Pokken Tournament Aims for More Pokemon, Less Tekken

Pokken Tournament, by the development team’s own admission, may have started life as a “Tekken engine [game] with some Pokemon characters” thrown in. “As we worked on it,” began development director and producer of the Tekken series Katsuhiro Harada, “We knew we wanted to show off the Pokemon, and that led to implementing the [free movement] Field Phase, and we just really realized quickly in that prototype phase that we needed to just kind of create this whole thing from scratch. “What we really wanted to do with the Pokken Tournament game was to reduce that skill and knowledge [element of fighting games] to a minimum and let players focus entirely on the strategy element of the game,” Harada said. “The two things that every single one of [the pro fighting game players] told us was that the game was a lot deeper than they thought,” Harada said, “and also that it’s totally different than Tekken. Kallie Plagge is a host of IGN Anime Club and is IGN's resident Poké Kid.