Soon after starting this up for the first time, I knew that even just buying this was a bad idea. Tekken is of course one of the very well-known fighting game franchises but I’ve had no experience with it since a short time button mashing a PSP version a very long time ago. I bought this out of curiosity and of course because I wanted more games to play on my Hori Mini fighting stick. But it was a bad idea because this is very technical fighting game franchise that has no place for amateurs at all and this particular installment has very scanty single-player content.
Stories in fighting games are traditionally crappy but this one must be one of the crappiest yet and is pretty short too. Tekken 7 has a huge cast of characters but the main story only involves a bare handful of them. It’s the usual revenge-focused drama involving the members of the Mishima family with Akuma from the Street Fighter franchise guest starring. It’s bit strange how it uses an unknown reporter as a point of view character but it doesn’t make much of a difference. The world they inhabit is ridiculous as well with two giant corporations at war with each other and countries being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, yet they somehow still a great deal care about public opinion. Then there’s how stupidly difficult the combatants are to seriously hurt and how guns and missiles seem not to matter at all. There are side stories that feature other characters, supposedly to cover what happens to them while the events of the main story are going on. But each character only has one fight and it’s usually just a silly encounter with nothing to do with main story. Even the arcade mode is weirdly short and there is no tutorial in this game at all.
The designers do realize how unfriendly this game is to newbies so there are a couple of assist mechanisms that you can turn on. One maps macros for four specific moves that the character can bust out with just a touch of a button. It is kind of useful to be able to try these moves easily in a match and then go on to learn how to pull them off the usual way, which is actually not that hard. Another is a mode which lets you execute a preset combo simply by mashing the punch buttons. This looks cool but doesn’t help you learn the game at all. However the real way you’re supposed to learn the game is through the practice mode which is extremely powerful. You can set the AI to whatever behavior you want or even have it repeatedly attempt a particular move so that you can learn how to defend against the move and punish it. But this is really self-directed learning and nowhere does the game tell you what its fundamentals even are.
Much more so than the other fighting games I’ve tried, Tekken seems to be all about not making mistakes and then ruthlessly punishing the opponent once you recognize that he or she has made one. Blocking is very powerful as you block by default simply by not pressing any button, there is no chip damage, you can block all day as there is no block meter and there doesn’t seem to be any attacks that crushes blocks. But once you do get a hit confirmation past the defenses, you can follow through with a crazily long combo. There are almost no projectile attacks and little in the way of special moves. This really is a game about using the entire toolkit of basic fighting moves. Due to this design, this game actively punishes button mashing and requires you to have a plan even if it’s just block all the time and use the same move over and over again when the enemy is the right distance away. You won’t actually be very successful at this being so predictable but you can slowly add more and more moves to your repertoire in this way and suddenly you can start winning, at least against the AI.
Unfortunately I don’t care enough about this game to really want to learn it as I can see how long it would take. Even allowing for the fact that the game was released several years ago, the graphics look unimpressive and I dislike the straightforwardly anime art style and character designs. Being an amateur, I find that I do prefer more flash in my fighting games and more plain cool moves. It would help too if the backstories of the characters were not so ridiculous. Combined with the lack of single-player content and the lack of proper tutorials, this is simply a game that holds very little appeal to me. I even hate how in the main story, you’re forced to fight overpowered versions of the characters who blatantly cheat.
At the same time, I do acknowledge how these mechanics make this franchise a favorite for tournaments. It really does reward player skill, knowledge and ability to read the opponent more than other games. I can see how it’s so deliberative and so cerebral as you simply cannot push buttons and hope for the best. In that sense, this was a good experience in that I finally understood what Tekken is all about. But it’s not for me at all.
