Pokken Tournament

On the peanut butter scale, it's roughly jam out of chocolate

The history of Pokémon spinoff genres is almost as old as the franchise itself. Though strong in the puzzle realm, the pint-sized powerhouses have been in everything from photo safaris to typing tutors and beyond. With the cooperation of some big fans from the Tekken team at Bandai Namco, the 20th anniversary was the perfect time for Pokémon to step full force into the real-time fighting realm. And much like Pokémon Snap, it's a solid debut for a spinoff that needs more content to be fully recommendable.


Pokkén Tournament is a one-on-one fighting game that uses six buttons for combat – ranged, melee, special, jump, support calling, and block. Hitting combinations of buttons does throws, special counter attacks, and activates the “Synergy Burst” super mode. Pressing the L and R buttons a second time while in Synergy Burst uses a one-shot (per full meter) super move that looks visually impressive and does a load of damage to the opponent. The controls work well on the GamePad, Wii U Pro Controller, or the wired Pro Pad controller from Horii (sold and reviewed separately). A Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination is supported, but given the limited buttons in that scheme, it's not ideal. Regardless of the control scheme, the controls don’t take too long to master. In my testing, players who only had the first of the game's tutorials were consistently beating me in one-on-one matches after I had played most of the single-player modes.

One of the major selling points of Pokkén is that this is the first time Pokémon have been represented in honest-to-Arceus HD. And it doesn't disappoint as the combatant Pokémon look striking on the big screen. From the rough skin of Garchomp to the detail on Pikachu Libre's wrestling gear, the little touches on each of the Pokémon are gorgeous and easy to spot. Each stage has its fair share of neat visual gags as well; one stage clearly features someone trying to hatch a Pokémon as in the RPGs, complete with riding a bike and a nearby Volcarona to speed up the process. The Tekken team also has some references, from Pikachu clearly fighting like Heihachi from the Tekken games with some extra juice, to an entire tribute to the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 stage Bountiful Sea that adds flying Magikarp. The background music for the stages doesn't distract, but the game features constant cheering from your assistant Nia that can be adjusted downward. After a few hours, you'll be glad you did.

The single-player game is fun, but repetitive. The loop is your character chooses a partner Pokémon and enters a league with a large number of participants. You start at the bottom of the leagues, which have at least 30 entrants, and battle groups of opponents and their Pokémon five in a row. Win a majority of your matches and your ranking increases, until you reach a top 8 and enter a tournament. (A minor nitpick: I finished each tournament, and never had a tournament with the right seeding: 1 vs 8, 2 vs 7 and so on. You would think a game with Tournament in the name would know how to conduct a seeded tournament.) Winning the tournament earns you a match with a League Master, and defeating the League Master earns you a large reward (including new Support Pokémon and stages) and a match with the story's villain, Shadow Mewtwo. The storyline isn't going to win any awards, but it does a good job of staying close to the story beats of a Pokémon RPG, for better or worse. For those who haven't romped through a Pokémon RPG in a while, you can level the Pokémon you fight with to increase their stats, and a lot of the replay value will come from getting everything to high levels. The battle flow does get repetitive after a while, however, and serves to really exacerbate the game's biggest issue: the limited roster.

Despite drawing from a franchise with over 700 characters, only 44 different species do anything in battle, and 30 of those are things the main roster summons for just a single attack. The (maximum) 16 selectable characters hit two of the same species twice with the two forms of Pikachu and Mewtwo. Granted, the two Pokémon that double up are among the most popular ones, but the roster has plenty of room for expansion. Sadly, no plans are on the table for DLC for Pokkén Tournament, so the 16 playable characters in the base game might be all that we ever get.

The other ways Pokkén generates replay value are in the customization and multiplayer. Myriad options exists for designing your character, though building up funds in the single-player modes is necessary to buy the clothing items. You can also tap Amiibo to the GamePad five times a day to unlock clothing items as well as in-game titles that follow your character into multplayer modes. My character's tag is “I Am The Game,” which I personally found disappointing as I was going for manager of champions Paul Heyman and ended up with current (as of press time) world heavyweight champion Triple H.

The multiplayer modes are pretty simple, but functional. The key controversy with the local multiplayer is the game having to split views (one person on the GamePad, one with another controller) and splitting the framerate, which wouldn't make sense in a normal fighting game. However, the two-phase nature of Pokkén, in which battles shift from full 3D to a near side view after certain attacks, means that it's the closest the game will have to an elegant solution. The original arcade game used dual monitors, and the Wii U version supports LAN play, so under the right circumstances, full framerate play is possible – but it's probably not going to happen. (Nintendo World Report only received a single code for review.) We tested the online, though all it had before launch were simple “ranked” and “friendly” match types. No spectator mode, quarter match, or party options exist. The performance was good – only one match ended up as a slideshow – but given the importance of online play, a full review of that will be appended here once the game has been released. For now, the chief advantage to playing online is that your single-player character carries its experience in and will gain levels there as well, so both you and your new Pokémon can get better through online practice.

The base of a great fighter is present in Pokkén Tournament – the combat is simple to pick up but has enough complexity that a competitive scene could thrive. What characters are present do play with enough variety that you won't get bored leveling them up, and the obsessives will have a field day collecting every title and piece of clothing. It's also a graphical showcase for late era Wii U games. It's just that if this is going to be Street Fighter II, it needs a Super version with some new challengers – and hopefully not at full price.


Summary
Pros

• Easy to pick up and play
• Pokémon have never looked this good before
• Stealing Pikachu's soul as a ghostly candle never gets old

Cons

• Assistant's voice acting is extremely grating
• Local multiplayer doesn't represent the game's power
• Too much Fire

Score Pending