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Learning how to adjust between phases can be tricky, because even after playing the tutorial my understanding of switching phases worked remained vague. games, which puts a focus on the type of attack you use (normal, counter, grab) over the attack itself. In the Duel Phase you can pull off a variety of different special moves by holding a direction and a button in a similar manner to the Smash Bros. In contrast, the Duel Phases last a lot longer and feel more like a genuine fight. Some Pokémon like Braixen thrive on firing out projectiles, but if you have two close-range Machamps then this phase will only last seconds. I enjoy zoning in other fighting games, so I like the idea of the Field Phase in Pokkén, but its existence in most of my matches ranged from negligible to highly abusable. Eventually things will move to the Duel Phase, which is an angled two-dimensional perspective that feels more in-your-face and closer to more traditional fighting games. Every battle starts off in Field Phase, which gives you fully three-dimension controls and often results more defensive and ranged styles of play. Pokkén battles are split between two phases: Field Phase and Duel Phase.
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Once I understood that the basics of the game weren’t really that complicated, Pokkén started to make a little more sense.Ī bigger factor in Pokkén’s complexity are the shifts in battle perspective. Despite the simplicity, the system manages to stay interesting because there are so many variations of the three types of attacks that I never felt like I was playing the same game over and over. In concept it sounds like a fairly rigid system for a fighting game. Correctly guessing the right move does more than just give your move higher priority, though, as it also activates a critical hit that increases the damage dealt. The core of Pokkén Tournament’s fighting mechanics is a rock-paper-scissor system: counter attacks beat normal attacks, grabs beat counter attacks, and normal attacks beat grabs. The name Pokkén made me expect a game much closer to Tekken, but Pokkén is definitely its own thing, and coming to terms with that was one of the most challenging and interesting parts of my experience. Playing just one round was enough for me to quit out of the game and head straight to the tutorial. If I had to describe my first experience playing Pokkén Tournament with one word, it’d be "messy." The movement felt foreign, I had no idea why the camera and my moveset kept changing, and I kept getting assaulted by menus telling me to make choices.