Story by  Staff Writer Carlos Hernandez and Reporter Ricky Stiles 
Photo courtesy of Game Zone

In our continuing coverage of the year of Pokemon, we come to this year’s second major release, Pokken. This long-time anticipated game is the Pokemon version of the legendary fighting game Tekken. On March 18, my close friend and sophomore, Ricky Stiles, purchased this game and we have since played it extensively.

As stated before, this game is a play off of Tekken, and judging by the game’s mechanics, it does feel like a family-friendly version of the original. As far as mechanics go, at the surface, it does not seem like complex combos, but that is because these instructions are in the tutorials. For those brave enough to use some of these combos, they are effective to setting up synergy bursts. Speaking of synergy bursts…

The storyline in this game follows the exploration of this new concept. Basically, your Pokemon builds up energy in battle, and when the gauge is full, you will be allowed to use that Pokemon’s signature move, whether it be Chandelure’s Soul Stealing festival of doom, or Blaziken’s butt-kicking frenzy. As for the story itself, it’s really repetitive where you just do league matches where you fight five battles at a time and the number of battle you win is how much you will go up in terms of rank. From there, you have to get your rank up to the top 8 in each tournament — at which point you unlock a Promotion Test. These Promotion Tests occur when you fight a boss-like battle where you progress to the next tournament. There are four tournaments (Green, Blue, Red, and Chrome) and at the end of each, you face off Shadow Mewtwo.

Whether you win or lose this battle, you will still progress. Shadow Mewtwo in this game is known for stealing synergy. The Gala in the Synergy is being drained from Mewtwo and as a result the league is about to be shut down. The Mewtwo’s trainer asks for your help to keep Mewtwo from being the shadow form. To unlock Mewtwo in both its forms, the Sun Medallion in the game must be shattered.

Overall, we recommend this game. It is not as fun as Smash Brothers, but it is still worth the purchase for those who own a Wii U. We have both logged quite a bit of time into the game and anticipate on coming back to it repeatedly in coming weeks.

About the writer…

Carlos “Eddie” Hernandez is a fourth year student at Aquinas and has been writing for the newspaper for a year and a half. He is an Acting and Music Major and is also a member of AQPB. His hobbies include ponies and Pokèmon. Other hobbies include eating and sleeping.