Namco Bandai has revealed that the well-received Tekken Tag Tournament 2 has missed company sales expectations. The publisher says that the company planned to ship 1.7 million units of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 but ended up just under target at 1.5 million units worldwide. The Wii U version of the popular beat-em-up franchise ended up with an average review score of 83% on online review aggregator, Metacritic.
Namco Bandai has announced that Tekken Tag Tournament 2 will be available at both retail and as a digital download on the Wii U eShop. However, the game will take up a whopping 16GB of space, which is clearly an issue if you purchase the Wii U Basic 8GB package. Thankfully, Nintendo has already confirmed that you can use a variety of external hard drives with Wii U, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Still, that’s one big download.
Namco Bandai Games’ Katsuhiro Harada, who is also the producer of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, is pushing for the localization of Project X Zone, which is the first crossover game among Namco Bandai Games, Capcom and Sega. On his Twitter account, Harada says he “proposed localization of Project X Zone,” and if he continues pushing for it, his suggestion will be recognized and considered.
Project X Zone will launch exclusively for Nintendo 3DS in Japan on October 11th.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 director Katsuhiro Harada admits that even he doesn’t fully understand Nintendo’s online service for Wii U. This is Harada’s response when asked whether or not the Wii U can compete against PlayStation Network and Xbox Live:
“Not quite sure at this point. I don’t fully understand it. We’re still working with Nintendo to find out about their network.”
Some lucky individual managed to snag themselves a pre-release copy of Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The individual subsequently mined the disc and discovered that there are six additional characters stored on it. Here are the six characters that were unearthed:
Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada has revealed that working alongside Nintendo on Tekken Tag Tournament 2 has allowed the development team to bring unique things to the Wii U version of the game. Harada gave the example of using the mega mushroom as a reminder of the fact that collaborating with Nintendo has been beneficial.
“We can say this – because we are collaborating with Nintendo we really wanted to create features like [the Mega Mushroom] that are only possible because we are collaborating with Nintendo. That’s just one example and we hope that everyone will be looking forward to the other things we have to show.”
Japanese gaming bible Famitsu has awarded Tekken Tag Tournament 2 an extremely impressive 39 out of 40 review score in its latest issue. The publications four reviewers individually awarded the game 10, 9, 10 and 10 scores, resulting in an overall score of 39. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is destined to launch on Wii U in the neat future.
The cover art of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 features the main protagonist of the Tekken series, Jin Kazama, along with his trainer/grandfather, Heihachi Mishmima. The game will launch later this month for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and this holiday for Wii U.
Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada claims he knows why Namco Bandai was chosen by Nintendo to work on the next Super Smash Bros. games for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. Because Super Smash Bros. is a fighting game, Nintendo supposedly wanted Namco Bandai because of its 17 years of experience with the Tekken franchise. According to Harada, Namco Bandai has developed a “very good” relationship with both Nintendo and Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai.
“I think Nintendo chose us just because Smash Brothers is a fighting game. We have over 17 years of continuously developing titles in our franchise [Tekken], I think they felt we were a choice for that.”
“Also, we’ve continually developed a very good relationship with Nintendo. Maybe not necessarily in the public spotlight but kind of behind the scenes. We have established a very good working relationship with them. Not just Nintendo, but as a company, we have a very good relationship with Sakurai-san at Sora as well. I think that we are in very good position to make a great game for the Smash Brothers series.”
Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada claims that consumers are no longer dedicated to one platform and console makers can no longer control the way people game. Nowadays, there are many platforms that gamers can choose from to play on. Harada thinks that “it would be interesting if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo got together just to make one console,” and it makes him “very happy to think about all the possibilities that could occur because of that.”
