[Drakul]

Eventhubs linked to an interview with Ono at Game Revolution.

Excerpt of the interview from GR that Eventhubs posted.

So does that mean there are specific character rivals between the franchises? YO: Yeah, as you play through the Arcade Mode, you’ll run into something called the Rival Battle, and if you play as the official tag partners that we’ve set up, for example Ryu and Ken, eventually you’ll run into a rival battle with Kazuya and Nina who are there to stop you. And Nina will be like, “Oh, do we really have to fight these poor-looking guys who don’t wear shoes?” And Kazuya’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got to beat them up.” So there are scenes like that that flesh out the relationships between rivals. And there’s a lot of variety—that’s kind of a serious one, with Ryu and Kazuya and Nina and Ken going at it—but there are also really light-hearted Rival Battles as well, so we’d like fans to play through the story and just have fun finding out about all those relationships between the characters. How much communication do the developers of this game have with Namco? YO: As I mentioned before, in the beginning when we were trying to figure out how to transplant the characters into the game, we did contact Namco on a frequent basis to get advice. But once they told us that we had the freedom to do with the characters what we wanted, we decided we could just meet up whenever we would have dinner together or something, but other than that we’d just make the game and just show them later. So every time I’d go over to their offices and meet up with the Tekken team, I’d bring a new build of the game with me, we’d play around, and then go eat dinner. So it was more like showing them progress on the game rather than getting their feedback consistently. For this past year in particular, there were probably times when the Tekken team found out about characters through websites and things like that, not even us telling them directly. And then they would call us after reading the news on websites and say, “Hey, I want to play as that character! Can you bring a new version of the rom over?”