Tekken 6 was not a game I looked forward to before it was out but I picked up the PS3 version near the end of last year and have not stopped studying its intricate fighting system ever since with some kind of religious fervor. To say I am new to the Tekken series isn’t too far from the truth even though I probably have touched every game in the series. And by touch I meant loading up the game, setting it to 1 round easiest mode, and finishing every character in the arcade without actually learning their moves. The point of the exercise was to unlock every character’s ridiculous CG ending sequences, which dating back to the day of PSX was godsend, for they were gorgeous beyond your imagination. The most memorable ending was Tekken 3’s Gon, which was a bonus character — a small dinosaur from a manga series, and its cute ending included running through the lavish wilderness disturbing its denizens.
Fast forward a decade or so, with Tekken 6 in my hand, of course I still played through the campaign mode and the arena to unlock character endings, but CG scenes just aren’t as impressive as they were 10 years go, not that they aren’t good, but times have changed. What I ended up getting from Tekken 6 was actually trying to learn to play the game competitively, through online matches and with my friends. As someone who has played 2D fighting games all his life and even pretty good at it at that, learning the mechanics of Tekken 6 was both overwhelming and daunting. Even though Tekken doesn’t have a block button like most of its 3D fighting brethren, comparing Tekken to any traditional Street Fighter-like game is like juxtaposing oil and water. The skill set simply doesn’t transfer over.
The first thing I had to learn was how to read a command and combo list off the Internet. My Tekken veteran friends pointed me to Tekken Zaibatsu, which has a lot of good resources. My first step was learning what 1, 2, 3, 4 represented which button and action, and the kind of state a character can be in. Standing and crouching is standard in any fighting game, but Tekken has while standing (ws) command, which is going from crouching to standing, and till today, I haven’t mastered it. Not only that, Tekken takes command from all 8 directions of the joystick at each state the character is in and each of the direction will contain different command move and start different chains, and not only that, Tekken move sets contain fwd fwd and fwd fwd fwd moves. Learning an entire move set of 1 character was more than overwhelming, and mastering more than a handful of characters seemed more astronomically difficult than learning the Encyclopedia Britannica or winning the lottery . I learned to take notes (which I haven’t done since my college days), researching the best moves and writing them down, along with combos that you feel comfortable with is key to getting better at the game. Don’t expect to remember the moves for the first few weeks you learn a new character, and if you are switching between characters a cheat sheet will come in handy. After a month of learning or so there was 1 character I could play comfortably without glancing towards my laptop screen which displays the cheat sheet.
The character combos breakdown videos on YouTube are another helpful resource for me which I always rely upon learning a new character. Sometimes I feel like I learn to run before I learn to walk, which is that I try to learn the more complex combos before I learn the regular moves. The reason is to find characters I am more comfortable with — if I can do the useful combos, the normal moves will probably grow on me later. Of course this doesn’t work well once I got pretty good with a character and played some serious player and rank matches online, I found that while I could launch someone in the air doing some pretty impressive bounce combo (bouncing someone off the ground and continually juggling them is a must-learn skill in Tekken 6) taking off up to 40% of their health, I lost most of the matches — it was the exact problem that I learned to run before trying to walk and now I am tripping all over the place. Learning the best poking and essential 3 hit combos and bread-and-butter moves was crucial in diminishing my opponent’s last drop of life. A complex damaging combo isn’t all that useful, if you can’t hit your opponent.
Even with the serious match fighting out of the way, Tekken 6’s campaign mode is entertaining enough and totally worth it for the console version’s entry price. With a character of your choice, you can plow through different pretty bland environments (which aren’t as bad as I made it sound) against plethora of enemies Final-Fight style with your AI-controlled sidekick who is dumber than that guinea pig you experimented on when you were in elementary school — the game is begging for network multiplayer which hopefully will one day magically appear in a future update (Actually I just learned, when revising this article, that it IS coming next week). The fun in that is while you only have a punch and kick button in Final Fight, your hundreds of command moves is available in Tekken even in a free roaming environment; of course it gets quite confusing since you have to actively target and line up with an opponent on a plane, and you will learn the hard way that some area sweeping moves are much more effective than what you normally use on a 1-on-1 situation. The real fun in Tekken 6 campaign lies in finding hidden stages and bosses and getting to the character endings in the area, and most importantly, earning items and outfitting your favorite character as you like — dress up your favorite whore in schoolgirl outfit and dish it out online — whatever strikes your fancy
Just like Little Big Planet, Tekken 6 will remain within constant witinh-reach-access-shelf-space next to my PS3 — while I most likely won’t become an expert in it in my lifetime, with the 10 years of Tekken lore head start that I hadn’t taken advantaged of, there are still many aspects of the fighting system that I am willing to learn, and going through that journey is part of the enjoyment. Though I wished the lag could be better, and the loading a little faster — I know that I will be fighting to my life and death against familiar friends and complete strangers in Tekken 6 matches for a very long time.
An exciting tournament match:
