Harada feels like making Tekken Tag Tournament 3 wouldn’t make much sense and that TEKKEN needs a tag mode instead

TEKKEN 8 has had a tremendous showing this past weekend at Evo, revealing the first Armor King gameplay trailer alongside a brand new trailer, with the game dripping with content just under 2 years since release.

At Evo 2025, Destructoid got a chance to sit down with members of the TEKKEN team, including Kohei Ikeda (Nakatsu), Chief Producer and Game Director of TEKKEN 8. Katsuhiro Harada, Producer and Executive Game Director on the TEKKEN Project. And Michael Murray, Producer for TEKKEN 8, and the person who kindly translated for both Nakatsu and Harada during our interview.

We had a lot to ask the team when talking to them about TEKKEN 8, but there was one topic on my mind that I felt compelled to ask. And that was the potential existence of a Tekken Tag Tournament 3 in the future, and if the team would consider making it as the next project after TEKKEN 8.

Harada (as translated by Murray) spoke candidly about the idea of making a sequel to the Tag series and commented on the abundance of tag fighters in the market right now, and why it probably doesn’t make much sense to work on a direct sequel to the Tag Tournament series in the current market.

“It’s quite difficult because, you know, Tag is something I’ve always thought of more recently, and [I feel] like it should be some kind of mode within a TEKKEN 9 or 8 or whatever you want to call it.”

Upon hearing this, I asked for more clarification on what he meant, asking if, instead of making a Tekken Tag Tournament 3, making it a mode within the mainline TEKKEN games. Murray, translating for Harada again, said about how tag fighters are popular right now, but “if we start now [to make a Tekken Tag Tournament 3] by the time that they’re no longer popular, that’s when Tag Three would come out” if they hypothetically made the game.

“We have so many more moves than a typical 2D fighter. So much more work is involved in trying to do that with a 3D game…It’s probably a ways off if it were to happen, and so probably not in my working lifetime. So that’s something that the next generation can decide.”

Of course, ending the interview, I wouldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t ask Harada about TEKKEN X Street Fighter and keep the question tradition alive. So, of course, I asked him, and was surprised to get an answer from Harada about the game.

“It’s hard to say if that’s even a thing. I mean, it depends on what people are wanting as well. That said, I would like to show people what we already have. That would be cool if we could do that. We were 30 percent into development, so fingers crossed.”