Anyone hoping for a Tekken Tag Tournament 3 as the genre’s popularity ramps up once more is going to be disappointed, since Bandai Namco has unfortunately shredded any hope of it happening.
I never got around to playing Tekken Tag Tournament until I picked up the second one a couple of years ago and had a fab time with it. It’s an unbalanced mess full of silly quirks and questionable choices, but it’s a lot more palatable when it’s not the current game everyone is trying to compete in.
Tag fighters have seen a pretty major downturn in recent years. We’ve had team fighters like King of Fighters 15 and Dragon Ball FighterZ, but the classic tag style has well and truly gone out of fashion.
Until now, apparently, because we’re currently standing before three pretty major tag releases: Riot’s 2XKO, Skybound’s Invincible VS, and Arc System Works’ Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. The latter of which is threatening to make us learn four entire-ass mains. Pray for the fact I can barely remember one combo.
It’s no surprise, then, that conversations are arising around whether Bandai Namco would bring Tekken Tag Tournament out for a third time. Striking while the iron’s hot, and all that good stuff. IGN recently asked directors Kohei ‘Nakatsu’ Ikeda, Katsuhiro Harda, and producer Michael Murray whether we could expect another 2v2 duke out in the future.
The answer? Not as a standalone experience, no. As Harada points out, Tekken has an incredibly bloated move list. “Each character has so many moves in a 3D fighter, compared to these other games that there’s so much to learn for just one character,” he said.
Harada continued on to say that while each fighter back in the first Tag Tournament game would’ve played more similarly to each other, “the characters became more unique in their move sets” as the series progressed, making it “even more involved to try to learn and master a character, and then another one on top of that.”
It’s a huge knowledge check, even moreso than usual, with Harada saying “there’s just so much more knowledge that’s necessary to enjoy the game” when you factor in extra characters to fight both as and against. It’s something that especially reared its ugly head when Tag Tournament 2 launched on consoles in 2012. “For the hardcore, they ate it up … but for your average player, it was very hard to gain a more casual audience.”
Murray echoed the sentiment, adding: “Nakatsu and myself, we probably grew up in the arcades playing while [Harada] was making Tag 1, so we really enjoy the game. I guess we’re more on the hardcore side of being able to use several characters and such, and we loved Tag 2. But we are fully aware that there were just so many people that couldn’t get a handle on it because of all the knowledge that’s involved.”
Harada said that if Bamco were to give a Tekken tag fighter another try, it would more than likely be consigned as a side gig. “If we were to do it again rather than have a standalone game, it would probably be better to have it as some kind of separate mode within a normal Tekken [entry].”
I mean, it makes sense. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 was a real fiscal low point for the series, one which actively threatened its future. It was a major factor in Tekken 7 operating on a pretty reduced budget compared to its predecessors, which would thankfully go on to climb its way up to 10 million sales and put things back on the right track.
It wouldn’t be the first game to shoehorn in a tag mode on the side, either. It was a mainstay of the fighting games I grew up with like Dead or Alive and Soulcalibur. While I’d love to see it making an appearance during Tekken 8’s life, we’ll probably be waiting a few years more for the chance of it turning up in Tekken 9. I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait.
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