Long interview: Harada looks back at the 5 years of Tekken 7

It's been a long time hasn't it? Tekken 7 saw it's initial gameplay debut back in the location tests of October 2014, but would eventually 'pre-launch' in February 2015 with an official launch a month later. In commemoration of Tekken 7's 5th anniversary, Dengeki Online talks to Katsuhiro Harada in this enormous single page interview on a wide range of topics. Subjects to expect; Post-launch support for the title, arcade adoption with the online network, collaborations, balancing characters, Tekken's low points, on spreading Tekken globally etc etc. He even explains why a Wing Chun character has finally arrived after all this time. This interview is huge so this page will run a machine translation on the entire thing so don't expect everything to be ad-verbatim, but I say this mostly came out decent so it's worth posting. In case of any inaccuracies, the original source in Japanese is here and prevails:

Dengeki Online Source ≫ https://dengekionline.com/articles/28096/

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What's next Harada: evolving the fighting game genre and Esports

It's that time of the year again where E3 takes place, and although there isn't anything new to present for the Tekken or SoulCalibur side of things, figureheads from Bandai Namco were in attendance once again to do an E3 coliseum panel with Geoff Keighley. The panel for this year is focused on the strengths of Fighting games in the Esports business, but similar to the interview from last year, Geoff is slightly awkward since he doesn't have a FG background and throws out his ideas on where they could go or evolve into that might not really resonate with those inside the community. Video archive of the 'Strength of Fighting Games in Esports' session is now available for people to catch up over on YouTube. I also have a written transcript of the panel added down below so feel free to read that if you want to skip most of the 'soooo, uhhh, anooo' air time.

• E3 Coliseum Host: Geoff Keighley
• Tekken Franchise Director: Katsuhiro Harada
• Tekken Franchise Producer: Michael Murray
• TEKKEN 7 & SOULCALIBUR VI Brand Manager: Mark Religioso
• Senior Esports Specialist BNEA: Cesar Solorio

The Strength of Fighting Games in Esports ≫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkMEc-cIGdg

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Tekken World Tour 2018 Season Begins Next Week at Final Round

Eeeeesports. Bandai Namco are back to announce the new year of competitive Tekken 7 with the Tekken World Tour. The 2018 season of the Tekken World Tour officially kicks off this month with the first event; Final Round 18 on March 16-18 being a Master level event for competitors looking for a strong start to the new season. The big changes to the tour format for this year is the unified leaderboards which replace the region locked leaderboards from last year, the location of grand finals event which is now set to take place in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and 20 top placers from the leaderboards qualifying for the TWT Grand Finals (up from the previous 16). For more details on the Tekken World Tour for 2018, you can check out their recently revamped web page for the 2018 tour:

Tekken World Tour ≫ https://tekkenworldtour.com/

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IeSF 2017 | 9th Esports World Championship Streamed Live on November 11

Taking place later today is the 9th Esports World Championship hosted by the International Esports Federation in Busan, Korea. This is a global scale competition for Tekken 7 as qualifiers for this world championship was hosted across 23 countries to find the world's best to compete in Korea. Tekken 7 at the EWC has already progressed to the quarterfinal stages off stream and among the players representing at the event are Jeondding (S.Korea), Book (Thailand), Doujin (Philippines) Kor_nnova (New Zealand) & more so you can expect strong competition. The Tekken 7 tournament finals day starts at 10 AM Korean time (5 PM PST) and finishes with the finals at around 8 PM (3 AM PST.) You can watch the live broadcast of the Esports World Championship over on the International Esports Federation Twitch channel here when it comes live:

IeSF_TV Twitch stream ≫ https://twitch.tv/iesf_tv

International Esports Federation ≫ http://www.ie-sf.org/

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AfreecaTV TEKKEN League 2017 Finals

We're at the end of the road, the AfreecaTV TEKKEN League Finals is taking place on Friday night. We've wittled out all the fierce competition that entered the league and the four remaining players left in the Semi-Finals and Grand-Finals are GoAttack, LowHigh, Knee & Qudans. The finals are taking place on 06/17 at 10PM PDT with a four-man double elimination bracket with Match 1 of GoAttack vs Knee and then Match 2 with LowHigh vs Qudans. The action will once again be streamed live worldwide via the AfreecaTV Global stream channel so tune in to catch the finale of the Tekken League featuring world class Tekken 7 from Korea.

ATL 2017 Finals Global Stream ≫ http://afreeca.tv/ATL2017

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