Simply an awesome game. Read on for a detailed analysis, comparisons to other fighters, and tips for new players.
First, a bit of history. I was introduced to Tekken back on the playstation over ten years ago, and at the time, Tekken 2 in particular was the most advanced fighting game to be released. While Virtua Fighter was the original 3d fighting game, Tekken 2 managed to trump Virtua Fighter 2, offering a deep fighting system that introduced techniques such as multi part throws, special counter moves, and more. It also had great graphics and music, as well as full motion video that brought the characters and their stories to life. Tekken 3 was more of the same, but at that time Virtua Fighter 3 was the superior fighter. Fast forward to the present, and the Tekken series has had a return to form, after the hiccup that was Tekken 4, and Tekken 5 DR is now a contender for the crown of ‘best fighting game ever’.
Before continuing one thing should be made perfectly clear. There is a common perception out there that Virtua Fighter is the serious and deep fighter while Tekken is more of a casual fighting game that doesn’t feature the same level of strategy. This is simply wrong. Both Tekken and Virtua Fighter have a hardcore and competitive arcade and tournament scene (especially in Asia), and both games are finely tuned with this fan base in mind first and foremost. If you go to a typical Japanese arcade you will see an entire bank of machines with intense and heated battles going on constantly. You really want to know your stuff before you jump into this arena, as I found out for both games. A real fighting game fan such as myself should have an appreciation for both Virtua Fighter and Tekken, and understand their differences. A game like Dead or Alive, on the other hand, was never successful in Arcades, so they gave up and focused on the console market, finding a home on the Xbox. Soul Calibur 3 also bombed out in the arcades, because the game balance was broken, this ruins the most important thing for competitive versus battles. The best fighting games always have a healthy arcade scene behind them.
However Tekken has always been more accessible than Virtua Fighter, easy and fun to jump into and have a good time with. But the fact is that around 95% of the people that play Tekken don’t know how the game is played to it’s potential. Tekken has never had a tutorial mode explaining the finer details, like Virtua Fighter 4 featured when it came to the Playstation 2, so I will mention a few pointers here. The first thing to note is that in Tekken, there are two fundamental skills that need to be learned first before you can hope to be any good. The first is movement, good players always use a backdash cancel in order to move around the arena. That means you double tap backwards on the controller, and before the backdash is finished, you input another move, usually the sidestep (tap down or up) or sidewalk (double tap down or up). This is repeated, so a player moves backwards quickly by repeatedly tapping twice backwards and once or twice upwards or downwards, e.g. bb d bb d bb dd (hold this second tap for sidewalk) etc. A backdash should be the first thing you do, if you have just made an attack that was blocked, usually this will put you at a frame disadvantage, where your opponent will typically try to punish you after blocking. If you always try to attack again immediately after being blocked, you’ll soon be in pain afterwards. A quick backdash cancel however will often create an opportunity to strike, when your opponent tries to hit you in retailiation and misses. You can’t always escape punishment though, some moves recover slowly and are risky to use.
The second skill is learning how to get up. This sounds easy, but it will happen that someone gets you down, and uses an attack repeatedly, hitting you over and over again until you learn how to escape it. This is called the Okizeme game, and it is a very deep system in Tekken. Unlike Virtua fighter, normal moves can hit grounded opponents, leading to many traps that can catch the unwary. I’ll just mention one simple method that can get you out of trouble in most situations. When you get hit on the ground, don’t touch anything. A lot of attacks will only hit you if you try to roll away. If an attack hits you while you are on the ground, and not moving, it will usually hit you away far enough so you can get up safely, just press up to rise in place, and auto block will be on while you recover. You can also tap up to rise, and immediately after press down and back to block repetitive sweeps and stuff like that.
It’s important to know this, because when someone is using the same move to hit you over and over again, and keep you on the ground, it’s not fun and you might just throw your controller out the window. I’ve played Tekken for a long time now, and I’ve seen tempers flare, it’s not pretty! Learn this stuff and avoid the pain! There is one more tip I should mention, and that is about the low parry.
If you see a low attack, like a sweep coming your way, hold down and forward, this will parry the attack away, leaving your opponent at a disadvantage. Every character has a guaranteed combo or damage after performing this parry. My fav character, Julia, can take well over half your energy from a single low parry, so be careful and don’t use repetitive attacks. Characters with a good hop kick juggle starter all have damaging combos from this parry. So keep these tips in mind, and once you choose a character you like (Tekken 5 DR is the most balanced Tekken, don’t worry about characters being good or bad) spend a bit of time in practise mode and go for it. I recommend sticking to one character for a good amount of time, and learning their good and bad points, and check out www.gamefaqs.com under Tekken 5 DR as a starting point for character FAQs, and www.tekkenzaibatsu.com as the best place for hardcore tips and strategies.
Unfortunately I’m living in Australia so I haven’t had the chance to try the online mode yet, it hasn’t come to the EU store yet. But reports from sites like tekkenzaibatsu have been mostly positive so far, get a good connection and the experience is mostly faithful. So good players will beat bad players and that is the way it should be, know the game and cheap repetitive stuff will not beat you down. If you come against a better player, don’t be frustrated, learn from them! Tekken gets better and more satisfying the more you play, I’m still stoked about the game after playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Kazuya: EWGF, EWGF, 1, cd4,1. Don’t know what that means? Let’s just say it’s a kick ass combo, that you could practise for hours and hours (weeks even) and still not do. But if you can do it (a Hori stick will help), you’ll be a Tekken player for life, trust me. See you online, PSN: Dragonseer.