My take on Tekken 5

Before I begin let me say that I won't hesitate to get into Tekken-jargon if it's appropriate, so if you've never played Tekken, you may have alot of trouble understanding what I'm saying sometimes. I guess I CAN at least put a reference...

The Tekken series was always a "Holiday Classic" for me. My cousins would bring their Playstation over on New Year's Eve, and we'd play Tekken 3 in my basement with other family members. I remember how Lei's d/b+3,3 seemed TOTALLY unstoppable. I spent the next few years mashing my cousins and nephews to death with Eddy once I realized he was EVEN EASIER to mash with, but I still didn't think much of it.

What made me think of Tekken as more than just a holiday season mash-o-thon was Soulcalibur 2. Yoshimitsu was my first character in SC2 and I remember reading a faq that said how playing Tekken would improve my game with Yoshi. I bought T3 that same week, and I ended up falling in love with King, the wrestler, and Ling Xiaoyu. I got into Tekken Tag Tournament (TTT) because the arcade where I played SC2 also had a TTT machine. The team of "King'n'Ling" was born! T4 was already released at this time, but I basically ignored it along with everyone else in my immediate community.

T4 is the skid mark on the underwear of the Tekken series. They made some tweaks to the fighting engine that were potentially interesting, but as the saying goes, "It's all in the delivery", and they made afew unforgivable mistakes in the delivery of Tekken 4. The first and foremost was to put King, my favorite character, in this STUPID cowboy costume.

Even VF3's wolf looked better in a cowboy costume. That's clearly what they were making fun of, but you can't bring your own character down lower than what you're making fun of just to prove a point. The costume desing in general was simply pathetic. They took one of the more respectable characters in the game, Heihachi Mishima, and put him in a "traditional sumo costume".



The sumo costume would be an ok idea if it wasn't a freaking DIAPER! These changes, and afew others, were enough to make sure that I never got into T4 enough to learn how someone could actually find the game interesting. There was also a subtle character-balance issue named Jin that, combined with the step-guard fiasco of SC2, made me stop taking Namco seriously for fighting games.

Now that I've tried out T5, I'm glad to see that they've learned from their mistakes. The game feels more like Tekken Tag, which proves to me that I'm NOT the only one who thought that T4 was a pathetic excuse for a Tekken game. The characters look more like they did in TTT too, but the visual quality is more similar to T4. The stages look sweet too.



I had been itching to try out Kind and Ling ever since I heard that the game was coming out, and the screenshots showed promise. King's new selection of airgrabs make his hopkick alot stronger now, but Ling is REALLY what's keeping me interested in T5. Since I never played T4 enough to see Ling fully in action, I now have all her T4 moves AND her T5 moves to integrate into my game. The stylish things she can do to juggle her opponent and give him a case of brainfreeze made her slightly more fun than King ever since TTT. I'm also fascinated with the concept of fighters who fight just as effectively with their back turned to the opponent.

The only problem is that I'm older now, and I'm just not into the arcade scene like I used to be. T5 is good, but it's not THAT good. But I will admit that I'm impatiently waiting for the console release. I might even buy T5 the day it comes out on PS2.