Pokkén Tournament Also Has Support Pokémon And In-Battle Power-Ups

We got a look at the newest Pokémon to participate in Pokkén Tournament with Suicine, Gardevoir, and Pikachu, along with a reveal of the controller that will be used to play the arcade game. Here are some more details from the gameplay footage that was shown.

Support Pokémon are chosen at the start of each round. By the looks of it, these can be used at any time, but they’ll also have a cool-down period. During the demonstration footage, we saw a Lapras appear from the side, and it covered a wide area with its Surf attack, although it got blocked.

The above is a look at the support Pokémon select screen. It shows Snivy with a Leaf Tornado attack, and its charge time marked as “Fast”. Lapras’ shows Surf with a charge time of “Normal”. So far, Namco have shown Support Pokémon pairs of Emolga and Fennekin as a “Set A,” and Snivy and Lapras as “Set B”. What this means exactly remains to be seen.

In the middle of a fight, there’s something called a “Phase Change” that makes the camera angles look more like a 2D fighter with a side-view. There are certain moves that can force a Phase Change as well.

There’s also a Burst Mode, which works as a temporary power up, where Pokémon go into their Mega-forms, and those without Mega versions get a similar power up. In the demonstration, Namco showed Lucario going into his Mega-form, while Pikachu got an power-up with an electric aura.

Special attacks are quite simple to pull off, so they won’t require complicated commands to execute. This is also another reason why it was made possible to play the game on a simple controller, instead of an arcade stick.

As an interesting side-note, the stage description for one of the battle arenas was shown in English. When Pokkén Tournament was originally revealed last year, The Pokémon Company did send out a press release in English, so the game will likely make its way over in some fashion.

Pokkén Tournament is in development for arcade.