Tekken

"A wrinkly old fighting relic, no I'm not talking about Wang Jinery"

Tekken when it first came out in the arcades was hailed as a ground breaking 3D beat 'em up. Mostly by those people who had had never played the infinitely deeper and more technically accomplished Virtua fighter games on the sega Saturn. When Tekken crossed over to the PlayStation as one of the early release titles a selection of ludicrous character endings were tacked on to begin the silly and pointless Tekken storyline that still fester on in the latest release Tekken 4.

Tekken as a fighting game offers the supposedly revolutionary system of assigning a button to each limb which allows combos to flow smoothly. This is a huge detriment to skillful gaming. Random button bashing quickly produces amazing attacks that are tricky to defend against due to the lack of parries, dodges, reversals or counter attacks. Admittedly this problem was ironed out some what in later installments, but here its Tekken at its most crude. Flailing limbs assault the other character who hides behind the block. The attackers combo comes to an end and the defender piles in with one, while the attacker now cowers back under there almighty block. Repeat until one is knocked out.

The characters are also badly balanced. Kazuya and Paul can win with just a limited moves. A more complex character like Yoshimtsu is very hard to win with initially as the AI will punish any mistakes viciously. With no training mode, getting a grip on a character is a frustrating process. Unlocking the secret characters requires either alot of patience, or a major cheat using the one round, 20 secs method.

However at the time the demise of the Saturn and the rise of the Psx saw Tekken crowned king of the 3D beat'em up genre, bettered only by its own sequels. Tekken 3 is certainly a worthy game, but Tekken is not something that you should return to for fighting thrills. It is painfully slow, the background are garish, the character models are blocky and merge and glitch badly in some grapple type moves and throws. The final FMVs are laughable, only really watchable for comedy value and for those interested in the stupid Tekken soap opera.

Tekken is a game that was overrated at the time and in the light of modern, better fighting games has retained none of the nostalgic replayability of such games as Street Fighter 2 Turbo. The best that can be said for this game in the 21st century is the Galaga loading game is still pretty good fun. Otherwise, leave it in the past, we've all moved on, there is nothing to see here now.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/14/02, Updated 05/14/02