Interview with Katsuhiro Harada, Chief Producer of Tekken Tag Tournament 2

At Namco Bandai's Global Gamer Day, I had the pleasure to interview Katsuhiro Harada, the Game Director and Chief Producer of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, via translator. Yes, this could have been posted earlier, but I've been nursing a ruptured eardrum that I got on my flight back. Anyways, it was the end of a long day of previews and Q&As — I know, my job is so hard — and Harada was kicking back shots of Tequila all day, so I decided to make the interview brief and have a fun with it.

Since I don't have my preview of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 up yet, I'll say in advance that Harada was dressed in a white pinstriped suit with glasses on, and he looked like a baller. He was accompanied by two women who were cosplaying to hype the game, and they had a Lamborghini with Tekken Tag Tournament 2 decals on it; oh, and Adrianne Curry was cosplaying as Christie Monteiro. Other journalists went off about this, which I'll discuss at a later time. This is all about…

The Interview!

Lance Liebl: Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. I know it's been a long day so I'll keep this brief.

Katsuhiro Harada: No problem. Happy to do it.

LL: First of all, I loved your entrance this morning. And I need to ask, how can I be as much of a baller as you, and where can I buy your suit?

KH: You have to start by first drinking as much Tequila as you can.

LL: Eh, I'm a scotch guy, so that's gonna be tough.

KH: (without the help of a translator) AH! Scotch guy! I love scotch too! (here's the audio clip for proof!)

LL: Okay! Next time we meet I'll bring scotch. Also, I own a Vita, and Mortal Kombat is coming to the Vita —

The translator said “Oh, I know where you're going with this.”

LL: — and Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, I own it, I don't like it and I'm not good at it, but I own it. I could use some Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for the Vita. Let's get this going.

KH: Well, yea. I mean, we'd like to, but there are several hurdles. For example, in Tekken 6 we could only have two characters on screen at once. We finally got enough performance to get four on the same screen, and whether we could accomplish that on Vita is questionable — I mean with processing. But personally, I really like the hardware and have one myself. I would like to make a version for Vita if we could find time to develop it.

LL: Okay, so we'll have a scotch and Vita party. Come to Florida; we'll do this.

KH: Oh we've been before, we went to Orlando.

LL: Well come visit and we'll do this, on me. So, you're able to swap out characters at will, and both players can do that, that's what I understand?

KH: Correct.

LL: So, when you're playing online with random people, how will you combat people just griefing and trolling by constantly swapping out and ruining the gameplay experience?

KH: Currently, the way we are looking at it is we'll probably have it so you have two people on one PS3 against two other people on a separate PS3. The reason for this is, well first, technically, if you have four machines and one is way far off, the lag caused by that is going to affect everyone and not make the game so entertaining. But not just that, from a gameplay perspective, it's better if you're close and you can talk — like I'm going to change now and communicate. It's much more fun to play tag that way. So on both fronts, we found it's much more entertaining to do it the way we described.

LL: Last question, you have incredibly good looking women cosplay for your game. I don't know if it's because it's the best fighting game or if it's because of you guys, so which one do you think it is?

KH: Well, it's not just the women. It's the cars — the Lamborghini and such. This time for Tag 2, we're very confident in what we have. It's AAA class. So we just wanted to make sure everyone understands that from our presentation, as well, because the presentation has to be AAA too.

LL: Well thank for your time. I appreciate it.

KH: Thank you.

You can follow Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ