Tekken 6 — The King of Iron Fist Fighters

If you ever needed a word to quickly sum up the entirety of the package that Tekken 6 offers, that word would be: Confounding.

Not to say that it’s a bad game at all. No, Tekken 6 is at its best when all it involves is its core fighting mechanics. If you’ve been following the game at all, you’ve probably heard about how enjoyable of a fighting game it is, and how it’s been the most popular arcade game in Japan for nearly two years – that’s including the original Tekken 6 arcade release and the refined Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion, the latter of which is what the home console iteration is based on. The game is not the problem; the problem is almost everything else.

If you’ve ever dipped your hand into the Tekken pool before, this game will instantly feel familiar to you, aside from a few new additions to the fighting system to not make the game feel like a rehash. If the aforementioned “dipping” requires playing the console versions, you’re probably aware of Namco’s penchant for not being content with leaving just the main fighting game for console owners to enjoy. Since Tekken 3, Namco’s added a bunch of modes to increase the value of the home console version. Some of them are good fun, like Tekken Bowl and Tekken Ball, while some are just exercises in frustration, like…well everything else. Unfortunately, Tekken 6 has none of the former, and too much of the latter.

This is a fighting game, and you’ll probably (hopefully) want to spend most of your time with the actual fighting, and that’s where Tekken 6 is at its best. There are plenty of single player modes that you’d expect to be here, like (an admittedly very short) Arcade Mode, Time Attack, Survival, Team Battle, and a Practice Mode to brush up your skills against a dummy. There’s also a Ghost Battle mode to fight the ghosts of tournament players, and if you get sick of the amount of them there, you can feel free to download the Ghost data of online players.

But the majority of the fun is, of course, to be had with another human player, which most people – unless you live in Japan – will have to find online. The netcode in the game now fortunately isn’t the one that existed in it when the game launched; the one where lag was prevalent even when your opponent was only a state away. The current version of it, which was patched in on Thanksgiving Day, is actually very workable. Of course, this depends on the connections you’ll find. A five bar match is almost comparable to an offline bout, while four bars is only slightly worse. A three bar match will have a little input lag, but it’s still workable. You’ll want to avoid anything below that, though, as it will be unplayable because of both input and on-screen lag. Overall, it handles better than Street Fighter IV online, but keep in mind that Street Fighter is a bit more lag friendly than Tekken.

As much as you’ll want to immediately jump online to play some of the competition, the game’s structure will unfortunately prevent that for some players. When Tekken 3 released back in 1998, it came with a mode called Tekken Force, a side-scrolling beat ’em up mode with fighting game controls. After playing it, the mode was certifiable proof that fighting game controls seriously don’t work in a side-scrolling environment at all. You’d think Namco would get the message after throwing it on us once (Tekken 3 required you to play the mode to unlock the very bizarre Dr. Boskonovitch), but no, as Tekken 4 also had it, as well as 5. And, as you’d expect, Tekken 6 has it as well in the form of the story-driven Scenario Campaign mode. And, as you’d expect, it’s an absolute exercise in frustration.

The Scenario Campaign takes you through the adventures of the Swedish Super Saiyan-inspired Lars Alexaanderson and his robotic companion Alisa Boskonovitch (who happens to be the robotic daughter of the man mentioned above). The two of them will be responsible for stopping the former protagonist Jin Kazama from plunging the world further into war and seeking to revive the ultimate evil, Azazel. The campaign will involve you beating up mindless drones and finding items and equipment that you can use to increase the stats for your characters. You can also use the equipment for the characters themselves, if you’re planning on maining them. Nice ideas, but it’s the execution that’s the problem.

Trying to hit your opponents with a combo is a problem with mechanics that are meant to be used against one opponent. And things get really frustrating when you’re surrounded by a ton of opposition, and at least one of them knows precisely when to hit you when you’re trying to attack. It feels like it represents some of the worst brawlers of the early 90s in its cheapness, which might have been excusable back then, but times and standards have changed. The worst thing is that if you want to see all of the character endings, you have to play this mode. Unlike previous games where you could see them if you played a few matches to arcade mode, Tekken 6 are unlocked when you go through one-on-one fights in the campaign’s Arena mode; and to unlock the characters to play them, you’ll have to beat them at the end of the levels in the campaign. Also, if you want to customize your character’s outfits for all to see online, you have to play suffer through this mode.

And that’s because the equipment and extra outfits for customizing individual characters is hilariously expensive. For instance, I wanted to customize my Lili with a different shirt, pants, and hair style, along with a few other minimal details for her to stand out. The shirt cost around $400,000, and the pants around $650,000. The pony-tail hair-style? $1.5 million. They can’t be serious. And you can forget raising that kind of money with the other modes. A battle online or in a Ghost battle will only get you around $6,000 to $8,000 per fight, depending on the ranking of your opponent; which means a hell of a lot of grinding. Meanwhile, completing a level in the scenario campaign will get you $80,000 to $3 million on average. Yeah, you can tell which one Namco would like you to play. Confounding indeed.

It’s a real shame that the overall package is so frustrating, because as a fighting game, it’s one of the best in the genre this generation. Tekken 6 enhances the fighting of the original game by adding something called bounding, which gives another opportunity for you to juggle your opponent to make some big combos. It does make an already juggle-happy game even more juggle happy, sure, but it also adds a new layer of depth. These combos aren’t easy to perform, especially depending on the character you’re using and the learning curve they’ll require.

And speaking of characters, there’s 40 of them at your disposal here. Many of them are returning, but six are new to Tekken 6. Most of them play pretty differently, with some of them being easier to learn (Paul, Lili, Bob) and some being a little tougher to get a grasp on (The Mishimas, Julia, King). It’s where Tekken is at its finest, and it’s what Namco Bandai’s focus should have been on. A shame it wasn’t, which was especially evident when the online was in shambles upon release.

There may be a lot of frustration in this review, but I actually like Tekken 6 quite a bit. But that mainly goes for the competitive aspect of it. It’s everything else that’s the problem. I’m glad they fixed the online – though it was a bit too late as its sales undoubtedly suffered due to poor word of mouth. I sincerely hope that Namco Bandai learns from their mistakes with this one and realizes that no fans like having a half-assed brawler forced upon them. It kind of detracts from the overall experience. But I sincerely recommend it for anyone looking for a fighting game right now.