What do you get when you put the head of Tekken together with the Soul Calibur team and ask them to make a Pokemon fighting game? You get a game that’s not only a good game for “casuals” but maybe even potentially a competitive Arena Fighter which are few and far in-between. You get Pokkén Tournament.
What was that Black Pokemon?
Pokkén Tournament’s story is nothing special. You arrive in the Ferrum region. People here fight with their Pokemon through their Battle AR with a Synergy stone in them. It makes the bond between Pokemon and Trainer stronger. The story mode is just the player going through a set number of battles with some small talk from opponents in between. It doesn’t take too long however for a mysterious woman and a Mewtwo with a black color and shard in his shoulder to attack you. After that, you will meet players who were also attacked. It’s obvious where this is all leading up to. The story mode is nothing special but what is special is the voice-acting. The first thing you will want to do is turn the voice to Japanese or turn off the voice-acting entirely. The English voice acting is incredibly bad. Its voice-acting is so bad it might even overshadow the original Resident Evil in terms of badness and almost in hilarity. Pokkén’s story is nothing special but is required to unlock assist Pokemon and both Mewtwo and Shadow Mewtwo.
Most of The story will be presented by small dialogues like this.
Complex but approachable
Pokkén tournament is an arena fighter. Two opponents face off and have free control of their characters in a flat arena with the camera positioned behind them. The game starts off playing much like the Naruto Ninja Storm games, but as soon some hits are dealt, the game changes dramatically. There are two different phases in Pokkén. One is called Field phase which was the above-mentioned style. However when certain attacks are executed the game shifts to a 2D play style called Dual Phase. Both phases play very differently with Field’s focus being on ranged attacks and trying to get in on the opponent and Dual’s getting more up close and personal.
Most arena fighters are fairly simple and are mostly just fluff, but Pokkén Tournament instead tries to actually deliver on a deeper and more engaging mechanic. Of course, the attack triangle is present with attacks beating throws, throws beating counter attacks and counter attacks beating regular attacks. All Pokemon are in four categories: standard, speed, power and technical. Every Pokemon works vastly differently, Machamp for instance deals a lot of damage and likes to get in close while Gardevoir likes to keep opponents at a distance. All Pokemon have different tools to deal with any situation and there is no lack of attacks. Special attacks even have the same attributes as their RPG counterpart. For instance, Blaziken’s Brave Bird actually does recoil damage or if High Jump Kick misses, Blaziken receives fall damage.
Pokkén falls fairly light on content other than the actual fighting. You can customize your avatar with clothing and titles and playing with Pokemon levels them up. Each level a Pokemon increases is one point the player can put into either attack, defense, strategy or synergy. Other than the fairly basic and simple story mode, training, local versus and CPU battle, there also are online battles to be had. The online is great. The longest it takes for a match to be found is 10 seconds at max and most of the time a match is found within 2 seconds. Most battles run really smooth. There are of course some bad cases but these are very far and few in-between. Clearly a great deal of care and thought was put behind the characters and mechanics and that’s what makes Pokkén not only fun but actually engaging and maybe even fit for a competitive scene.
Fighting is fun and looks flashy.
Lacking a bit in the visuals department.
Visually Pokkén looks good. While the game looks nice for the most parts, there is some weird pixelation going on with some characters and effects. The Pokemon look great and there is great attention to detail in their animation. All characters just have charm oozing off them. Attacks look great and have a lot of visual flair. Pokkén Tournament is a very colorful game and the characters move fluently. What doesn’t move as fluently are the background Pokemon and characters in the stages. The background animation and models look horrendous. Most Pokemon are just low-polly models and are set in a specific pose. Any movement they have is just the models being moved back and forth and sometimes the models are just sliding across the floor. While of course, the main focus is the playable characters, it does take a lot of charm out of the stages. It’s a sad thing considering all the charm of the playable characters would have been great seeing on the models of the huge amount of characters in the background. What’s even worse is that some stages have crowds in them that are just flat 2D images that would make the N64 say “Damn that’s ugly”. The menus look nice and clean and are easy to navigate and the music for the most part is just there to fill silence except for the stages’ tracks which sound amazing. There is something strange going on visually with the game, and the backgrounds miss the same charm that the playable characters have but other than that Pokkén looks good.
Here you can see the weird in the effect mentioned in the review.
A new challenger enters the scene!
Closing note:
Pokkén Tournament is a great game. It’s an Arena Fighter with depth and balance which is something the genre has been sorely missing. The story is just there for the sake of having something to offer and the voice-acting is so ridiculously bad it’s funny. The game has some deep stuff to offer and is incredibly fun. All characters play widely different and all have different ways of dealing with their opponents. The customization options are a neat little extra and leveling up your Pokemon for buffs while small in effect is a little incentive to continue playing. Despite all that, the game doesn’t offer that much in the way of different modes but the excellent online will offer players enough fun to come back again and again. Graphically, while Pokkén won’t set the world on fire, it looks pretty good. Characters’ personalities are charming and the animations are great. That’s not something that can be said of the stages as any Pokemon or people in them are either poorly animated or a blurry image. Pokkén Tournament is a great game with depth and character and even if it’s a bit barebone; as long you either have friends or an online connection you will be able to keep yourself busy until you feel satisfied.
