Just another Tekken?
Okay, I'm being vague. Tekken 5 is one of the deepest if not the deepest fighter next to Virtua Fighter. If you like fighting games then its worth picking up. If you don't then you may need to rethink your view of fighters... I can't help but go through all this in this review. Please bear with me.
Tekken is not a game that you will feel adequite at for quite a while after you begin playing it. The game is considered deep in that is has quite a few different concept you must learn to use in order to fully understand it. The game though it's been around in 7 different incarnations over the years has not gotten any more accessible for beginners. If you want to play the game, and win then you must be willing to study it, practice it, and continue practicing.
Now that that's out of the way I'll go on to the review.
The game has really improved it's visuals from Tekken 4 and in my opinion surpasses all other serious fighters for the PS2. The character are colorful and well animated each with their own unique look, and different styles. Stages are fun to look at, and quite beautiful and varrying. Stages contain a lot of their own animations, and different things that go on in spite of the two people in the middle of it trying to knock eachothers heads off. I lends a sort of realism to the game that is later taken away by the wacky actions of characters, and impossible moves. Story mode contains a bit of comic bookish art for each character in their intros (which I thought was very nice), and each character has their own CG ending with the exception of a girl who's ending is in Anime style, or cartoon in laments terms, and Eddy who has the same ending as Christie for the second time in a row (he shared her ending in Tekken 4 as well).
In all the graphics are quite nice, and are one of the many bonuses of the game if you enjoy it after all. One would think that more could be put into a fighter for bonus material, but let's not confuse the issue here. Tekken 5 is a fighter, and as such the most important part of the game is the gameplay.
The sound in the game is greatly improved over the previous installation in several areas. For one the music is a bit more lively, and noticeable than the previous, and is pretty good, but other fighters that tend to have better tracks are some of the two dimensional fighters like Street Fighter 3 third impact. Other than that it's good, but still bested by even the console version of Tekken 3 in my opinion.
Vocals on the game are much improved over Tekken 4 with people actually having decent voices, and not sounding like they have speech impediments. People tend to have some problems with accents or so I've heard complaints, but it's not that big of an issue. It may be noteworthy that most characters speak in the dialect of their native land, and even though one character speaks to another in English the response may be in Japanese, or Mandarin, so be ready to check out those subtitles.
Gameplay is the most important aspect of the game and it doesn't dissappoint. You first of all will enjoy the story aspect of the game and probably want to go through each characters story to see their motivation for entering the tournament. There are about thirty (I never counted) characters so you'll have a nice time completing that aspect of the game. Next you'll be able to choose from a number of different things. There are several "minigame" such as Devil within mode to spend time trying to beat and earn credits, as well as the first 3 installments of Tekken, and another game called starblade that can be unlocked or otherwise only played in the loading screen for a breif moment. All of these add some small depth, but if you are still interested in the one player battle you should be spending your time in Arcade mode trying to acheive a decent rank, and more importantly get money so that you can customize your favorite fighters. You could costomize the rest too, but that would be after months, and maybe years of playing through, and earning more credits.
There is also survival, and time attack modes which allow you to test your skills, but lets not get confused on the issue here. You can only get so much fun from defeating the computer. The real fun comes from intense battles among friends of similar levels of play. As you and your friends progress matches can be a blast to simply watch, and downright immersive to play. The real fun is in the two player match.
All in all I give Tekken a rating of 9.95 in my book, because nothings perfect but somethings are just so damn close.