Review: Tekken 6 is awesome, except where it isn’t
November 5th, 2009 | 
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Tekken 6: great game that Namco wants you to hate
I’ve been playing Tekken since 1999. Since Tekken 3, basically.
I got very good at Tekken 3. At university, my friend and I got so good that all our other friends refused to play us. With the lack of external competition, we focussed on beating each other. We played with the fight timer off, and rounds got longer and longer and longer. When we figured out reversals… we had at least a couple of fights that lasted ten minutes or more, because neither of us could get in a good hit.
After that, Tekken Tag and Tekken 4 passed. I played them a bit, liked them. My friend didn’t so much, and it wasn’t until Tekken 5 turned up that we began regularly playing again.
Tekken 5 was a good game – a great game, even. Except for one aspect: Jinpachi. The final boss from hell. Mostly human, he had a mouth where his stomach should be that shot giant unblockable fireballs. Cheap, overpowered and painfully frustrating. I beat him once with each character to get all the endings, and then never faced him again. He wasn’t any fun.
You’d think Namco would learn. You’d think, after all the complaining about Jinpachi and about Seth from Street Fighter 4 (a Doctor Manhatten lookalike that makes Jinpachi look like the Star Wars kid), Namco would think: people don’t enjoy this.
Maybe they did think that. Maybe they want us to hate Tekken 6.
How to ruin a perfectly good game
Let me say this: Tekken 6 is a great game. Better than Tekken 5. If you want to play on the Xbox 360, it’s worth finding a new controller to replace the embarrassment that is the Xbox directional pad, but once you have that… more characters, better balance, character customisation, online fighting, better graphics. However, Namco went out of their way to make people dislike Tekken 6. It’s as though they’re ashamed by how good it is.
The main portion of the game is the ‘Scenario Campaign’: a roving 3-D beat-em-up. What used to be a mini-game back in Tekken 3 is now the main story in Tekken 6. It’s huge, to the point where Namco want you to play it instead of the primary fighting modes. Not only does it get top billing on the start menu, but about three quarters of the Xbox achievements are geared around it.
Scenario Campaign is very… average. At best. But you have to play it to get the most from Tekken 6, which is a real shame. Even so, it’s not the worst thing about the game.
That honour is left to Azazel.
He takes up half the fucking screen
Azazel is the new Jinpachi. He’s a dragon that takes up half the screen and can’t be thrown. He’s got a few of Jinpachi’s old moves, as well as a wealth of new moves that spawn out of nowhere. The AI behind him isn’t particularly good. It doesn’t need to be: playing against him feels like he’s got cheats activated.
As I said at the start, I’m a good Tekken player. Not the best, but I can hold my own (and with Xiaoyu, I can kick your arse while I’m at it). Against Azazel… I’m losing far more fights than I’m winning. On easy mode.
What is it that these people don’t get about ‘easy mode’? The clue’s in the title. ‘Easy mode’ doesn’t mean, “simple opponents until the last one, who should be a royal pain in the arse“. ‘Easy mode’ means, “easy mode”.
Like the arcade guy from Wayne’s World said…
Tekken is a series with its roots in arcades. By making a final boss that can’t be reliably beaten simply by being skilled at the game – by basing victory on luck – Namco ensured that people will keep pumping money into their arcade machines. After all, it’s the final boss, right? So close to victory: one more go! Which is fine, because actually arcades are social experiences anyway. 2-player is more important.
True Ogre in Tekken 3
But why put this rather redundant money-grabbing scam on my home console? Keep Azazel, fine, but make him realistically beatable. Make him, y’know, fun to play against. Namco can do it: Tekken 3 had Ogre / True Ogre: a big monster boss that was perfectly balanced – so balanced that once you’d played through with all the other characters he became selectable for 2-player mode.
You don’t make any extra money if I have to press ‘continue’
Namco, you make games for a living. I play games for one reason: to have fun. I don’t take them seriously; I don’t have time to become a hardcore player. Playing through Scenario Campaign as the primary part of a fighting game feels like working for all the good stuff, and I don’t want to work. Of course, I don’t want everything on a silver platter, but when I buy a one on one fighting game, I expect to unlock stuff by fighting one on one. Like on the back of the box, or like you had to in the previous six games (counting Tekken Tag).
And (this goes for you too, Capcom) stop with the fucking cheese-monkey end bosses. They. Are. No. Fun. You. Fucks.
(For the record, there’s another, even bigger, boss in Tekken 6 called Nancy-MI847J, which is a giant robot with guns that is even harder to beat. I don’t mind Nancy so much though, as fighting it is basically a bonus round for which you aren’t penalised for losing.)
I’ve been threatening to write a video game post since IWDTFM was launched. I finally got round to it. Sorry to all the people who thought they knew me: in truth, I am a geek.
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Awesome, stick it to those short-sighted game publishers! There really IS NO POINT to the Continue screens!
I didn’t sit here poring over this one fight, rapidly getting RSI and/or carpal tunnel syndrome to bail out the first time it’s suggested, especially considering it will cost me nothing.
Some games are getting this right. For all their other flaws, Prince Of Persia and Fable II both got rid of continue screens completely. Fable II makes it impossible to die, and PoP just replaced it with an automatic continue that looks like you’re being ’saved’.
In truth, Tekken’s a fighting game: you need to be able to lose so that your opponent can win (and vice versa, obviously). My problem isn’t with the fact that there is a continue screen; it’s with the fact that I see it so bloody often, and that it doesn’t seem to matter how good I am at the game!
Ah, see my qualm isn’t with the frequency of the continue screen, that’s a given; I am relatively crap at Tekken, always have been, under no illusions.
I have no intention of quitting, I just want to mash X/A/Start and get past it and carry on. It doesn’t let you, you have to watch your character scramble to their feet and wait ’til the first count of 9 for it to register your fervent determination.
Annoying.
While I agree that Azazel is much too hard, you’ve forgotten one major- but lesser known- series.
The King of Fighters bosses have always been ridiculous. When I got to Jinpachi and Seth, I simply was reminded of unloading quarters to try and beat Zero or Magaki. It’s nothing new, and people often forget about KoF; but it doesn’t excuse the fact that Azazel is a cheap little prick.
I’ve never actually played a KoF game (I know, I know…). Are they any good?
The problem is that I don’t think Azazel is ‘hard’ per se. I think, as you’ve said, that he’s just cheap. Skill just goes out the window with him: it’s all about whether the AI will magically manage to ignore all your moves, and you end up just using one or two spam moves over and over. If you read an FAQ on how to beat Azazel, most of them seem to say “Select Jack-6 and do forward-kick”. Seth: select Zangief and do the spinning move. Pure boring, and definitely tactics that would work against any human player.
It means that I never want to play on the arcade mode, which is a real pity.
Thanks for commenting!
whoever is reviewing this game is an idiot. i got tekken 6 and i love it. the scenario campaign was fun, such a shame how countless tekken players hate it. and bosses are supposed to suck. every boss that does cheap stuff to you to get you agrivated is considered a boss. it’s taking me practice to defeat azazel, even though i get angry sometimes, its not that bad. the true tekken players are the ones who are patient, willing to get practice, calm, and trying to practice the target system in the scenario campaign mode instead of giving up so easily without trying, anybody who hates this mode are hacks and twits. EVERYBODY, STOP THE NEGATIVE HATE ON TEKKEN 6! TEKKEN 6 BLOWS TEKKEN 5 RIGHT OUT OF THE WATER BY FAR!
Translation for our other readers = “fuk off i got biskit”
As far as I can tell – and it’s difficult to work out given your disregard for the English language – you seem to think that an overly cheap boss and a crap targeting system on the Scenario Campaign constitute “design features”, not “flaws”. Bosses are not “supposed to suck”. They are meant to provide a challenge, but not at the cost of my sanity. Difficult I can handle. I draw the line at “fucking cheap”.
And, let’s be honest, Scenario Campaign is a bit rubbish. That’s not me being bad at it. I finished it. It’s an okay diversion… but it’s not what I paid for, and it’s far too long for what should be a mini-game.
I like Tekken 6. I really do. In fact, if you’d bothered to actually read the article, you’d have read the following: “Tekken 6 is a great game. Better than Tekken 5.” Idiot.
You seem deeply affronted by Geoff’s views. Did you have a hand in making the game by any chance? Either way it is so admirable of you to jump to the defense of Tekken 6, down the author’s throat at the first utterance of bad press.