Bikini bonus for Tekken Tag pre-orders

The release of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is just months away, with Namco Bandai Games announcing 150 swimsuit character costumes as pre-order bonus content.

Although the franchise has long had a focus on its multitude of female characters, this is the first time swimsuits have been introduced to the mix, following in the same vein as Namco’s other beat ‘em up, Soul Calibur V, which also featured swimwear as downloadable content.

There’s a pretty awesome video here for the DLC pack, labelled ‘Girl Power’, which features various female characters brawling semi-naked.

Other bonus content for those who pre-order includes a Snoop Dogg stage and additional characters Michelle Chang, Angel, Kunimitsu and Ancient Ogre.

DLC has been a contentious issue recently with the release of Street Fighter X Tekken as characters were included on the game disc despite the fact that they could only be accessed by paying for them.

"I speculate that maybe the reason they did that was because, for example, if I were to fight someone online and I had bought a character and you hadn’t, in order for it to work you’d have to have the data on your machine as well," says Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada, producer and director of much of the Tekken series. "It was probably done to reduce file sizes and make the matches more convenient."

Harada says the Tekken franchise won’t be holding back content in order to charge extra after TT2’s release.

"Tekken’s never really done that before and charged for it… this isn’t really directed at Capcom, it’s something I’ve been saying for a long time now, I see characters and their move sets as kind of like chess pieces. They are essential items necessary in the competitive aspect of the game and we would never sell them individually.”

That’s a nice change of pace from most developers, as more companies change to subscription models and downloadable extras to profit further after a release.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 will be released in New Zealand on September 13, 2012 for Xbox 360 and PS3. We've included a couple more screenshots below, let us know what you think in the comments - does Namco's open approach to DLC make up for the fact that the content is pretty questionable?