Game:

Pokkén Tournament (2015)

Duration: 6:30

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Let's kick off the first of the game's five tutorials with the basics! As a new fighter, the game's main goal (other than, you know, making the fighting good) is to make sure players know just how to play the thing!

Meet Nia, both our coach for the tutorials, and the narrator of matches, and all the menus. She's a battle trainer that takes you under her wing and while I appreciate her help....she gets annoying fast. She talks constantly, often interrupts herself with MORE advice that may or may not be helpful and...well, her voice acting is as wooden as can be. So I've adjusted the sound settings (the "Voice" option) and set it to be about half of what it usually is. If she sounds a tad hard to hear at times, this is why. Especially when certain music kicks in, it kinda drowns her out. Sorry about that...but trust me, I'm sparing you from her prattle!

I've chosen Lucario for these tutorials, as it is both the mascot for this game, and the "Ryu" of the game, a balanced character that is great for learning the fundamentals. The game breaks down the fighters in four categories: Standard, Power, Speed and Technique, and fittingly, Lucario is Standard. There's still variety within Standard characters though, some favoring close-combat and some better at range, but Lucario is decent at both!

The tutorials, generally, do good jobs of explaining things well, so the description here will get redundant fast if I don't reign in my ramblings.

Basically, this is a game that blends 3D arena-styled fighting with more traditional 2D fighting. You move back and forth between the Field Phase and Dual Phase constantly during battle, with most strong hits transitioning from one Phase to the next. As such, everyone's got at least some projectiles and melee options, some having more options than others. Overall, we've got Light and Heavy attacks (X and Y buttons), as well as Special Attacks (A button), with a Jump (B) and Guard (R).

We see glimpses of other mechanics in this video, and end it with Synergy Bursts. A super state that really turns the battle around, it comes complete with really pumped music! More on this mechanic in the other tutorials. Don't want to get ahead of ourselves!

Now, this might seem simple enough to keep track of, and for the basics, yeah, it's not bad....but as you'll see, there's QUITE a bit under this game's hood. More than anything else, there's just a lot of attacks to memorize rather than getting muscle memory down for landing attacks.

See you for the next lesson!

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