Yuke’s Studio Producer Recalls Working With Kenny Omega on AEW Fight Forever

In an interview with Video Games Chronicle, Yuke’s Studio Producer Takashi Takezawa spoke about the process of working on AEW Fight Forever and collaborating with Kenny Omega on the project. Here are highlights:

On how he feels about Fight Forever’s success: “First of all, I should preface this by saying as a developer and not the publisher, there’s only so much I can say. I can’t really comment on sales figures, and can’t really comment on upcoming content because, again, that’s the job of the publisher. I can speak to how we feel about the game, and having developed it and having had it released a year ago, we’re really proud of it. It’s a really solid work, and was fun to make. We’re getting a lot of great feedback from fans. They’re letting us know how they feel about the game. A lot of positive feedback, which we love, and a lot of constructive feedback, which we also love, so we know what areas to focus on in the future.”

On developing a game for WWE every year: “I would say it was both challenging and liberating, and motivating for the team. And first of all, I should preface this by saying it’s no problem at all mentioning WWE. We’re fine to talk about that. We worked on those games for 20 years – it’s totally part of our history, so no worries there. The way that those games were developed, yes of course, they did come out annually in the WWE franchise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it just took a year to make them, right? They were on an offset sort of schedule where the game you were seeing coming out one year had actually been worked on for three or four years previously. In a manner of speaking it was almost like dominoes going down. So there wasn’t a huge difference necessarily in the development period, or necessarily our approach when we went to AEW: Fight Forever. I think the biggest difference, the biggest challenge and the biggest motivating, liberating factor was working directly with AEW and with Kenny Omega. Outside of the typical developer-publisher relationship, there was more involvement from those parties, which made it very different and refreshing.”

On working with Kenny Omega: “It was very collaborative. We did get a lot of feedback from them. Of course, we had play sessions where we could have meetings and let them play the latest build and get feedback directly from them. In one such meeting, Kenny Omega actually joined from the green room backstage after a big wrestling show – you could tell he was holding his phone and talking to us. And he was giving feedback on one of the animations in the game and he actually grabbed another wrestler that was nearby and was like “no, it’s not like this, you do it like this,” and started dragging the guy around the room. So we got, let’s say, very detailed feedback from him, for sure.”