YMMV / Pokkén Tournament

• Adorkable: Decidueye has moments of endearing, undignified enthusiasm despite its Cold Sniper tendencies otherwise.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Many fans find Nia's constant tips more annoying than helpful, but not only can they be toned down or excised from fights entirely, her English voice acting (frequently viewed as less-than-stellar) can be replaced with Japanese or nothing at all, allowing said fans to minimize the annoyance as much as possible.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dragonite, now that it has been revealed to have been relegated to an Assist Character as opposed to a playable part of the roster. Some fans are calling the pseudo-legendary's inclusion as support a case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, while others are happy Dragonite made it beyond a background Pokémon at all (and, of course, some fans don't care either way). Similar debates also exist for other popular Pokémon turned into support characters, such as Mismagius, Ninetales, and Sylveon. This changed when Croagunk was Promoted to Playable despite itself being an assist character, meaning that Dragonite and any other support Pokémon still have a chance.
• Creepy Cute: Chandelure's personality and movements are pretty adorable for a soul-burning phantom.
  • For a Pokémon that's supposed to be so creepy, Gengar's victory animations are just so silly that it's hard not to find it oddly endearing.
• Critical Dissonance: The home release got mixed-to-positive reviews, but is one of the most beloved Pokémon spin-offs with the fandom, much like how Hyrule Warriors is to the The Legend of Zelda fandom.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Gengar, seeing that it was voted into the game via a Japan Twitter vote out of all the 700+ Pokémon that could have been added to the game.
  • Despite being considered a Base-Breaking Character when she was revealed, Pikachu Libre has ended up being received very well by fans over time, to the point of being the game's unofficial mascot even though normal Pikachu and Lucario are the ones primarily featured on the cover and promotional material. In fact, during Nintendo's official Pokkén Tournament event/stream on the day prior to the game's Western release, a battle between Pikachu and Libre resulted in the Pikachu player getting the cold shoulder from the crowd for a while due to the beatdown he gave to the Libre player.
• Fandom Rivalry: A moderate one flared up between Pokkén and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 when their respective fandoms were trying to vote them in for Evo 2017 as part of a charity drive donation event. As they quickly became two of the most donated for games, things got a bit heated. Suffice to say some harsh words were passed back and forth from some of the more passionate members on each side. Cooled down considerably after the donation period ended, and while Marvel Vs Capcom 3 ended up winning out, the voice of the Pokkén Tournament community was heard and praised for their passion. Also the Evo organizers promised to help fund future PT events and Tournaments.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Kazuya or Heihachi/Heihachu for Pikachu, being the resident Mishima clone.
  • Pikachu Libre is often called "Rainbow Pika" (Or "R. Pika"), after Rainbow Mika, another luchador-esque female wrestler with a heart motif.
  • Hyper Meme for Mewtwo's Hyper Beam^note It's a highly damaging move that can be used in both duel and field phase to check opponents trying to outrange Mewtwo, but over reliance on it is dangerous due to its lengthy recovery time, a flaw which doesn't stop new and experienced players alike from spamming it in the hopes that they'll catch someone off guard..
• Friendly Fandoms: Developed near-instantly with Super Smash Bros. on its announcement, as both series are Fighting Games involving characters from Nintendo-owned franchises. Several well-known competitive Smash players got into Pokkén for a time, and popular website Smashboards once had an entire section on Pokkén in spite of it otherwise not being related to Smash. It also helps that the game has a simple control scheme similar to that of Smash, which further appeals to those who aren't a fan of the more button-heavy fighters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Check the main page.
• Game-Breaker: Shadow Mewtwo had an exploit/oversight where it can pull an infinite on someone who's shielding by hitting them with it's Backward weak attack, canceling into Miracle eye to power it up to add more hits and then throwing another one out before the shield stun ends and doing it all over again. It can keep you blocking the whole match doing this while dealing chip damage the entire time. The reason it can do this is because it's Backward weak attack will never break the opponents' shield so it can just keep doing it over and over again without your shield breaking. It can effectively win the match by chipping your health down to 1 and waiting until Time-Up where it will be declared the winner due to Health lead being calculated by percentage of health left and it having the lowest health in the game. Miracle Eye costs health to use so it will inevitably whittle itself down to 1 health doing this but again, that's not a problem because of the percentage rule. See it in action here. Eventually, this was patched to remove this problem.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A Tekken game featuring Pokémon as the fighters? Where do we sign up?
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Referencing Sia's song "Chandelier" in regards to Chandelure's (polarizing and confusing) revelation of joining the game's playable roster.
  • "Overwhelming Mechanics," IGN's single con for the game in their review has been subjected to a fair bit of condescending jokes, similar to "Too Much Water" from their Alpha Sapphire review.
  • Blastoise's high stance to the tune of Toto's "Africa" picked up speed shortly after its arrival.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Pikachu’s "DEIHA!" followed by lightning sparks crackling is an indicator that you’ve successfully pulled off an Electric Wind God Fist/Hellsweep to Omen Thunder God Fist on your opponent, complete with blue lightning instead of the usual yellow. It helps that the formerly Difficult, but Awesome EWGF/OTGF in the main Tekken games are by far the easiest to pull off in Pókken (forward + Y simultaneously and Y any amount of times then X in rapid succession respectively), so expect competent Pikachu players to do this a lot.
• Padding: The League Matches when taking on the Ferrum League, later on. For context, what you have to do is beat enough trainers (which come in sets of five) to get your rank to the top eight. Then you can take on the tournament and promotion test, to move to the next league. But the amount of League Matches you have to do gets pretty absurd. Even if you win every single match, you'll likely have to do two or three sets (ten or fifteen matches total) for the easiest leagues, and that only increases as you go, as does the AI difficulty. It's not out of the question to be forced to do thirty or forty matches in the later leagues just to get to the actual tournament. And, yes, you have to advance through and complete the leagues in order to progress with the actual story.
• Pandering to the Base: The game is clearly created for the franchise's older demographic. Not only does it feature gameplay that is about as complex as the main Pokémon RPGs or other Fighting Games (fighting games usually have controls with a steep learning curve), the game also features "rougher" textures for all Pokémon that contrasts it with the rest of the franchise. The revealed roster even includes many of the "tougher" and most popular Pokémon among older fans (Blaziken, Suicune, Lucario, Gardevoir, Gengar, Weavile, Sceptile and Charizard) with a lot of the cuter ones in support roles, while Pikachu itself is given a personality overhaul (similar to Mario in Super Smash Bros.) to bring it more in line with the "tough" Pokémon.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The tutorials only tell you the controls for playing on the Wii U gamepad, even if you've selected a different controller setup. Like the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, where the buttons for the gamepad don't come anywhere close to properly corresponding. Considering Nia's speech isn't even very specific towards the buttons ("To use a grab attack, press these buttons!"), you wouldn't expect it to be too much to ask for the game to display a different diagram based on the controller setup you chose at the start. Thankfully, this is nonexistent on the Switch version due to the format of the console.
  • The game's damage and combo scaling - particularly into Burst Attacks - is so dramatic and sporadic at times that even people who have spent significant amounts of time with the game can't reliably predict how much a combo with a Burst Attack ending it will do.
• Special Effect Failure: Contrasting Visual Effects of Awesome below, most of the Pokémon and humans in the background of many stages are flat, 2D sprites that have little-to-no animation. Looking at them in comparison to the rest of the game, including the stages themselves, is pretty jarring.
• That One Boss: The final encounter with Shadow Mewtwo, who follows the usual Fighting Game rule of boss characters being tough, mechanically-unusual affairs. In Shadow Mewtwo's case:
  • It's always in "Burst Mode" since it's in Mega Mewtwo X form for the entire match, meaning it has access to Mewtwo's most powerful skills, though it tends to avoid using all of them until Round 2, when it actually Bursts and adds its Limit Break to the mix.
  • Shadow Mewtwo has several attacks cribbed from the rest of the roster, in addition to having its own unique abilities, which means you'll be on your toes the entire fight. It also has more HP than everything else in the game, so you'll have to whittle that down every round.
  • Finally, the match is scripted in a sense, so losing in the first round instantly ends the match, as the final round is supposed to be the "turn-around" match (what with the more heroic music playing). It's a suitably awesome battle, but it's a little undermined by Shadow Mewtwo now fighting at its best, with even more HP to cut down.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • With all the Pokémon available, it was impossible to satisfy everyone and to include them all, and fans crying "Where is my X?!" was unavoidable. However, in addition to Dragonite, the most noteworthy omissions were Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee, the original Fighting Pokémon, as well as tiny luchador Hawlucha who all seemed to be perfectly fitting for this game. Jigglypuff and Greninja also were mentioned, most notably in this comic, as they were the only Pokémon in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U who were not included in the game at launch.
  • There are a couple of hints that Nia is actually a decent Battle Trainer (as well her default outfit resembling her favorite Pokémon, like the rest of the League Masters), and one of the loading screens for online mode implies that no one knows how strong Nia and her Weavile really are. You're never really given a chance to face her in battle, though, despite the Iron League (or even as a Superboss upon winning said League) being a perfect opportunity to have her battle you.
  • Similarly, Anne seemingly disappears from the game after you save Mewtwo. She even hints that she'll meet the player and Nia again, so when the Iron League presents itself, you'd think she would turn out to be the top contender (especially since none of the other NPCs in the Ferrum League use Mewtwo). Instead it's somebody else; Anne is nowhere to be found, and beating the league just has the game tell you to keep growing by fighting other players online.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Of all the Legendary Pokémon, who would have thought the the first one shown would be the quadrupedal Suicune? Suicune's role as the mascot of Pokémon Crystal might've helped a bit, though.
  • Machamp is another one; although in hindsight, it makes sense, what with Machamp being one of the most iconic Fighting-types of the original Pokémon generation, Machamp's serious lack of love and spotlight over the years made its inclusion an unexpected, but welcomed surprise.
  • Weavile as well. Being a relatively popular Pokémon, but one that hasn't received much attention from Game Freak over the years, definitely made its entrance into Pokkén Tournament a very pleasant surprise.
  • Pikachu Libre wasn't expected because there was already a Pikachu on the roster and the Masked Luchador theme was done by Hawlucha first.
  • Who else was expecting Mewtwo, let alone "Shadow Mewtwo" to appear as both a boss and a playable character?
  • Given the focus on Pokémon from Generation 4 and earlier, Braixen's reveal was a pleasant surprise. This is doubly unexpected due to the fact Braixen is the un-evolved form of Delphox, when most fighters so far are fully evolved (Pikachu is also in the same boat, but it is generally considered to get a free pass for being the Series Mascot of Pokémon). Though it might have to do with the fact that Braixen is Serena's signature Pokémon.
  • Chandelure: Of all of the Generation 5-debuting Pokémon, a non-humanoid, object-based Pokémon was not expected. In addition, prior to Chandelure's reveal, it was teased that the next officially revealed fighter would be a Pokémon with the character "ラ (ra)" in its Japanese name, which includes many more anticipated choices with Mega Evolutions to choose from, including Swampert, Heracross, and Kangaskhan.
  • Croagunk came as a bit of a shock because not only was there reason to expect other Pokémon besides it and, like Braixen, is not the final form of a Pokémon (Toxicroak in this case), but it was already in the game as a support Pokémon! Thus it appears that being in the game as a support mon doesn't mean you won't become playable. Though, like Braixen, it's status as a non-final form might have to do with Croagunk being one of Brock's Pokémon.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game looks pretty, to say the least. The character models are ridiculously detailed, and animations are incredibly smooth and expressive. Other visual effects look incredible with bright colors that really pop out, such as Lucario's Aura Spheres and Mewtwo's Hyper Beams. And Burst Attacks are the crown jewels of the animations, with special mention going to Shadow Mewtwo's. And the entire game, save for local multiplayer, runs at an unbroken 60 frames per second.