Posted by Kevin Carruth on 2009-11-03 @ 11:37:55 , edited on 2009-11-09 @ 10:03:39
... well, mostly awesome, anyway.
Tekken has been my favorite fighting game for a long time, ever since I played Tekken 2 on my friend Eryn's PS1 back in middle school. Before that, I'd only played Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, so it was my first 3D fighter. And while Street Fighter will always hold a great nostalgia value for me, and M. Bison will forever be my favorite fighting game character, Tekken gameplay mechanics just blow it out of the water.
In college, my friends and I used to gather at a dorm room and play Tekken Tag Tournament for hours each afternoon after classes were out. We'd even scramble through our homework so we could start the fighting. That was probably the most fun I've ever had playing a fighting game; 7 or 8 guys gathered around, loser passing the controller, the glory of going on a hot streak and whupping everyone in the room, the frustration of losing and concentration on what to do different when the controller came back to you. Good times.
So when the Playstation 3 was released, and Tekken 6 was announced for Winter 2007 release, I snapped one up as soon as I could, because I didn't want to be caught without one when the first next-gen entry hit the shelves. Two years later and it's finally here. And it's almost everything I'd hoped.
So, first the good. The graphics are looking good, especially the cutscenes. In-game character models have some aliasing problems in certain lighting, but I just read that turning off the "motion-blur" feature can reduce this, so I'll try that this evening.
The core gameplay is as fun as ever. I've gotten to play a good bit of vs. against my brother and all my favorite moves are still there. We went 12 rounds of Jack-6 (me) vs Devil Jin (Wade) last night, good stuff. Not much new; a few moves are tweaked but that's about it. But in this respect, no change is good.
The character selection is nuts. I think this is the biggest roster I've seen yet. Pretty much everyone's here. There are 6 new characters, none of which I particularly care for, including what seems to be fast approaching a norm in Japanese fighting games: the fat American.
Character customization is pretty crazy too. Just like in Tekken 5 and Soul Calibur 4, you can now unlock additional costume pieces to make your favorite characters look a little different. Well they've gone nuts with the number of objects you can buy. Granted, a lot of these "options" come in the form of colors, with a given object (say, a hat) offered in 8 different colors, each sold separately, but it's still pretty cool. Of course, some accessories are just silly, but there's some good stuff in there too.
And now the bad.
First and foremost, the new "story" mode. No longer do you have to beat arcade mode with each character to get an ending and unlock new characters. Now there's a "Scenario Campaign" mode, similar to the "Devil Within" mode from Tekken 5. Basically it drops you into a 3D bash-em-up and you are supposed to make your way from one end of the stage to the other, where you'll fight a 'boss' in the form of one of the main characters. Sounds OK in theory, right? But in practice, it's horribly implemented. First off, you only have eight axes of movement, even when using the joystick. This can get ridiculously frustrating when trying to correct your heading a little bit. Second, the fighting. In "Devil Within", they re-configured the buttons so you had two punches, a kick, and a jump. I thought this worked rather well. In this one, you've always got your standard controls, which would be good except that to pick anything in the stage up, you have to use X, which means you can't use that button to attack if there's something interactable near you. Also, when there are no enemies, the camera stays fixed and follows you as you run around; you can move freely in your 8 directions, and you run. When an enemy approaches, the camera slides around to the side to give you an almost-fighting-game side view, and your character slows to a walk, and you control them classic Tekken style. However, now the camera stays still, even if you get knocked into the foreground or background, making directional input quite frustrating. Then, sometimes, for no apparent reason, it'll just flip around to the other side, screwing up whatever you were doing. The game claims you can switch in and out of this mode, but you can't get back to the free-roam running mode. So basically, if you get swarmed, you can either inch your way back (gaining no space), or toggle the fight mode and walk away with your back to the enemies, and get knocked down because you can't block! Ugh. Then there's the enemies, some of whom have unblockable attacks that, if they so choose, can lock you down and end the scenario before you can do anything. That doesn't happen too often (they pause between attacks to give you a chance, usually) but it has happened to me on occasion. I simply can't believe they released this mode in the state it's in. It feels half-finished, like a early alpha-test, before the kinks were worked out. Why play it, you ask? Well, it's the only real way to get enough money to afford the character customizations I mentioned earlier, and it's also the only way to unlock the character-specific cutscenes (accessible by playing a mini-arcade mode game in one of the 'locations').
Next, there's the online play. I've always thought fighting games were a little too dependent on split-second reactions and timing to be effective in online play. And my experiences in the past with Tekken 5, Soul Calibur 4 and Street Fighter IV confirmed this. Tekken 6, I'm sorry to say, is no different. I've tried playing online several times now, and I've yet to play a match that actually feels like Tekken. They're all so laggy that I'm reduced to using simple, quick, power hits and hoping they connect while I wait for my inputted commands to render on screen. Trying to execute combos, or block multiple hits, is nigh-pointless. If they'd implement a latency filter, it might improve, as I've yet to get auto-matched against anyone that's not "in the red". Unfortunately, the developers decided that this lack of quality didn't matter, since they've put quite a bit of emphasis on online play. First, for the aforementioned Scenario Campaign, you can play online with a friend, but not with a second controller. Lame. Second, like Tekken 5 and Virtua Fighter 5, you can earn rankings (8th-1st Kyu, 1st-4th Dan, etc). Now, to progress past 1st Dan, you have to play online.
And last, I mentioned character customization earlier. In Tekken 5, you could create a second profile which the second player could load in order to have customizations for both players in a 2-player vs match. That's apparently gone. Why they would take a step backwards I don't know, unless it's another attempt to emphasize online play. A small nit, perhaps, but an annoyance just the same.
[EDIT] I also found that you apparently can't save control configurations for the second controller. This means that if you use the shoulder buttons (which I do, since I hold the controller like a normal person and thus can't hit LP + RK or RP + LK with my thumb), you have to configure the controller every time the game starts.
Overall, I still love the game. I always write way more about the grievances I have with a game than I do about the things I like, but that's because I notice them in more detail. However, don't let the text volume skew my overall opinion; this is still Tekken and it's still the best. The fighting's as fast and fun as ever. It's just that the peripherals suck, and they really dropped the ball on offline multiplayer support. I wish they'd bring back Tekken bowling...