed the character to be female during the Cologne premiere of Tekken: Blood Vengeance, in game Leo is almost always referred in gender-neutral terms. It has also been confirmed that Leo's full name is Eleanor Kilesen and was given a bikini costume in Tekken Tag Tournament 2. This all changed in Tekken 7 when Leo was officially referred to as a male through both Yoshimitsu's and Leo's bio page.

Tekken producer Katsushiro Harada had the idea of adding an Arabian character into the series' roster since 2009, wanting to first visit the region to get a sense of its people and culture. Shaheen's final design was created with the help of fans across the region, even appearing on newspapers in Bahrain.

Due to criticism from Western fans over the character "Lucky Chloe", Katsuhiro Harada stated that she was to be made exclusive to the Japanese and European versions of the game. Harada took to Twitter after seeing a thread about the character on NeoGAF calling her a "furry Vocaloid idol." He posted, "By the way, are you 'Western' only one bulletin board?" [sic] "Hello small world. I'll make muscular & skinhead character for you. Remember, I said we've more new characters and She is ONE on THEM." This was stated as a joke by Harada, though news outlets began to report that this would actually be the case.