Posts Tagged ‘cheese-monkeys’

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.

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