If you’ve been questioning why there hasn’t been a Soulcalibur recreation for six years, Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada has offered a prolonged clarification.
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 tasks had totally different visions, totally different improvement insurance policies, and really alternative ways of excited about the model,’ Harada added. ‘It is just not that we hated one another. However, they have been such rivals that it was not stunning to suppose so.’
He goes onto clarify how the combating recreation market shifted from arcades to consoles, with Soulcalibur outperforming Tekken in North America on consoles, whereas the latter remained extra standard in arcades.
While Soulcalibur was ‘at all times seen as having a promising future’, Harada states that issues modified as builders behind the franchise turned managers larger up within the firm, which was the widespread profession trajectory for builders on the time in Japan.
As such, lots of the key figures behind Soulcalibur have been successfully ‘peeled off’, which meant the ‘massive goals and visions’ for the collection ‘turned weaker’.
‘Project Soul was struggling to outlive (or so it appeared to me), particularly amongst its youthful members,’ Harada added. ‘However, it appears that evidently it was troublesome for them to keep up their imaginative and prescient, will, and organisational construction now that they’re not within the recreation development-centred world of the previous, however somewhat ‘a recreation improvement crew that is only one of all the companies within the group firms’.’
Harada states this transition to administration occurred to him in opposition to his will, the place he was assigned to a division known as Global Business Development which had ‘nothing to do with recreation improvement’.
Despite being pulled off Tekken, nonetheless, Harada stated he continued to steer the collection to make sure it will proceed: ‘I made the choice to steer the Tekken Project even though I used to be in a distinct firm, division, and division, and had no funds authority. I virtually manipulated the inventive and funds planning.’
He added: ‘And we, Tekken Project, at all times stated that ‘the rights to the title belong to the corporate, however the fan neighborhood can solely depend on the crew that has the need to make the sport’. So, from the very starting, I made a decision to utterly break the ‘rule of tacit understanding in an organization’.’
As such, the Tekken crew successfully operated like they have been an unbiased firm, which was ‘very a lot disliked’ by the division heads on the writer. ‘Yeah, he hated me a lot,’ he added.
In reference to this drive to interrupt free from the norms on the firm, Harada stated: ‘If there is just one main distinction between Project Soul and the opposite firms, that is the one one.
‘There are many titles which have disappeared in the middle of these previous transitions. There aren’t any apparent villains in that historical past. They are all being chipped away in the middle of a bigger development.’
Harada does finish the publish on an optimistic notice, believing Soulcalibur will come again sooner or later – though it’s unclear precisely when.
‘But from my standpoint, I don’t suppose the hearth of Project Soul has been extinguished. There are nonetheless just a few folks within the firm who’ve the need to do it. I wish to consider that they’re simply not united now.’
While the way forward for Soulcalibur doesn’t precisely look vibrant, based mostly on his feedback, this deep dive into the historical past inside Bandai Namco is actually attention-grabbing.
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.
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