~ Estimated Reading Time: 4 min ~
The game with the smallest demographic ever? Not to say that literally nobody can appreciate this crossover - Pokemon and Tekken are basically my most played games of the year so far - but the compromises both sides have to make for each other shrinks its remaining appeal. They smoothed out every edge that the appeal of Tekken thrives on, knowing that its gameplay speed wouldn't work for the kids getting this for christmas. They will be left with nothing to remember about this deeply mechanically-generic game, other than the few drops of the Namco Bandai juice that stuck. There's like a LITTLE bit of club music that managed to get Pokemon scrubbed enough to pass through, and Shadow Mewtwo doing Devil Kazuya shit is like this game's whole cultural footprint.
We are not calling this shit "kusoge". Like yes, the term gets thrown around for a lot of underloved games, and there's a reason that vibe is beloved. It has that outsider art thing going on, where because no companies really knew exactly what was going on that made Street Fighter 2 work. Everyone broke a lot of invisible rules that loosened these games up, gave them weird options that would've never flied. Kusoge is not when your game has a "_ is Broken" video. Pokken is a professionally made AAA fighting game by a 30 year veteran - its rigormortis has been developed intentionally with precision.
The blocking stance in this game is incredibly laggy in a way that drags the whole pace down. That split second you can't move after guarding feels like decades compared to Tekken's usual fluidity. There's a Focus Attack-esque thing you can absorb two hits with, so you can use that instead to move more aggressively, but it's actually too over-emphasized. There's a rock-paper-scissors-y feel to breaking through it, which makes committing to any response feel kinda bad. It just makes the whole game feel very much like each character is in one State at a time, and the states don't flow into each other naturally. I put on some high-level play to see how much skill can loosen it up, but because of how little each highly committal option covers, everyone just slows down at close range. There isn't even high-low mixup to open their opponent's guard up - top players freeze up like dogs who caught their car when they've approached. Defensive play is glacially slow in this game.
But obviously I get why something like this - something normal, something so normal it financially fails for not being interesting enough - gets incorrectly labeled as kusoge by some. They both have the same outcome, existing for most people as some oddity to boot up a few times out of sheer intrigue. If someone was like "how do you feel about there being a real video game where pikachu does spinning demon uppercut" i'd be like "that sounds like something my brain would produce in a haze at 5am". And so I'm playing it in a haze at 5AM. And I think it is pretty easy to have fun with most things under SOME circumstances. So of course there are a dozen things that are still Interesting about this, there is a little too much history behind both franchise-halves for there not to be. I say this neither joyously nor cynically, because I think it's okay for something to just be a thing you have fun with for an evening.
Like, I kinda love the way the Pokemon animate in this? There's a lot of obviously ripped Tekken animations, which of course has its own appeal - the bespoke shitty model swap energy of machamp doing King animations is always gonna be memorable. But they also just really push the limits of these design's bodytypes in a way that the actual series has never done. Stuff like Empoleon bellyflopping while using its arms as swords, Blastoise moving around like a tank with jets of water under its feet, Sceptile with the flip-kick wrist-blade izuna drop shit, and whatever Chandelure is doing... It doesn't 'feel like Pokemon' to me, but that's because what Pokemon battles look like in my head were defined by a bunch of C-tier Naruto fights from the 2000s anime. The series interpreted by people who've instead watched hundreds of hours of wuxia as reference is actually like...the most interesting interpretation I've seen by far?
And for people who actively enjoy this, you don't even need to think about how to wring fun out of it. No matter how "dead" you think it is, you can play it as much as you want. It's Pokemon, so it's always going to have a thousand more diehards than some of the genuinely forgotten oddities I've stumbled onto through Fightcade.... But even with that casual social irrelevancy, fearing its status as a potential "discord fighter" is silly. You're honestly more likely to have a meaningful, or even life-changing experience playing a niche game with a small community than anything else! Regardless of perspective, I think this sorta thing is worth playing... I'll keep noticing cute details each time I revisit; (one hour of) Pokken (per half decade) 4 life