Tekken boss explains how he broke the rules to keep series alive – but not Soulcalibur-Adam Starkey-Entertainment – Metro

Tekken and SoulCalibur previously bumped heads (Bandai Namco)

If you’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been a Soulcalibur game for six years, Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada has provided a lengthy explanation.

While Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat have maintained their position as the biggest fighting game franchises aground, through constant new instalments, one IP which has seemingly fallen by the wayside is Soulcalibur.

The series, which began with 1995’s Soul Edge (aka Soul Blade), hasn’t received a new instalment since 2018’s Soulcalibur 6. At the time, publisher Bandai Namco described it as a success, but since then the company has not mentioned anything about a follow-up.

Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada, who has also worked on several Soulcalibur titles, has now given a explanation of why the series has gone quiet, suggesting it is due to internal politics within the company itself.

Harada addressed the topic in response to a fan, who claimed that if Soulcalibur 2 had a ‘loyal’ and ‘long term’ director like Harada, then sales of that game and the series at large would have increased over time. He also claimed the popularity of the series has declined due to the amount of changes between titles, such as the mechanics.

According to Harada though, the situation with SoulCalibur is more complicated than simply mechanical changes. In a lengthy response, the Tekken director said the departure of key staff behind the franchise, and changes at Bandai Namco, led to it stagnating.

‘This was not simply a matter of sales and marketing, but I can tell you that the organisational changes and decision makers at Namco Bandai had a great deal to do with it,’ he wrote.

For context, Harada explained how there was a ‘rivalry’ between the Tekken and Soulcalibur teams, led by Hiroaki Yotoriyama, within the first 10 years at Bandai Namco, to the point where they ‘fought daily’.

‘The two projects had different visions, different development policies, and very different ways of thinking about the brand,’ Harada added. ‘It is not that we hated each other. However, they were such rivals that it was not surprising to think so.’

He goes onto explain how the fighting game market shifted from arcades to consoles, with Soulcalibur outperforming Tekken in North America on consoles, while the latter remained more popular in arcades.

While Soulcalibur was ‘always seen as having a promising future’, Harada states that things changed as developers behind the franchise became managers higher up in the company, which was the common career trajectory for developers at the time in Japan.

As such, many of the key figures behind Soulcalibur were effectively ‘peeled off’, which meant the ‘big dreams and visions’ for the series ‘became weaker’.

‘Project Soul was struggling to survive (or so it seemed to me), especially among its younger members,’ Harada added. ‘However, it seems that it was difficult for them to maintain their vision, will, and organisational structure now that they are no longer in the game development-centred world of the past, but rather ‘a game development team that is just one of all the businesses in the group companies’.’

Harada states this transition to management happened to him against his will, where he was assigned to a department called Global Business Development which had ‘nothing to do with game development’.

Despite being pulled off Tekken, however, Harada said he continued to lead the series to ensure it would continue: ‘I made the decision to lead the Tekken Project despite the fact that I was in a different company, department, and division, and had no budget authority. I practically manipulated the creative and budget planning.’

He added: ‘And we, Tekken Project, always said that ‘the rights to the title belong to the company, but the fan community can only rely on the team that has the will to make the game’. So, from the very beginning, I decided to completely break the ‘rule of tacit understanding in a company’.’

As such, the Tekken team effectively operated like they were an independent company, which was ‘very much disliked’ by the department heads at the publisher. ‘Yeah, he hated me so much,’ he added.

In reference to this drive to break free from the norms at the company, Harada said: ‘If there is only one major difference between Project Soul and the other companies, this is the only one.

Will Soulcalibur ever come back? (Bandai Namco)

‘There are many titles that have disappeared in the course of these past transitions. There are no obvious villains in that history. They are all being chipped away in the course of a larger trend.’

Harada does end the post on an optimistic note, believing Soulcalibur will come back at some point – although it’s unclear exactly when.

‘But from my point of view, I don’t think the fire of Project Soul has been extinguished. There are still a few people in the company who have the will to do it. I would like to believe that they are just not united now.’

While the future of Soulcalibur doesn’t exactly look bright, based on his comments, this deep dive into the history within Bandai Namco is certainly interesting.

If Soulcalibur seems out of the question for the foreseeable future, Tekken probably won’t be going away anytime soon, after Tekken 8 managed to outsell Street Fighter 6 at launch in January.

SoulCalibur VI was the last entry (Bandai Namco)

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