Review: Tekken 6
Written by Kayin Amoh on November 9, 2009 – 08:27
First, a little history on the background of Tekken 6. It was first released into arcades nearly two years ago, and garnered solid support from the fans despite occasional complaints that it was, you know, maybe just a little too similar to Tekken 5 and that the Rage mode was slightly broken –a system which allows fighters with low health to deal out significantly more damage than their uninjured rivals, allowing for easier comebacks from the brink of annihilation. Many players considered it hardly fair that being on the receiving end of a combo which should have left you alive will suddenly kill you just because you’ve been playing better than your opponent up until that point, but them’s the breaks.
Again, Bloodline Rebellion didn’t quite set the world alight and instantly reignite the well respected Tekken competitive scene to its former glory, but players still enjoyed what it had to offer. It did, after all, feature the largest roster of Tekken characters ever available in a single title as well as all new bounce combos and the ability to crash through walls and floors during a friendly bout between two people doing their damndest to beat each other unconscious.
It’s been a while since both versions first came out, and both Tekken fans and fans of fighting games in general have been eagerly anticipating the home console port of Tekken 6 for quite some time now. Much longer than expected, in fact. Namco, you see, wanted to thank their fanbase by adding something special into Tekken 6. They wanted the netplay to be absolutely rock solid to allow for hours and hours of unimpeded lagless fighting fun and frivolity. More than this, they wanted to reach out to the non-fighting game crowd with a three dimensional scrolling beat em up detailing the trials and tribulations of the Tekken cast as they potter around Tekken 6’s war ravaged world like idiots.
Oh dear. Not only is this cross-genre reachout sort of like FIFA attempting to reach out to non-football fans during a Premier League match by having one team strip shirtless at half time and dance around like the Chippendales while a swarm of flesh eating locusts chases the other team around the pitch, but the main problem with it is that it just isn’t very good at all. In fact, it’s dreadful. In fact, it goes beyond merely ‘dreadful’ and drops off the bottom end of humanity’s ability to describe just how bad it really is.
So, what’s Scenario mode about, exactly?
Well, as has been mentioned previously, Scenario mode is essentially a three dimensional side scrolling beat em up featuring your favourite Tekken characters smashing the living hell out of anyone stupid enough to get in their way, assuming that the utterly incompetent, drunken camera and clunky control system don’t get in the way and cause you to get repeatedly molested by a bunch of shirtless, sweaty men. And, occasionally, a kangaroo, robot or ninja randomly chuck their end in for good measure.
Did I say favourite Tekken characters? Pardon moi, it’s actually about two of them beating the living hell out of the rest of them. I hope you like the new additions to Bloodlines, since Scenario mode features the two of them quite heavily in all its utterly bizarre, disjointed glory. Basically, it’s a rip-roaring epic saga which centres on a man who randomly punches missiles out of mid air. In this intricately crafted tale of intrigue and treachery our intrepid hero attacks a military base, develops amnesia, fights a bunch of people who apparently have nothing to do with anything in the entire universe and falls in love with a robot before thundering along to a thrilling conclusion in which he picks up a nearby chaingun and presses a couple of buttons a couple of times in order to WIN THE GAME.
The Count of Monte Cristo, eat your heart out.
On a more serious note, the story mode is puerile tat which seems like it’s been extracted directly from the mind of a mentally deficient twelve year old anime addict via a syringe before being strained through every cliché known to man and finally pumped out, devoid of anything resembling rational thought or reasoned design, into your Xbox 360 or PS3. The series’ previous hero, Jin Kazama, has seemingly gone nuts and started an all out war between the Mishima Zaibatsu and the G Corporation headed by his significantly more badass father, Kazuya. There’s some big humanity ending entity involved in there named Azazel and… augh, just thinking about it hurts my brain.
The worst thing about this mode isn’t just that the storytelling isn’t up to the usual high standards offered by other games – it’s more the fact that the entire offering is nothing less than absolute shit on every conceivable level. There are times when it flows smoothly enough, usually when there aren’t many enemies on screen, and you have just about enough space to awkwardly manoeuvre around and get your attacks in. Not that you’ll be varying them too much, since enemies happily fall for the same tricks over and over and over, such as Kazuya’s UF+4, 4, 4, 4 or Devil Jin’s laser attacks. Hardly thrilling stuff, but when the screen gets busy and you’re unable to see yourself or your partner for the crazily oscillating camera and the hordes of henchmen bearing down on you it can get very ugly, very quickly.
Did I say partner? Oh yes I did! If you’re feeling generous, you too can share this mind numbing absence of anything remotely resembling entertainment with a friend… assuming, of course, that you hate said friend with every fibre of your soul. If you prefer to suffer alone, you’ll be treated to Namco’s innovative solution to the notoriously dodgy partner AI usually found in these types of games – they’ve decided not to give her any AI at all.
Seriously. When Alisa’s running low on health she’ll quite often blissfully ignore any life restoring items that may be scattered around the battlefield, and when she’s full she’ll spend half her time pilfering the items you so desperately need to survive. In order to make her collect something, you usually have to position yourself between her and the item before running the other way so that she’ll follow you over the top of it.
The targeting system is every bit as horrible. You’re always forced to lock onto nearby characters (and once locked on, you stay locked on even if they’re miles away) and you spend all your time staring them down which makes it bloody infuriating when you’re low on health and all you want to do is turn around and punch a crate in the hopes of revealing some lovely heath restoring poultry. Not helping matters with this is how you’re forced to shuffle around in mini-steps whenever an enemy is nearby, making easy, fluid movement nigh on impossible.
Ugh, ugh, ugh. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. By the time you’ve got to a particular boss who’s been making your life hell for the majority of the game, and been treated to a spine shatteringly tedious airborne battle between Alisa and an attack helicopter you’ll probably have felt your will to live being drained out the bottom of your shoes. When you’re not bored to tears, literally weeping in dismay as you trudge from one horrid end of this stupid mode to the other, you’re spitting in incoherent rage at some of the ridiculously unfair challenges it throws at you.
So why give Scenario Mode such a hard time? It’s not what Tekken’s really about, yeah? Good old vanilla Tekken 6 is still in there, yeah?
Well… yeah. Kind of. Astonishingly enough, the home ports of Tekken 6 seem eager to have this half cooked abomination of a mode rise up and supplant the good old fashioned Tekken gameplay we’ve come to know and love. It’s like they’re somehow proud of this atrocity against videogames that they’ve committed, and insist on waving it around in your face like a constipated drunkard who’s finally forced one out and insists on everyone at the bar taking a good long look, much to their collective disgust.
Scenario mode is the first option on the menu, for instance. It’s also been made the only viable way to make enough money to customise your characters, since many of the available items cost between a few hundred thousand in gold and several million. A run through a single stage in scenario can rake in up to half a million or more, wheras fighting online or in the arcade mode will net you a few thousand per match – not to mention that these items regularly drop for free while you enjoy the delights that Scenario mode has to offer.
Fancy unlocking those legendarily well produced CG endings that Tekken has become famous for? That’s right, off you trot to Scenari… ARGH! BUGGER BUGGER BUGGER! Why in the pissing hell does everything that’s fun in Tekken revolve around this bloody mode? It’s about half as enjoyable as helplessly watching a homeless man beating your family to death with a claw hammer, and we’re supposed to believe that this monstrosity took a year and half to create? In that timeframe a half competent team could probably have been well on their way to releasing another sequel, or have remade the graphics engine so masterfully that Virtua Fighter 5 would be weeping itself to sleep every night, or perhaps they could even have designed and introduced several new, accomplished and well considered characters into the roster. Anything but bloody Scenario mode, in other words.
On the plus side, anything that isn’t related to the worst scrolling three dimensional fighting game ever, which takes everything Namco learned from the notoriously mediocre Death by Degrees and chucks it clean out the window, tends to offer up good old fashioned Tekken fun in spades. Very familiar Tekken fun, but still mighty enjoyable nonetheless. Returning characters have been retuned, from the series’ badboy mainstay Kazuya Mishima all the way through to Dark Resurrection’s acrobatic favourite Lili. Many of the new additions to the roster are fun to play as and the new approach to breakable stage interaction, while very much like those found in the Dead or Alive series, make for some genuinely rousing battles.
The new characters introduced for Tekken 6 all fit in well, with special mention going to newcomer Bob – an obese martial arts expert who realised that his previously slight build left him unable to actually knock out his opponents and so wisely turned things around by eating all the pies, thus eventually becoming the rotund hero we all know and love. His move list is worth a smirk too, given that the majority of his moves are named after food types.
The music comes across as fairly average throughout – keep an ear out for the yodelling track in particular, which is either the worst or best music track I’ve heard in my life – and sticks quite closely to the electronica style Namco usually tend to use in the series. The graphics, while not outstanding, definitely do their part in keeping things visually interesting. Characters are larger than they were in previous outings, and although they can come across as a little stiff tend to be more smoothly animated than ever before. The backgrounds deserve special mention for lending a feeling of authenticity to proceedings. Arenas often come across as suitably moody and atmospheric and do a great job in representing the ‘war torn world’ environment that Tekken 6 takes place in. Crumbling buildings shatter and break apart as you fight, fighter jets swoop overhead and gunships spray gattling bullets down on tanks. There’s variety too, with arctic tundra stages sitting alongside lush jungle environments.
The ‘Fiesta Del Tomate’ stage is hideous, however. It’s so bad that it almost feels like someone spewed straight into your eyes mere seconds before the fight begins.
What’s less impressive about Tekken 6’s production values is that many of the winposes and move animations have been drafted in from Tekken 5 with no alterations made whatsoever. As a Kazuya player, it’s kind of disappointing to see that most of his battle startup and win poses haven’t changed at all, and he’s not alone.
Online play is generally quite okay, too. While games are rarely free of lag, they do usually come across as being playable at the very least. This can be a real problem for advanced players however, since Tekken’s combos are often quite exacting in the timing required to perform them – not difficult, in many cases, but a jab coming out one twentieth of a second late can really mess up your potential to deal the damaging juggle combos which often make up the majority of a fighter’s damage potential. And, of course, it’s difficult to defend against rushdown attempts successfully when you’re unable to react to what’s happening due to lag.
One amusing example of this came whilst fighting another gamer on Xbox Live whose tag I shall omit on the grounds of professional courtesy. A remarkably poor Yoshimitsu player, the slight lag prevalent in our match caused his entire battle plan to revolve around nothing more than doing a high spinning kick into a low spinning kick. Over and over and over. Since I have less respect for these types of player than the dirt beneath my shoes I retaliated in an equally cheap fashion, performing Kazuya’s roundhouse to triple spin kick ad infinitum. A pair of braindead leprechauns could have put up a more engrossing fight, but I came through easily since I actually understand unimportant little things such as, you know, timing.
Needless to say, a private message was soon incoming about my lack of skill and poor parental heritage, with a final teary-eyed comment likening me to a female dog. This was nicer and more respectful, I suppose, than my return message. Even by my standards it was fairly inventive and far reaching.
Ah, Xbox Live. Never fails to bring out the worst in people. Just remember to block those sweeps before they happen when playing online, everyone.
Other than that, Tekken 6 delivers pretty much everything we’ve come to expect from the series. Ghost data can be downloaded off the network, there’s a gallery which allows you to view your unlocked ending movies, replays, prologues and the like, and the ever present practice mode is still, in fact, present. It isn’t the best practice mode around, however – despite showing you sample combos for your favourite characters it doesn’t actually seem to offer a way to view the actual commands needed to perform them. And keep an eye out for some of the customisation items having special effects – you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Lili magically producing penguins from out of nowhere mid-fight just because she happens to be wearing a special pair of pants.
Special mention has to go to the bosses in Tekken 6 as well. Nancy-mi847j and Azazel are so far beyond being merely atrocious that I don’t even know where to begin describing just how awful they really are. I remember when KoF XII launched a few months ago we had legions of fighting game fans bemoaning the lack of a boss rounding the single player experience off. This game goes a long way to making an absolute mockery of those complaints, because any fighting game boss that turns out anything like the two spectacularly unenjoyable walking shitbags on offer here deserve to be drowned in a bucket full of donkey piss and other assorted unmentionables that happen to be floating around inside.
And that’s pretty much it. If you’ve played Tekken at all in the past, you’ll know pretty much what to expect from this latest iteration. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it still offers good solid fighting enjoyment with a lot of depth to the combat system. It may be a little masher-friendly at times – a masher will beat an intermediate player more often than you might appreciate, though an actual expert will demolish them each and every time – but the more you learn and understand how the game works, the less likely this occurrence will manifest itself in your own matches.
If you’re after a deep, easily accessible fighting game with a lot to offer, Tekken 6 certainly delivers. It may not be as deep or as technical as the criminally overlooked Virtua Fighter 5 which you could now probably find being sold for a tenner or less quite easily on either system, but it’s still easy to get into, looks solid and feels great, if somewhat overly familiar at this point.
God alone knows what they were thinking with that Scenario mode though.
7/10
How come female fighters in fighting games all have such smooth complexions and perfect figures, anyway? You’d think that being stuck in a vocation where they spend half their time getting punched in the face by large, burly men with biceps the size of my thighs would leave them looking ugly and lumpy and horrible and misshapen, with enough missing teeth to build a piano out of.
That’s videogames for you.
For more Tekken 6 reviews check out Test Freaks