Pokkén Tournament is more Pokémon-like and skill-intensive than you’d expect

It seems like the most obvious thing in the world to make a fighting game spinoff of an role-playing game property that features monster fighting, but until now, The Pokémon Company was content to leave its competitive battling turn-based. That changes with the emergence of Pokkén Tournament, the new fighting game from Namco Bandai coming to Wii U in Spring 2016 that aims to capture the spirit of monster battling in a real-time, blow-for-blow format.

And The Pokémon Company isn’t fooling around here. It’s using developers who work on the Soul Calibur and Tekken (hence the name Pokkén) series. With such a pedigree, one would expect a polished and fun fighting game in the same vein as the aforementioned series. What is surprising is how much of this it owes to its Pokémon DNA.