Teppen directors discuss this month's Turnabout Festival

Mobile card game Teppen is in the middle of an exciting event. Earlier in March, GungHo and Capcom launched the Turnabout Festival, which not only introduced some new characters and cards from the worlds of Ace Attorney and Haunting Ground, but also threw players deep into a harrowing murder mystery.

To learn more about this exciting March event, Shacknews spoke with GungHo Online Entertainment Director Satoshi Ogihara and Capcom Director Yuki Okano via email. They talk about expanding on certain concepts introduced by the Ace Attorney crossovers, as well as how the latest event has affected the current meta.

Shacknews: What can you tell me about TEPPEN's Turnabout Festival? What makes this 20th expansion special?

GungHo Online Entertainment Director Satoshi Ogihara/Capcom Director Yuki Okano: Turnabout Festival is the second card pack featuring the Ace Attorney series.

In addition to characters from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, popular characters from other Capcom series also appear in this original story. The mystery is set in a tropical resort hotel run by Jamba from the Okami series. [Sengoku BASARA series'] Yoshimoto Imagawa's beloved dog has been zombified. This Ace Attorney-inspired story involving multiple other titles is something that can only happen in Teppen.

In addition, this card pack focuses on the "deduction" aspect of the Ace Attorney series and introduces a new type of play that isn’t found in other card games. Instead of just card battle gameplay, we created a new way to enjoy Teppen: All of the card illustrations and flavor text from Turnabout Festival include clues so players can investigate and find the culprit. While examining all of the cards will tell the full story of the events surrounding the incident, it will not reveal the culprit. It's up to players to use the evidence and testimonies scattered among the cards to deduce who the culprit is. We hope players can solve the case and find answers to questions like: Who is the real culprit? What is their M.O. and motive? What is the conclusive evidence?

Shacknews: This looks unlike anything that I've seen from Teppen so far. What have these characters from Ace Attorney and Haunting Ground opened up, in terms of storytelling and card design?

Ogihara & Okano: This card pack centers around solving a murder mystery and discovering the true culprit. In fact, we built upon the mystery-style gameplay implemented in the previous Ace Attorney-inspired card pack, Ace vs. The People.

This time, in response to the results from AVP, we made it easier to deduce what happened in terms of the timeline and setting where the incident occurred. We also dialed up the unexpectedness of the case, so we believe that Turnabout Festival is even more Teppen-like and challenging to solve.

We also selected characters from other Capcom titles that were just added to Teppen's roster, such as Fiona Belli from Haunting Ground, so some unexpected characters may play an important role in this case... maybe.

For AVP, the answers were only announced on our official social media accounts, but this time, the truth will be revealed through the eight Supplemental Cards, which will be released sometime in April. Now you will be able to find the answers to the case just by playing the game, so we hope players can enjoy their investigations until the Supplemental Cards are released.

Shacknews: You've brought back the Evidence mechanic for this expansion. For those who haven't played Teppen or been away for a while, can you explain how it works?

Ogihara & Okano: We created card effects that mirror the Ace Attorney series’ gameplay style of gathering evidence and then presenting it at court. Certain cards have effects that, when activated, will provide the player with “Evidence.” Acquired “Evidence” can then be consumed by using the Present ability. The effects of Action Cards will change depending on the number of Evidence consumed through the Present ability.

In general, card effects that are changed through Evidence and Present are more card effects, so we hope players will actively collect "Evidence" and make use of Present.

Shacknews: What are some of the new cards that players can expect to see and which ones are you particularly excited for?

Ogihara: Although it's not a specific card, the amount of Evidence you can obtain has been increased compared to AVP, which is part of our design to allow players to obtain more Evidence and trigger Present more aggressively.

In addition, we have implemented cards that show the number of times Evidence is used. This is designed so that when players build an Evidence-based deck, the more Evidence is consumed, creating even more incentive to activate Present than before. Although it’s only been a few weeks since the new card pack was introduced, I’m happy to see players actively playing with Evidence-based decks.

Okano: In addition to new characters like Apollo Justice and Trucy Wright from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, we’ve also added new characters in swimsuit costumes, which is a first for Teppen!

In Teppen, we consider the world setting and story to be some of the most important elements in the game, so we value the question of, "Why does that character appear there?" In Turnabout Festival, the setting is a tropical resort, so when we thought of which characters would be most fitting, the idea of characters in swimsuit costumes came up for the first time. All of the girls’ charms are depicted against the night pool background, so we hope players can take a look at those too.

Shacknews: In what ways do you expect these new cards to affect the Standard meta? What exciting plays have you already seen?

Ogihara & Okano: In general, we try to create a card pack that both reshapes yet fits elegantly into the Standard meta. In Turnabout Festival, we believe that Evidence-based decks are changing the Standard environment and creating a new way to play.

Regarding the community players, everyone is really good at Teppen. Everyone has a high-level understanding of meta decks, and they not only keep track of their opponents MP as if it were second nature to them, but also consider their own hands and opponent’s decks when making moves to gain an advantage. Watching a Teppen match can be difficult to understand without commentary, but as a competitive game, watching players try to read each other in real-time is truly wonderful.

We really appreciate all the users who have organized many tournaments and who create videos of themselves playing the single-player content like "Adventure" mode.

Shacknews: Looking back over TEPPEN's 20 expansions, tell me about some of your favorite moments in the game. What have been some of your favorite cards, mechanics, and interactions?

Ogihara: My favorite ability would be Ascended, which was introduced in the third card pack.

During Teppen's launch, we were theorycrafting and developing the gameplay flow for the next few card packs. In the first pack, we introduced the Explore ability which allows players to add cards to their EX Pocket. In the second pack, we introduced Growth to emphasize more on incentivizing players to take the offensive and play more Units to buff their Units on the field. However, when adding this ability, there were situations where Units could not be played when the board was full, severely limiting when players could use the Growth ability. Not being able to play your Units even if you want to can be stressful. I thought I could implement the Ascended ability so players could use additional Units on top of others that were already in play. This was also a good way to resolve the stress of waiting for Units to deploy by "ascending" them on top of other cards and activating additional effects.

Ascended is great either for offense or defense when activating the ability at the right time and place. This makes it a very unique ability for a real-time card game like Teppen.

Okano: For Teppen, we are not only creating effects to make card battles more interesting, but we are also considering how to express the character's identity to the fullest extent possible.

From that perspective, the card that left the strongest impression on me is "Advanced Artifact X." It has an effect that copies the abilities of defeated enemy units. This effect represents how X from the original Mega Man X series becomes stronger by learning the abilities of the enemy reploids he defeats. In Day of Nightmares, characters like Hunk and Vector were featured as 4MP Unit Cards, and had card effects that would only activate in the presence of other 4MP cards. In the original Resident Evil franchise, Hunk and Vector are agents under the Umbrella Corporation who are part of a team and work best together. We reflected this relationship in the cards by giving them synergistic qualities.

In the end, we unified and focused on making them as 4MP cards, but there were many twists and turns coming to this decision, so it remains strong in my memory. As a result, these cards are now some of the most popular cards in Teppen. I am very happy about that.

Shacknews: Lastly, we're seeing characters from Ace Attorney like Apollo Justice, Trucy Wright, and Klavier Gavin. Were there any characters you had originally hoped to include in this expansion that you couldn't quite get to this time? And is there hope we'll see those characters in the future?

Ogihara & Okano: In the Ace Attorney series, Dahlia Hawthorne is considered to be one of Phoenix Wright's arch-enemies. We decided not to include Dahlia in Turnabout Festival as she wasn't suited to the story we wanted to tell; however, we would like to feature her in a card pack that best showcases her character in the near future.

There are also conversations about potentially adding characters from Capcom franchises that have not yet made an appearance in Teppen. We are considering adding these characters in future card packs, so we hope all of our players can wait a little bit longer for their favorite characters to be added to Teppen!

Teppen's Turnabout Festival is happening right now. Check out the latest information on the Version 5.1.5 update. Learn more about the event over on the Teppen website. Teppen is available now on iOS and Android.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?