Tekken 7

Heidi Kemps: We've been seeing a bit of a trend lately, spearheaded by games like Street Fighter V and King of Fighters XIV, where new fighting games are skipping an arcade release entirely. Tekken, however, is still going strong in arcades. What are your thoughts on the situation?

Harada: For a lot of companies, it's not really a choice of being able to release first in the arcades or not. An arcade operator has to purchase a game for several thousand dollars, hoping that they'll be able to recoup their investment. Many fighting games couldn't have an arcade release even if they wanted to, because nobody would buy them at that sort of price. Tekken is one of the few still able to command that sort of premium. While Street Fighter IV had an arcade presence, Tekken had five times the amount of machines running - and Street Fighter is one of the stronger ones! If you compare it to other fighting games, we have ten times more machines in operation than them.

The arcade is also a very different business model because the player pays for each time they play a game. If the game isn't fun, then they don't put in more money. That allows us to create a game that's more polished - if people keep playing it, that means it's interesting. Also, it generates quite a bit more profit than many people might think. That, in turn, allows us to take that very polished fighting game and use the income from the arcade version to add bells and whistles like CG movies to the eventual console ports. It's a very good pattern for us that maybe isn't available to other fighting games.

What are your thoughts on the current state of fighting games as an eSport? I get the feeling that more people are actively watching watching games, but I'm not sure if that's really translating into sales of said games.

It's hard to say. There's the game itself—Tekken has sold three million copies with each installment, on average. Back in the day, you couldn't easily watch tournaments that you couldn't physically go to. Nowadays, there are popular players who have their own streaming channels.

In the years before streaming really took off, out of those three million copies sold, around 2.5 million would be more casual players, and maybe about 500,000 would be the more dedicated fans who were into competitive play, and 100,000 of those players would be hardcore enough to attend tournaments and such. But now those tournaments are being seen by more people. It's difficult to judge if that's impacted sales of the game, but it has shifted those ratios around a bit: the people interested in competitive play, either going to tournaments or watching others, might have been 500K before, maybe it's more about half now. So, maybe sales themselves aren't changing much, but the reasons why people are buying the game are.

So, about that Nina Williams redesign in Tekken 7: Fated Retribution… Why the bride motif?

Well, the fact that you're even asking that question means that we succeeded in what we were trying to do! We wanted people to see her and have their interest piqued as to why she's dressed like that, and what kind of story elements might cause that to happen. If you take a look back at the Tekken series, the 1P costume has always had a “fighting gear” sort of look while the 2P side outfit was more everyday clothes. A lot of those 1P costumes went on to be iconic for the characters that wore them. Later games gave you the ability to further customize those outfits with items. Recently, we saw a shift in the tastes of our players. Nina's had her battle outfit for a while, and people wanted something different. With the wedding dress, and other outfits in general, we try to give them a tie-in to the background story, and add a few elements that might get people excited about what's happening: “Hey, why is she wearing this?” It was my idea. I'm glad it's working!

Here I was thinking it might be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “ore no yome” or “mai waifu” otaku meme that's been circulating in Japan and abroad.

Well, that wasn't my intent, but the fans certainly latched onto it! [laughs] It makes me happy.

So Akuma is a guest character in Tekken 7: Fated Retribution. Why did you pick him specifically?

There are many ways to go about having this sort of collaboration. The first is leaving on impact on people who see it. You can do this in a variety of ways: Soul Calibur IV achieved this to great success by having Darth Vader in the game. For us, we felt it had to be a collaboration with another fighting game. Giving it some thought, we felt that it had to be a character who looked cool and felt natural to the Tekken series. Some games might refer to these sorts of characters as “guest characters,” but for us, Akuma's not just a guest. He's an enemy our characters have to face! Not only is he really cool, he doesn't feel out of place at all in Tekken. Story-wise, he blends into Tekken as well, though nothing's really been shown yet regarding that. Maybe you'll be seeing more Akuma-related story bits in the future!

Were any other characters being considered?

Nope, just Akuma. We knew we wanted him from the get-go. It wasn't “hey, let's add on outside character to the game,” it was “hey, let's add Akuma to the game!”

Okay, let's wrap this up. I've noticed that the number of 3D fighting games seems to be on the decline. There are a lot of 2D fighters using 3D visuals, but they still play on a side-scrolling plane. Why do you think 3D fighters have fallen out of favor, and what do you think can be done to reverse this?

This discussion doesn't happen very often, but we've actually been thinking about this very thing for a long time. It might not have so much to do with the “playing” aspect but the “watching” aspect. With 2D fighters, you tend to have a lot of over-the-top techniques like fireballs and energy blasts. Tekken is more like watching something like boxing or UFC grappling. Using boxing as an example, you have several different weight classes, and some of the weight classes are much quicker, but not as hard-hitting as the heavyweights.

In America, though, the heavyweights tend to be more popular—their punches are slower, but when they connect, they have a lot more impact. When you really get deep into boxing, though, you realize things like what jabs are for, the strategies they're employing against each other, and so on, but that can be hard to see if you're just watching on TV.

It's the same story with UFC and grappling. Someone might not be interested in what's going on, they just want to see a KO. If you don't know who's doing what, who's trying to get advantage, then it's not very exciting. Perhaps 3D fighters are similar—you don't have those flashy skills, and it's not always easy to understand why a person's doing a jab or similar technique. Unless you know these elements and understand what's going on, it's harder to be entertained compared to a 2D fighter.