EGM posted a lengthy preview for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 that sheds some light on the new Fight Lab training mode. As previously mentioned, this mode will attempt to teach players the fundamentals of the game in a unique way.

The set-up is this: Violet (the alter-ego of Lee Chaolan) brings back his Combot project, but an unfortunate accident leaves him having to start from scratch with a prototype model. The player is then tasked with teaching the Combot prototype how to fight—the catch being, of course, that doing so is actually teaching the players themselves how to fight.

This training won’t just come through your standard “do a move” or “complete this combo” requirements, however. Harada brings up the various mini games that have been a part of the Tekken series for a while now, and how they can serve as the inspiration for giving players a better method of learning a game’s systems.

One hypothetical example he gives is learning how to side-step as a dodge. Typically, you’d be asked to side-step a move performed by a CPU opponent, which would result in either a “pass” or “fail” being doled out. What if, instead, you were playing the role of a young bear who is having sushi thrown at him? The bear has to dodge out of the way of the sushi as a mini game—which, of course, would give the player a chance to perfect their side-stepping skills.

Another (again, hypothetical) example from Harada is Tekken Ball. What if we bring Ganryu into the picture, and have players try to perform aerial juggles on him. The more Ganryu is juggled, the more his size inflates—until he finally explodes if the player is successful in pulling off a long enough string of juggles. A little gruesome, sure, but another example of how learning gameplay elements can be offered to players in a more enjoyable and easily understood package.

When asked about Street Fighter x Tekken, Harada goes on to explain how Capcom’s 2D based fighter is a whole different beast when compared to the Tekken series.

“Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken are very different games, so to have players come over to our games, that’s really great if that happens. As you know, the game systems are quite different between 3D fighters and 2D fighters, and something that’s quite interesting is that for people who play 3D fighters, a lot of them have played 2D before. But, you don’t see the opposite that much. I think for a lot of the 2D fighters out there, the players who are into them don’t play 3D fighters much. So, we don’t want to pressure them to play Tekken. We do, though, think that rather than just saying, “because you played Street Fighter X Tekken, you need to play Tekken,” recently we’ve been taking our game around to various events, where we have consoles available for people to check it out. We hope that they’ll enjoy what they see, and gradually get into the game that way.

“However, that being said, Fight Lab is one way where people not familiar with Tekken can kind of get into Tekken Tag Tournament 2, even if they haven’t experienced a 3D fighter before. I think they can then feel why it might be entertaining to jump to the world of 3D. So, we’re also thinking of that audience when implementing that mode. As well, I think it’s also quite difficult to take a 2D fighter and customize move sets like you can with Fight LAb. I think maybe if there are 2D players out there who see Fight Lab, and think it might be cool, that might be something else that will draw them into a 3D fighting game.”

Harada also teased about what the future holds for the Tekken series.

“We think [Tag Tournament 2] is so unique that if we were to put out Tekken 7, for example, and it only had one versus one, we might get a lot of people out there who ask us why not use the previous format, where you can do two on one, two on two, and one on one? So, we’re not sure, but this could become the standard [for Tekken].”

The entire interview can be read over at EGM.

Source: EGM, tip via Ivan