Posted on March 13th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I picked up Tekken 2 and 3 at half price cheap, after continually hearing/reading that they’re the greatest 3D fighting game ever made.
And then we were playing through them (and dozens other games) in preparation to pull out lots of titles to sell at the game convention.
I just have to say I was totally unimpressed with the two games. The characters/graphics weren’t all that great. The virtua fighter characters are kinda plain too, but at least they all have noticably unique fighting styles.
But who cares about graphics, I like polygons you know. But gameplay… the special moves were incredibly hard to pull off. And it wasn’t just the PoS controller. I have one of those capcom controllers, and an arcade stick too. It didn’t matter. You have to hit those buttons at lightning speed. At least twice as fast as the combos on MK3. You have to go Yngwie on those buttons.
And what’s worse is the charge-back/chargeforward parts of special moves. In most fighting games, you just have to hold for 1 or 2 seconds, and if you hold it for more than that, no problem. But for the charge holds in Tekken, you have to hold it or like exactly 800ms to 1200ms. If you hold it for 1.5 seconds, it considers it too long of a hold and cancels the move. I could try a special move 10 times and be lucky to get it to work once.
And then they list all these special moves to do while you’re running, but they don’t actually exist. You perform the exact same special move just by running into someone, without having to press any of the buttons.
And the moves and special moves are all rather boring.
The only cool think about the games is the throws. Each character has a really cool hold/throw/backbreak type move, one from the front and one from behind. They sometimes last 10 seconds. Those are very cool. But they don’t make up for the rest of the game in my mind.
In comparision to other 3D fighters I’ve played, like Soul Blade/Calibre, and Dead or Alive 2, and even the original Virtua Fighter, it just didn’t stack up.