Namco's New Bullshit

about Tekken 6



The Wind Up

I know this is a little slow but yet again Namco have failed to deliver with their new Tekken game. I feel like it's personal since even though the games are a little shitty, I still keep coming back to buy the next in the series but this is my limit.

Tekken 1 had a good selection of characters and even though there were much better games out at the time it still stands as one of the better games in gaming history.

Then in Tekken 2 they cocked it up a little, mainly due to executive decisions and the good old "I thought it was a good idea at the time" theory that always seems to fuck up good game series.

Then there was Tekken 3 and for most this was the first one they played. IMO this was the best the series was gonna get and no-one would have blamed them if they just ended it there. So what if the characters were a bit hit and miss but at least the game was fun, functional, looked good (at the time), only mildly annoying and was anything but boring with comedy characters like Gon and Doc B and the many numbers of different modes. This included a volleyball game and that's several years before D/A stole the concept and put their own slant on it.

Then Tekken Tag showed up and I count it as Namco's excuse for being too lazy to make a proper game. It was Tekken 3 with a whole bunch of useless characters added, one of the most annoying bosses in history and it was missing all the fun modes we'd enjoyed earlier. So the less said about this game, the better.

Then there's Tekken 4, which still has the best graphics out of the whole series, and despite the fact that Heihachi's Soul Calibur move set made it near impossible to win if he got just one hit in, the rest of the characters were well made and well balanced. Except for Steve Fox of course who was in a league of his own and could beat the crap out any character if you could get the hang of his swaying. They also took older characters like Hwarang, Lee, Martial Law and Paul Phoenix and tweaked them so they were much easier to play, harder to cheat with and less biased against other characters.

The one major thing that pissed me off about 4 though was the fact that they completely changed Jin's move set so that it was incredibly easy to perform that mid air collapse that somehow kicked them and insanely hard to perform that crossing punch combo that was so awesome.

The quote unquote flying kick took too long to recover from even if you did hit them, it didn't do enough damage and it was so damn slow anyone would see it coming. Somehow though that is the only move that the great AI of the game walked straight into every time. It's like they knew the move was shit and wouldn't work so the deliberately programed the AI to run headlong into it every time you performed the move. The cross punch combo however was always avoided but pretty much killed them outright.

Funny how when the AI played they seemed to avoid pressing an action that was just circle every time but every time they performed the ridiculously hard cross punch combo as easy as pressing one button. This in my opinion is where the series died. What we've been following since is the undead remains of a classic series.

And so the atrocities continued with Tekken 5. In this game you had a whole character customizer thing but this is completely overshadowed by the much better customisers in Virtua Fighter, which they got the whole idea from, and Soul Calibur, which is their game, so why would they make something that they know is gonna look second rate.

Then there's the whole problem with characters. Again there's a whole selection of copycat characters but we're kinda used to that and there is that Feng Wei guy and Raven, which are pretty cool, and a few golden oldies too, but what really takes the biscuit with the Tekken 5 characters is the fact they kept all the shit characters and then took the good characters and made them shit.

For example, Steve Fox was awesome in Tekken 4, he showed a new form of fighting. You would counter attacks by evading and following up with an attack. Unfortunately in Tekken 5 they took that away and made him just a guy with punches. They also took away all the tweaks they had made to improve the characters and returned them back to the tricky to play, cheating, biased characters more accustomed to Tekken 3 but without the whole style of the game to balance it out.

On that note, they also made Bryan Fury biased too. In fact, they made his so biased that anyone who practiced using him could beat any other character with ease, even the boss.

Now to give credit to number 5, it did have that whole platform game, and I mean platform game and not side scrolling fighter like the previous games had. But with all the time they spent on adding shit they could have easily made Tekken 5 a much better game. UC you add stuff after you finish the thing. Only when you have a good product do you try and make it better, like with Tekken 3. And if they though 5 was a good game then I seriously fear for Namco as a successful games company.

The Punch

Now when I heard about the new Tekken, that is Tekken 6, in case any other Tekkens have been made before you read this post, I was apprehensive of course. There have been many bad decisions throughout the entire series so I prepared myself for the worst. So it came as no surprise when I found out that Tekken 6 is the shittest, the absolute shitest of the entire series.

Let's start with what's most important, the gameplay. They have reintroduced all the cheat moves, character biases and awkward controls from the earlier games. So if you're a fan of repeatedly performing the same action over and over and using the character with the most annoyingly impossible to avoid moves just so that always win then you're in luck. But if like me you actually want to play a game an not just sit there crouching and timing the square button with exact time they stand up AND EXPECT OTHERS TO DO THE SAME (including AI) then you'll be sadly disappointed.

Then let's talk about characters. There are a total of 15 copycats of the 35 characters in the game (that about half) and unfortunately 6 of them (just under half of them) are new to the series. Of the 2 new characters, count them, 2 not 6. I don't count different stories and physical appearance as separate character. Of the 2 noobies one is unplayable and the other a giant war machine that any 2 year old kid could make up moves for. The most annoying thing is that the war machine's moves were incredibly similar to the moves of a character from the game Vampire Savior. So apparently Namco are less original than a 2 year old kid. That's quite some low you've sunk to there Namco.

For those people who are a little unsure as to what characters they are copying I have a list here that I prepared earlier.

Alisa Bosconovitch = Julia - There's a vid on Youtube where Alisa is fighting Julia and the similarities become so obvious.

Bob = Paul Phoenix - Their moves are identical. They even collapse the same.

Lars = Raven - It's a little tricky to see it but when you watch both side by side it's obvious.

Leo = Lee - Hard to tell as Lee himself is a copy of several other characters.

Miguel = Marduk - Miguel's moves look a little disjointed because Marduk has very different proportion to him. He even has the same battle into, right down to his stupid grimace.

Zafina = Kuma - It took me ages to figure this one out. The reason her limbs are all twisting in peculiar ways is because Kuma's movements aren't at all realistic.

Then there's the graphics. They promised us PS3-E3 quality graphics. But instead we got Tekken Tag. With the sheer graphical processing capability of the PS3 there's no excuse. Namco are just lazy, that is all.

It's not hard to sharpen a texture or at least no res it down so much. And it's not hard to smooth out those pointy polygons. The excuse they gave was that when you play the side scrolling fighter the polygon count would be too high. Then why did you make the thing in the first place. People don't care about side scrolling fighters.

You already made a whole platform game, a character customiser, the arcade mode of Tekken 1, 2 and 3 and a whole fighting game on 5 and that was on PS2 so why not with Tekken 6 for the PS3, a machine which is at least 20 times the power.

There's no excuse Namco. Stop making stupid crap like booting sheep about whilst mad yodelers sing their eyeballs out and start you know actually making a game.