Tekken 6’s new online features were highly anticipated, but so far it’s turned out to be the game’s biggest weakness. And guess what. Katsuhiro Harada isn’t surprised.

The lag in Tekken 6’s online play is unacceptably bad and Namco Bandai knows it. They’ve vaguely said that a downloadable patch will be available “as soon as it has passed rigorous testing procedures”. Clearly, they did not do enough rigorous testing on one of the game’s key components before releasing it.

Incidentally, when we asked you what you wanted to ask Harada-san, the question over online play was raised. So when I asked him if he thinks there’s a market for online play in fighting games… he had to stop and think about it.

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Building new characters into an existing story doesn’t happen without considering game balance. So how did Katsuhiro Harada bring it all together in Tekken 6?

From a story perspective, new characters are easily justified by their individual motives for fighting in the tournament. A pink-haired robot, a fat martial arts legend and a Spanish bull fighter are among eight characters introduced in Tekken 6, bringing the total number of characters in the fighting game series to 42. Harada says that achieving game balance with so many characters came down to three things.

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It may be at the top of the fighting game genre now, but the Tekken series wasn’t always popular. Katsuhiro Harada (aka Mr. Tekken) explains how Tekken fought its way to the top, and what makes it unique.

Harada-san was in Sydney last week for the worldwide launch of Tekken 6 on PS3 and XBox 360. Armed with your questions, I had a one-on-one chat with him about the past, present and future of Tekken, and more specifically, how it compares to a competing game he contributed towards: Soulcalibur.

He says that Soulcalibur’s animation was based on the code used for Tekken, but players will note that the games’ mechanics are “radically different” from each other. In fact, the two teams had completely different philosophies on what a fighting game should look like.

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