00:03Hello, welcome to PlayStation Access, I'm Nathan, and today I am with Katsuhiro Harada, who is the boss of Tekken.
00:09We're going to be talking about Tekken 7, which I've had a go of next door.
00:13I beat a man, I'd never met him before, but I won, that's what I'm doing for you guys.
00:17My first question, Tekken 7, it's the first time it's in Unreal, could you tell us what the Unreal Engine
00:23allows you to do?
00:24What does it mean for Tekken 7?
00:26This is actually the first time we've used an outside engine.
00:29We used to write our own code for everything until now.
00:32But the Unreal Engine has really allowed us to attain very high-level graphics pretty quickly.
00:36Not just for the characters, but also things like particle effects, objects breaking on the ground, and the physics involved
00:42in the movement of clothing.
00:43Unreal has allowed us to do all this relatively easily.
00:47This time Akuma is in the game?
00:49Yeah.
00:50I've seen Akuma, what's he doing there?
00:52That's my only question, what's he doing there?
00:57Well, he's kind of different to your typical guest character, in that he's actually tied to the storyline for Tekken
01:037.
01:03When people pick up the game, they'll find out more of the details, but he's especially involved in one of
01:08the older story arcs with the Mishima family,
01:10namely between Heihachi and his wife Kazumi, who's now dead.
01:14Akuma, he actually owes Kazumi a debt, so when players play through the storyline, they can figure out what that
01:19is,
01:20and how he's involved in the Mishima clan.
01:33In the presentation that we just saw, the move from cinematics and cutscenes straight into the gameplay,
01:39and then the interruption, the storyline coming into the fights, that all seems kind of differently integrated this time.
01:46Can you talk a little bit about what you've done there?
01:52This is really an evolution of the mechanics themselves, because up until now, we've had these opening CG type of
01:58movies.
01:59Then we've also had the characters' entrance poses and their spoken lines, and then they go into battle with each
02:04other.
02:05But it's always been set, the characters always start the same distance apart from each other,
02:09almost as though they've met beforehand and decided where to start, which felt kind of strange.
02:14So I'd always wanted to do this, and having discussed it with the programmers,
02:18they were able to achieve this seamless flow of going straight from cinematics into the in-game cinematics,
02:23and then into the gameplay.
02:27The starting positions of each character depend on what happened in the story,
02:31and the situations they fight in are also affected by the opening sequence of the story as well.
02:36This feels much more natural, and something I've always wanted to do.
02:46My final question, I did win the only game that I've played so far,
02:50but I've been playing Tekken for a long time, Tekken 3 was my big game,
02:54and back then we didn't have any of the rage arts,
02:56so can you just kind of explain a little bit about what rage arts are, and the best time to
03:00use them?
03:06So the rage arts are available when you're enraged,
03:09which is when your health is below a certain amount, and you enter a rage mode.
03:12That's when you have access to these.
03:15So then, should you use it right away as soon as you're enraged?
03:19Maybe not, because the amount of damage you deal with your rage arts depends on how much health you have
03:23left.
03:24The less health you have left, the more damage you do.
03:28Another property of the rage arts is that you can absorb a hit from your opponent,
03:32so even if they're attacking, you can blow through it to finish them off.
03:36So you need to think strategically about how much health your opponent has left,
03:40and when is the best time to use it,
03:42and in certain instances, it might be better to not use it at all,
03:45and just continue to use regular rage mode.
03:59And the very final thing I'd like to ask you,
04:01in the new kind of story section, I saw Akuma say,
04:04die a thousand deaths, which was awesome.
04:07And I want to know if you had like a final,
04:08if you had a battle cry where you were going to kill somebody,
04:10what would it be?
04:13Well, in Japan, we call it bakuchi,
04:15and in English, I think it's cilantro or coriander.
04:18I hate it so much that I could die if I ate it.
04:21So if I was going to use a special chant, it would be,
04:24you give me cilantro, I'm going to beat your behind.
04:30I actually use it frequently,
04:32because when it does appear on my plate,
04:33I turn into Godzilla and rant and rave.
04:35I do actually use that one.
04:37because I'm going to use it as a weapon that I use it.
04:39Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today.
04:42Thank you. Thank you.
04:42Thank you guys for watching, and stay tuned.
04:44We've got loads more coming up over E3.
