New details about the development of Pokken Tournament have been released thanks to Siliconera, who translated an interview in Famitsu with the Tekken series chief producer Katsuhiro Harada, as well as a few other key people involved in the title. The team talks about the appeal of a Pokemon fighting game, stating that seeing Pokemon fight in real-time is one of the major reasons why they believe the game will be fun.
I believe that this project’s most entertaining and refreshing aspect is about being able to move your own Pokémon and watch them react and pull off moves in full-frame, and the freshness of real-time. We’re working on making those aspects as enthralling and fun as possible.
Some have worried that the Tekken routes of the series would mean the game ends up more like Hyrule Warriors, where the mechanics of the game are distinctly Dynasty Warriors with a coat of Legend of Zelda paint. However, the team says that they’re working on incorporating several aspects of the Pokemon game to make it feel like a better marriage of two concepts.
When you think about Mega Evolution, there are those [Pokémon] that do Mega Evolve and those that don’t, so you might wonder what happens to the ones that don’t. We’ve already thought of plenty of things like that since the early planning stage, in order to make it more like a Pokémon game.
That’s how we’re thinking of shaping this game into one with an emphasis on Pokémon’s way of playing, along with many of the game’s own ideas as well.
When asked which Pokemon would be included in the game, Harada says they’d like to include all 700, but then the game would never be finished. The end scope of the game will be more limited, but the team working on Pokken admits that the trend in fighting games currently is to have lots of characters for players to choose from.
I believe that the general direction that current fighting games are trending towards having more characters. I also believe that getting a grasp of how to play as all the characters is a big part of the fun, and as far expanding that goes, we’re thinking of starting with Pokémon that are easy to understand, and with a nice range of movements and ways to play.
Finally, to wrap up the interview the trio were asked if there would be any Tekken characters making an appearance in the game. The answer is no, but the developers aren’t ruling out easter eggs for Tekken fans to experience. Either way, it sounds like the development team is really devoted to working on a concept that will merge Pokemon with Tekken in a way that it doesn’t just feel like a Pokemon skin laid over Tekken rules. That’s good news for fans of the concept who want it to eventually land on consoles.
