You’d think a game announcement as big as the next major installment in the Tekken series would come with a bang, but Tekken lead Katsuhiro Harada’s announcement of Tekken 7 at Evo - the world’s largest fighting game tournament - was an accidental reveal. A projector mishap caused a revealing Tekken 7 slide to briefly flash-up on-screen. The news was caught by IGN although not officially reported until late last night, however it was leaked ahead of schedule on AOL.com.
The video has since been pulled, but Harada was reported as saying “With Unreal Engine 4, we can rapidly achieve the visual quality expected on next-gen platforms and go beyond it […] Not only is Unreal Engine 4 powerful and easy to use, but it allows us to easily bring Tekken 7 to any platform we desire.” This news has been corroborated by a pair of game reveal trailers linked below.
The trailers use a film-grain style to emphasize the the story material which harkens back to the series past. A woman with her back to the camera tells Kazuya “I must stop him, I must stop Heihachi”. Series fans will know that Heihachi and Kazuya are arguably the worst father-son combo in gaming history. Heihachi having cast his son into a volcano and Kazuya (non-canonically) having tied his father to a rocket and blasted him into outerspace. It’s safe to say the two don’t get along. Not least because Kazuya holds a grudge against Heihachi for having killed his mother.
A text scrawl at the end of the trailer tells us that Tekken 7 will be “The Final Battle”. Presumably between Heichachi and Kazuya rather than the end of the series itself, considering that Tekken X Street Fighter is still officially in the works. The trailer closes with a sombre close-up of Heihachi’s and Kazumi’s (Kazuya’s mother) names etched into a wooden surface. The two names appear under an umbrella shape known as “Ai Ai Gasa” (Lovey-Dovey Umbrella) - in Japanese culture, it isn’t unusual for lovers to write their names under an umbrella like this.
At the moment Tekken 7 has no firm release date or announced platforms, though being based on UE4 presumably rules out Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, making the current crop of hardware the safest bet. We also don’t know whether it will be an F2P release or a full-price boxed game, and it will be interesting to see which given that Harada has expressed the difficulty of getting funding in place in Japanese development circles.
We’ll update you as we hear more. In the meantime, check out the two trailers and see which dub you prefer. The content of the trailers is the same, but the top one is dubbed in English and the bottom one in Japanese. Are you looking forward to it? Or would you rather see Tekken X Street Fighter? Let us know.
Shehzaan Abdulla
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