Usually, the reveal of a new character in a much-anticipated fighting game is a time of celebration for a franchise's community. Unfortunately for Bandai Namco and director Katsuhiro Harada, the same wasn't true for Tekken 7's most recent reveal.
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For those who prefer to just skip the drama and focus on the game, here's the news that started it all. Tekken 7 has revealed a new fighter named Lucky Chloe, a bubbly young girl who enjoys dressing up like a cat. Armed with cat-ear headphones, a tail and a sweater with cat arms, Lucky Chloe leaps around the battlefield with a dance-y kind of fighting style. If you want to leave the story at that, feel free to check out Lucky Chloe's reveal trailer below.
Here comes the drama part. The reaction among the game's community was mixed. Many posters over in a relevant NeoGAF thread (thanks, Continue Play) criticized the character's design as being uninspired and pandering (the word "abomination" might have been thrown around). Things really started heating up, though, once the thread was sent to Harada himself.
In a couple of tweets responding to the criticism from the forum, Harada responded by suggesting that Western audiences would prefer a "muscular & skinhead character" who carries around guns. He even suggested that Lucky Chloe would be a region-exclusive character and wouldn't even show up in North America, though a Tekken game designer tweeted that Harada was only joking.
As Kotaku found out, Bandai Namco won't comment on whether or not region-exclusive characters are a possibility because, technically, Tekken 7 is only confirmed for a Japanese arcade release in February. Neither a Western port nor a console version have been officially confirmed yet, so, at least on paper, the Japanese arcade game is the only version of Tekken 7 at the moment. And it looks like Lucky Chloe will have a solid place among that version's lineup at the very least.
