Pokkén Tournament

Pokkén Tournament is a little less than a month away from releasing in the west, and early footage of it certainly looks very promising. It's pretty well known that this is being developed by the Tekken team, naturally making one wonder just how similar it plays to the popular 3D fighting games series. While it seems that there's plenty of overlap here, the developers were keen to make this a unique experience that stands all on its own.

Katsuhiro Harada recently chatted with IGN over the game, and he briefly discussed this topic. While he admits that it began life as a relatively simple Tekken project that featured Pokémon characters, it quickly grew into something more when they realised it was a project that would need to be built from scratch if it were to be done right. This led to them building a new engine and battle system, specifically made for the game. Here's the quote:

As we worked on it, 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. We even built an entire new rendering engine, and kind of came up with an entire new battle system for it.

What do you think? Are you glad that the team decided to take this game in its own direction? Do you plan on picking it up? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[source ign.com]