and those who put too much stock in how weak others say certain characters are
It’s a bit wild to think for fans that Tekken is turning 30 years old here in 2024, and there’s some faces on the development team that have continued to stick around since the beginning.
That includes longtime Director / Producer Katsuhiro Harada, who recently shared some interesting tidbits about the early titles as well as thoughts on character hype and balance in Tekken 8.
Harada’s Bar recently released a new episode having pro Street Fighter player Rohto|Tokido on as a guest to help celebrate reaching 100,000 subscribers on YouTube for both of their channels alongside the comedians Kotetsu Hoshino and Tomoyuki Yano.
The jokesters present the fighting game icons with No Motion jerseys to which they have a laugh about Harada looking like Falcons|MenaRD.
The veteran developer also talks a bit about how pros BI|Doujin and NV|AK from the Philippines were celebrated by their president and own two houses, which he laughs about saying even he doesn’t have as the Producer of the games.
Harada then jokes that he could just nerf or delete their characters out of spite / jealously, which eventually gets them on the topic of balance and character strength.
He lauds Tokido’s avoidance of complaining about games online and laments that he wished more top players had some more perspective on how developers have to approach projects like Tekken.
“But among pro players, not only Tekken players, there are some people who believe they are [entitled] to criticize on game balance because they are skilled and have enough accomplishments,” said Harada. “They think they know about the game best. But for us, everyone is our fans and customers, no matter how good their skill level is. What kind of game balance highly skilled people want and what people who just want to enjoy the game are very different.
“When Tekken 8 was released, many said ‘Kuma is just for jokes. We can’t win with Kuma. How come Kuma is always like this? Do better, Harada!’ Many kept saying that to me for so long. But once Rangchu started to win with Kuma, people started to say the opposite. ‘It’s too OP. Why did you do that? He’s not even a human character to begin with.’
“I was like, ‘Rangchu is the only player who wins so much with Kuma!'”
So players tend to put a lot of stock in what others have to say about specific characters / the game in general in our hyper-connected world now when things aren’t usually so black and white.
Yano complaining about Paul’s strong punches in the original Tekken, but the longtime developer says it was King who was the truly broken character.
Harada talks about how King ended up having an unfair advantage because players can just hold a throw input before the round start that’ll come out as soon as possible and is hard to avoid unless you hold to jump back.
He also mentions how in the older games there were some attacks it was actually better to get by than dodging or guarding against too.
The comedians ask about having voice actors in the original Tekken games to which Harada says they used some but also tried to keep as much of it in house as possible, which led him to voice Marshall Law up until like Tekken 6 — something that dedicated fans likely already knew though that’s not all he had to say.
He reveals that Yoshimitsu was handled by creating a mixture of the voices of himself, members of the sound team and some others while the children in King’s ending were just adults at Namco.
“Do you remember Tekken 1’s ending scene with King? Those voices were animation staff members,” said Harada.
Strangely as we look back now, however, we don’t hear any voices at all in King’s ending — Just the music.
Harada does also mention that the animation staff used to wear aprons to block electromagnetic waves back in the day from monitors, and we can see some aprons on the “children” in the real life footage included in the FMV.
So perhaps he meant that they used the Namco staffers as children in the video, or there’s an older version of the ending that we can’t find — or maybe it’s the Mandela Effect.
No matter the case, it is still fascinating to hear how developers had to essentially wear different hats back in the day that almost probably no one on the outside realized or took much notice of.
Now, these development team sizes have grown exponentially to put people on very specific tasks to try and keep up with the demands of high-fidelity gaming compared to what it was in the ’90s where smaller groups were left to try and figure things out on the fly and do what they could with limited resources.
There’s a ton more discussed in the full video including Tekken Tag Tournament 2, dealing with fans, tournament prep and canned takoyaki.
Plus there’s a lot of laughs with the comedians on set, so we recommend checking that out below.