Tekken 6 Review -- What Happened To Tekken?
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 9:26PM 
No matter how many times you adjust your collectible head gear and change outfits on your favorite polygonal fighter, it won’t bring back the one you love. For the past three iterations of the once illustrious 3D fighting Tekken franchise, the series has been balancing the art of evolving and correcting previous miscues. Where this current Street Fighter community had the ability to grow two-fold thanks to this new age of online play and console connectivity, Tekken fans will still yearn for an online system more sophisticated than the one found in this game. The biggest issue with Tekken 6 currently, isn’t so much the robust fighting system and the well-realized graphics engine, but how it presents these features to a varied audience of hardcore enthusiast and newcomers.
In the future, I’ve already written a story which encapsulates my love-turned-apathetic relationship with what the Tekken franchise has morphed into. The glory days of the mid-90s are well beyond the series now, and even for its 720p high definition graphical output -- the actual look of the animations look fairly antiquated. Most fans, like myself, see this as an homage to when the series was great and didn’t get all mucked up by the awful landscape designs found in Tekken 4. You remember Tekken 4 right? Its the game that Namco-Bandai has been apologizing for since the early PS2-era. Its the game that turned the series from a varying array of play styles to the game reliant on who can get the other player in the air for a juggle combo first.
Tekken 4 served as a fantastic springboard to what the sixth installment has regretfully been paying for. Where Street Fighter IV served as a reboot to a series that needed a new look and feel for a new type of gamer -- I can only applaud Katsuhiro Harada and the team over at Namco-Bandai for sticking to the Tekken tradition. Though I feel the series should move past the reminding players how great Tekken 3 was -method of design, there is still something in my fanboy heart that gets all warm in fuzzy, when I see that a warm and fuzzy Kuma and Panda are still selectable characters. Much like Tekken 5, Tekken 6 serves the player more characters with varying styles that actually don’t feel like a cheap palette swap or lazily designed add-on characters. Seriously. Play as Bob for a weekend and absorb the fact that the play mechanics for a man of this size didn’t restrict him to a typical grappler or ‘oafish’ type of overweight brawler.
Hardcore fans will notice that the new characters a bit of a challenge to use in tournament play, and their tried and true favorites like Yoshimitsu and Law have had style and speed adjustments [Note: that Yoshi’s style not only utilizes two swords, but he has less unblockables. Law’s style has slightly quickened and he even has some additional moves added]. With this, hardcore players will also wonder why Nina or Bryan Fury weren’t overhauled as well. Not as a complaint, just as a question of “Why?” Due to the Jin balance issues of Tekken 4, it seems that Namco-Bandai didn’t want to shake up the world with this foray back into the Tournament of Iron Fists. Its laudatory that the series sticks to their guns, but shows a certain hesitation to try new things that doesn’t involve customizable suits and weapons that only add [possibly distract] to the Japanese game design aesthetic.
My biggest bone to pick with Tekken 6 isn’t the online mode, which is awful and for many reasons. The single player campaign mode is downright prehistoric. If you remember the control issues of the bonus mode found in Tekken 3 called Tekken Force Mode then you know of two things: Namco’s willingness to experiment with the series and their ability to fail miserably at said experiment. Imagine this very optional and admirable failure of an experiment being made into the Single Player Campaign mode of Tekken 6. Now open your eyes and live the dream. The single player mode is one that highlights almost every positive and negative aspect of how the Tekken series has evolved. The story is an acquired taste, in which it limits you to playing as Lars. Join Lars on his very action-beat’em up-meets-RPG quest you can unlock characters and eventually unlock the Arena Mode.
Arena Mode serves as a way to select characters you’ve unlocked in the single-player campaign, have them face foes and eventually see how their story concludes. Sound familiar? It should. It’s how the typical single player campaign should function in a Tekken game as oppose to playing through dozens of slow-loading screens that reveal stages with mildly entertaining gameplay and a less-than fleshed-out control scheme. To Namco-Bandai’s credit, the control scheme of the single player has improved, but that is like saying a razorblade sandwich is much better with ketchup and mustard. Both of which will leave you feeling that much closer to your ultimate demise.
The online mode is a tremendous step back for the series. By this I mean its a nightmare and one of the sole reasons why the Tekken series will have a difficult time regaining the glory it once had. Fighting games like Super Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue and even Tekken 5: DR serve as examples of where the fighting game scene is currently. You need great online netcode in order for this hardcore community, that so religiously supports these franchises, to continue to grow. This works hand-in-hand when this new fighting game community that wants to try their hand at a more advanced level. I, and I’m sure other hardcore fighting game fans, support in-person face-offs, Tekken 6 needed this to work and it doesn’t. Its fantastic that the MMO-like character level-ups have given a certain uniqueness to each player’s favorite characters, but this is useless when showing them off in an online community that is struggling to...or literally fighting to play online.
Tekken 6 is a great fighting game. There are a lot of if’s and but’s that should follow, but as far as a pure fun fighting game, the tradition continues. Unfortunately, a lot of the tradition has grown stale and when the developers ventured to keep up with their fighting game adversaries they stumbled more than they succeeded. The loading times, the terrible online functionality coupled with an antiquated single player and a final boss so incredibly cheap it would make King of Fighter’s fans giggle -- all contribute to Tekken 6 being the only game I could only recommend to fans of the franchise. Even then, there are several caveats.
I Give Tekken 6 ...
The “Cold Shoulder” Award
Bandai, Namco, Tekkenzaibatsu, tekken in Criticism, Entertainment, Fighters, Gaming, Reviews 
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