It’s an old joke that Pokemon is essentially teaching kids about fantasy cockfighting. No, the kind with birds. And now Nintendo’s bringing some MMA to this party with Pokken Tournament.
First uncovered by Kotaku, the game is headed for arcades and is developed by Namco Bandai. And yes, it’s a full-fledged fighting game with Pokemon in it: While we don’t know how many are on the roster, it’s probably going to be fairly substantial and involve a lot of beatings.
It’s also going to be targeted as much at Pokemon fans as it is at hardcore fighting game players, and it’ll apparently be designed to be accessible. So you don’t need to know much in order to start playing, and button mashing will be a perfectly acceptable strategy.
There’s no word yet on a console or a Western release, but as you can see from the video above, a Wii U can probably handle a port of this game, and it seems unlikely that anything Pokemon will be left out of a major market for very long. So expect to see this as a Wii U exclusive sometime in 2015. Until then, though, if you want to play it, you’ll have to wait for the Japanese release. Hey, in the meantime, you can go to Japan and play the arcade version of Half-Life 2, that should keep you busy.