Tekken 1 only makes sense if you put your brain into “mid 90’s mode” when playing games at home meant Sega Genesis or Super NES. Tekken’s fighters look blocky and robotic. For a home game this doesn’t have much content - just 3 gameplay modes and 8 fighters (assuming I’m not overlooking some secret unlockable one).
Tekken 1 may not have much meat on its bones by today’s standards but the skeleton it has is a solid one. At times the controls did feel a little stiff and I couldn’t always understand why an enemy’s attack would prevail over mine. But I still enjoyed myself enough to take several cracks at this. If you’re nostalgic about Tekken 1 or want historical perspective then go head and play it.
Some other random things:
- The CGI cinematics in Tekken 1 are so spectacularly bad that I was laughing my ass off every second of them.
- This game’s graphic design elements have have a certain unceremonious ineptitude that I just find charming. Like this:
GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION
- The soundtrack reminds me a lot of Sega AM2 games. In fact I think Tekken 1 uses some instruments from the soundtrack of Virtua Cop. It gives me strong mid-90’s vibes.
- This is actually the first Playstation game I have ever played in my entire life. When I was 5 I lived in England and my mom used to take me to this kids’ amusement center called “The Jungle Bungle”. It was like a British version of Discovery Zone, basically an enormous McDonalds play place without any actual fast food. One day at the Jungle Bungle they set up a Playstation with Tekken. All I wanted to do was play it. I specifically remember this stage:
The graphics look really dated now but in 1995 I thought I was seeing interactive Industrial Light and Magic. Of course my Mom got irritated because she had probably brought me out all this way to run around and get excercise, not to play video games. She kept trying to persuade me to stop playing it but I was hooked on video games even back then and wouldn’t stop.
Tekken 2 looks way better than Tekken 1. They appear to have turned on Gourad shading, which was totally absent in Tekken 1. Also the characters appear less like robots and more like people. They still look like they’re on original playstation, but it’s nonetheless remarkable that both Tekken 1 and Tekken 2 are on the same hardware. The CGI intro videos are less of a majestic train wreck and actually kind of look competent now. My only complaint is that they took away my main, Kazuya Mishima, because apparently he turned into the devil and is now the final boss. That’s all good and well but it doesn’t mean they had to deprive me of playing as him.
Tekken 3 could probably pass for a modern fighting game if I were nearsighted and not wearing glasses. It looks another order of magnitude better than Tekken 2. In a way, it tells a story of how much Playstation games improved from 1995 to 1998. The controls and tactile feeling are far smoother. Tekken 1 and 2 had a weirdly stucatto sensation. I’m not sure how to describe it except that they handle like Virtua Fighter. But Tekken 3’s controls feel like they’re from the modern era. Tekken 3’s soundtrack is hilarious. It’s full of try-hard, late 90’s electronic music reminding me of The Matrix (1999), Hackers (1995), or an extreme sports montage from back then. The music has aged poorly in a way that charms the heck out me and makes me grin ear to ear.
Tekken 4 reminds me of just how spectacular Playstation 2 graphics looked back when everyone was used to Playstation 1 visuals. In Tekken 1-3, the arenas are just 2D images that scroll left and right. I also get the feeling the Playstation itself was limiting the art direction they could depict in the game. But in Tekken 4, the visuals are likely pretty damn close to the concept art. You also fight in actual 3D places, like a beach in Brazil, a shopping mall, an air field, a nighttime street in urban Japan, etc. There are even polygonal people cheering you on from the sidelines. The graphics are dated by 2021 standards, but they look clean and crisp with attractive art direction lending this game a rather timeless look. I feel you could scale this up to 1080p and it would still look really nice, a sentiment I don’t exactly share for Tekken 1-3. The colorful locales, energetic soundtrack, and high adrenaline action give Tekken 4 a arcade energy reminding me of the excitement I used to feel at an arcade as a kid. This is my favorite Tekken game so far.
I don’t have Tekken 5.
[I'll upload a video of Tekken 6 later.]
I don’t like Tekken 6 as much as Tekken 4 but I feel this is the mostly the Playstation 3’s fault. Tekken 4 on PS2 would let me jump into the action with little to no delay, but Tekken 6 on PS3 introduces load times. It’s a real drag and honestly makes me prefer to play Tekken on my PS2 instead. The menus in Tekken 6 are also somewhat more convoluted. In order to reach arcade mode I first had to go to “offline mode”, which came across to me like a passive aggressive reminder of the inexorable arms race to get everything online all the time even if I just want to play by myself. There’s also a bunch of random bullshit that seems like an attempt to spice things up but doesn’t add anything, like some kind of slot machine you must play at the end of certain matches to earn gold coins. I don’t care about gold coins or slots, I just want to fight.
The visuals are certainly more detailed than Tekken 4 but I feel conflicted about this because some aspects of Tekken 6’s visual feature take steps forward for me, whereas others take steps backwards. I like the motion blur, the increased detail in the fighters’ faces, the environmental destruction, and the secondary animation like cloth fluttering around on the characters’ outfits. I do not like the bloom or the excessive “shininess” of certain scenes, the excessive and tacky use of both being a telltale sign of games from this era. Overall Tekken 6 is more visually noisy, making it harder to parse at times. Also sometimes Tekken 6’s increased detail makes other oversights more glaring, like when characters limbs prominently clip through each other. Seeing that on PS2 felt more permissible but on PS3 it creates an uncanny valley effect for me. I feel that when the dust has settled and PS2 and PS3 are equally outdated, Tekken 4’s visuals age more gracefully. But this could just be my personal aesthetic tastes.