Katsuhiro Harada, the project director on Tekken and the executive producer on Tekken 8, has revealed that he’s seeking feedback from the Native American community regarding the designs of two characters in the series: Michelle Chang and her daughter, Julia.
Michelle was featured in the original Tekken, Tekken 2, Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken Tag Tournament 2. She was designed as a woman of Chinese and Native American heritage, with her daughter Julia taking her place in the mainline games from Tekken 3 onwards.
Both characters have featured in numerous discussions regarding the representation of Indigenous people in video games, and Harada-san recently took to Twitter to garner feedback on their designs. He offered some insight into the creation of Michelle and Julia, explaining that “fighting games in particular needed to convey the ‘character’s personality and charm’ within a limited amount of time” back when Tekken first came out.
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He highlighted one instance between Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2’s release where a Native American fan expressed criticism regarding the Julia’s feather headband, suggesting it was promoting stereotypes. The person in question then showed Harada some images of the fashion worn by fellow Native American students at their college campus.
We do not just read books or research the Internet, but we also invite actual people from the country as designers, and sometimes we work with the embassies of various countries to learn from the people of the country or ethnic community, and we also solicit their opinions.
Example: In the past, when designing characters for Shaheen, we used past reflections and not only worked with the embassies, but also had a Saudi student participate in supervising the character design. Furthermore, even before we announced the new characters, we published the designs in the rough sketch stage on Facebook to get a lot of feedback to help us revise them.
On the subject of Tekken 8, both Michelle and Julia have yet to be confirmed to appear in the game, although if it’s anything like Tekken 7, there’s always a chance of at least one of them showing up as DLC, which was the case with Julia.
Tekken 8 is scheduled for release on January 26, 2024 for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
[Source – Katsuhiro Harada on Twitter]