Tekken 4 Review

[Guest KoR Fungus]

I'd been meaning to write up a Tekken 4 review for awhile, but I didn't have time until now. Anyway here it is, comments are appreciated.

 

---

 

Well, Tekken 4 has finally come home, after far too long a wait. Does it deliver? Yes, but that’s not exactly a surprise given that I’ve been playing it obsessively in the arcade for over a year now. The only thing new for me is the port, and it has its good points and its bad points, but I’ll get to that later.

 

As for the game itself, you’re not going to get too many complaints from me. Tekken 4 does make some major changes to the series, which I think are mostly for the better. Tagging was removed, which is a negative, but I think the tweaked movement system and the addition of enclosed arenas and position changes are all improvements. The changes have a substantial effect on gameplay, which in my opinion is positive, but opinions on this vary.

 

One thing everyone can agree on is the graphics. They’re beautiful. The characters are perhaps slightly on the low end in terms of polygon count, but they’re conceptually great and look very good in motion. The environments are simply magnificent. They’re expansive and full of vivid colors and beautiful special effects. The rippling water and reflections off surfaces that have become staples of fighting game environments recently look as good here as they ever have. There’s not a jaggy to be found (although jaggies have never been much of an issue for me). You’d have to be pretty damn jaded to find fault here.

 

The sound is, well, typical Tekken sound. The sound effects are the same as they’ve always been, which isn’t a problem since they’ve always been solid. The music is decent, but as has become the norm with Tekken recently, pretty unmemorable. Most of the tracks are a good fit with the stage in which they play, but there’s not much that’s really going to grab your attention. That’s a step up from Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag, where some of the tracks were bad enough that you wanted to avoid some stages to avoid hearing their awful music, but still, I can’t help but long for the glory days of Tekken 2. I also have to wonder why there isn’t an alternate music selection, especially given the amount of music that’s actually in the game. I mean, you’ve already got a bunch of Tekken and Tekken 2 remixed tracks randomly rotating as the stage music for the statue, and you’ve got a great remixed version of Kazuya’s Tekken 2 music playing as the stage music for the third force mode stage. How hard would it have been to have an alternate music option where those tracks played in other stages? With music, more options are always good.

 

All this is pretty much given, though. Everyone agrees that the graphics are great, the sounds are solid and the music is okay, but could have been better. The meat of all the reviews come down to the gameplay and the port. I'll start with the gameplay.

 

When it comes to Tekken 4’s gameplay, there are two types of concerns. There’s the scrub concerns and there’s the legitimate concerns. I’ll get the scrub concerns out of the way first.

 

You know that Tekken 4 is being reviewed by a scrub that didn’t take the time to learn it when you hear things like “Tekken 4 doesn’t add anything that Tekken 3 didn’t have” or “Tekken 4 is shallow and is just a button masher”. Wrong, and wrong, and that’s not opinion. It’s simply a fact that Tekken 4 did add a lot to most of the characters, and did make a lot of gameplay changes, and the question is just whether or not a player is going to take the time to learn them. All the characters have a good number of new moves and new combos. Some of the characters even have new moves that fundamentally change the way a good player uses the character. For instance, Lee’s mist step changes the whole dynamic of the character. He is able to be much more aggressive offensively and flow much more easily from one combo to another. The mist step also completely redefines his whole juggle game, making you basically have to learn Lee’s juggles from scratch if you want to be up to date. Not all characters change this fundamentally, but I can’t think of any legacy character that doesn’t have at least two or three new moves that you’ll want to add to your normal strategy. Detractors will point out that you can still beat the computer (and bad humans) using old moves, but that’s meaningless. Yeah, the old moves are still there, as they should be, but you’re not going to be a good Tekken 4 player or have any success against experienced humans unless you actually learn the new stuff.

 

As for Tekken 4 being shallow or being a button masher, that depends entirely on who’s playing, as it does for any fighter. Do some people mash buttons? Yes. Is it possible to win with Christie by mashing buttons? Against bad players, yes. Do some people just use the same move over and over? Yes, deathfists are still there, so scrubs can use them over and over if they see fit. But the key question is, does mashing buttons or repeating the same move or two actually let you beat someone that knows what they’re doing? And the answer, as it has been since Tekken 2, is a definitive no. With any fighting game, a player can choose to learn it, or they can choose not to learn it. That’s no more true of Tekken than of Soul Calibur or Virtua Fighter 4 or any other series out there. It’s easier to win with a button mashing Maxi than it is with a button mashing Christie, but that doesn’t make Soul Calibur a button masher. Most humans I’ve played just use basic PPPK or PPPdK combos over and over in Virtua Fighter 4, but that doesn’t make it shallow. And the same is true here. Yeah, as is always the case, most people are scrubs, but there’s still an elaborate and extremely deep top level game here that rewards those who take the time to find it.

 

So you’ve got great Tekken gameplay with lots of new moves and combos for the legacy characters, and that’s all great. However, some of the more fundamental gameplay changes, as well as the new characters, aren’t quite so black and white.

 

The biggest gameplay change, by far, are the walls. Tekken stages, which until now have been endless scrolling fields with no interactive objects, are now enclosed. There are also interactive objects, and elevation is now a factor, but those are both generally pretty minor. The meat of it is the walls themselves. As you’d expect, you can knock players into walls, juggle players off of walls and all the other things you can do with walls in fighters. This takes a little getting used to, and I was really worried when I first started playing that they would just get in the way. And I think that they would have, except for the fact that they’re implemented so damn well. When I think walls, I usually think cheap corner traps and endless juggles, but Namco did a great job of making sure that there was more to it than that. Techrolling off walls allows good players to get out of long wall juggles and counterattack, so endless combos aren’t much of an issue, outside of a glitch here and there (that no one will ever be able to exploit under normal fighting conditions). Position changing also works very well with the walls, as you can not only position change to get out of a corner, but you can also position change to press your opponent against a wall, which stuns them for a second and lets you sustain the offense. It all takes awhile to master, and some frustration will result while you’re learning, but I think it’s a change for the better.

 

With walls comes variety in stages, and this is where, whether you like the walls or not, you have to admit that they provide some benefit. In Tekkens past, where you fought made absolutely no difference, other than graphics and music. Now, the stages actually have different layouts, and fights on different stages feel very different. Stages range from extremely claustrophobic (underground) to extremely open (beach) with everything in between. In stages like underground, wall interaction is constant, and you’re pretty much either getting hit against a wall, hitting the other guy against a wall or rolling away from a wall at all times. I prefer middle ground stages like Hon-Maru or arena where walls are a factor, but aren’t the main factor. If you don’t like walls at all, just choose beach and you’re practically rid of them. The variety here is great, and is a welcome change from four games of complete, dull openness.

 

There are also other minor gameplay changes. I mentioned position changes before. This is basically just left throw getting replaced with a position swap that does no damage, but lets you position your character relative to the opponent’s, which is useful in a game with walls, especially because they can’t be countered. The left throw animations are still in the game, you just press forward and right throw to do them, so there’s not much of a drawback. The movement is also changed a little, as you can now walk up or down after a sidestep by continuing to hold up or down. It’s kind of like a slower eight way run, but it doesn’t change things much. The only problem here is that because holding down makes you walk down, you now have to press down-back block, which makes it significantly harder to block low. You’ll get used to it after awhile, but scrubs will try to take advantage of it by repeatedly doing low moves. I liked it a little better the other way. On the plus side, down-forward is now a universal low parry, which is an improvement. Universal defense improves balance, and while this is no guard impact, it’s a lot better than nothing.

 

Which brings us to the last major change, which is, of course, the new characters. There are three real new characters, those being Steve, Marduk and the new Jin. Christie is just Eddy with a different look and Combot is just Mokujin, so they’re not new. Steve is a boxer, and is probably the best boxer I’ve seen in a fighter. He has feints instead of kicks, which is a great touch that makes him truly original. Stylistically, he’s great. As far as gameplay goes, he’s very scrub-friendly and I don’t find him all that much fun, although I’ve seen him used very effectively. A solid character, although not one of my favorites. Marduk is another wrestler, and while he’s nothing particularly novel, he’s a solid overall character. He’s hard to use, and I’ve only seen one or two good Marduk players, but he can be very effective in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Wrestling fans will like his moveset, which includes lots of nice wrestling moves (shinbreaker, northern lights suplex, jackhammer, etc). The most controversial of the new characters is the new Jin. Jin is pretty much redone from scratch, with traditional karate replacing the old Mishima/Kazama hybrid style. Some people don’t like the change because they have to learn him all over again, and while that’s a valid concern, it’s not a big issue for me because there are already two other Mishimas in the game. Just use Kazuya or Heihachi and you already have a lot of moveset overlap. I love Jin’s new style, partially because it’s so much different than anything I’ve seen before. His moves are genuinely new, not just variations of someone else, and it gives him a personality that he didn’t have when he was a Mishima clone. My only complaint with him is that he’s a little overpowered, but even that isn’t as bad as some people make it out to be. Yeah, he wins more than his fair share of top level tournaments, but when you’re playing with your friends, it’s not going to make much difference.

 

The new characters as a whole are solid but unspectacular. Tekken 2 and Tekken 3 both added more, but it gets harder to come up with new character ideas as a series progresses. One thing that I really like about this cast is that there’s not much deadweight. You don’t have Dr B, Gon and ten different Jacks wasting space anymore, instead you have 18 distinct characters with 18 distinct styles. The balance is also the best it has ever been, probably because they cut out so much deadweight. You’ve got Jin at the high end and Kuma at the low end, but the other 16 characters are all right around the same level in terms of power. Even Kuma is now somewhat competitive with his absurdly powerful fast salmon hunting, so the only real standout is the overpowered Jin.

 

Overall, Tekken 4 makes a lot of pretty substantial changes, most of them for the better. The gameplay feels crisper, newer and better balanced than it did in Tekken Tag. Less characters and no tag option are annoying, but if I had to choose between Tekken 4 and Tekken Tag, I’d choose Tekken 4 because I prefer the gameplay. Both are an essential part of any fighting game collection, however.

 

All the above is true both of the arcade version and of the home version, so the only thing that’s really new about the home version is the port. And, like Tekken 3, Soul Calibur and Tekken Tag before it, I’d have to say that the port falls into the “good but disappointing” category. It’s slick, stylish and has all the requisite extras, but, as has been the case with every Namco port since Soul Blade, there’s something missing.

 

All the normal Namco modes are here, so you’ve got arcade, versus, team battle, practice, time attack and survival, just like always. The bonus modes this time out are training, which times you as you try to enter 20 moves as fast as possible; force, an updated version of the Tekken 3 mode where you fight waves of drones across four environments; and story, the best of the bunch, which is arcade mode except that you get to hear the story of each character before and after the arcade fights. The only mode that really appeals to me is story, and that’s only because I’m a mark for Tekken plot. I loved the high quality endings of Tekken 2 and Tekken 3, but never knew what was going on. Now, you actually get the backstory, which adds to the endings, which are once again high quality. If you love Tekken plot, you’re going to love this. The other modes didn’t interest me much. Force mode is well done, but fighting a thousand drones is going to get boring no matter how well done it is. I beat it once to get Hon-Maru, but I don’t plan on playing it much more. Training probably would have been more fun if I didn’t know all the moves already. It’s a little addictive to keep trying to beat your best time with a character, but this sure as hell isn’t kumite.

 

What’s missing is anything special. Where’s the bowling? Where’s the ball mode? Where’s that great alternate music that we got in Soul Blade and Tekken 2? I don’t need a new character, especially since Doctor B and Gon were so horrible, but come on, give us something! We had to wait six months for an American port, and all we get is subtitles? That’s ridiculous!

 

Now I’m not saying that this port is bad. It’s not, in fact it’s still well above average. It’s just that this is the company that gave us the absolute masterpieces that were the Tekken 2 and Soul Blade ports, and so they’ve raised our expectations, and when they don’t deliver any significant single player bonuses, we’re bound to be a little disappointed. There’s more than enough to keep you happy for hundreds of hours playing with a friend, but after you unlock all the endings, unlock Hon-Maru and diddle around in training for a little bit, if you’re a veteran player, you’re going to get bored with the single player options. Yeah, fighting games are about multiplayer, but still, a kumite clone wouldn’t have hurt. Without one, Tekken 4 is entirely a multiplayer game, and if you don’t have friends to play with, there’s not much here for you.

 

Bottom Line: Although Tekken 4 suffers a little bit from a slightly disappointing home port, it still stands as one of the best fighting games out there. 9.1/10.0

[Guest Thoth]

Great to see a review done by a non-scrub. You are a credit to your species.

 

I agree with pretty much everything, except that I find Marduk to be an easy player to use... but that's just me.

[Guest EricMM]

Compared to most of the recent fighters released from various companies (SNK, Capcom, Sega) Namco has been LAGGING in terms of extras.

 

Where's the Kumite mode, the Groove mode, the amazing posters and wall scrolls from Soul Calibur even. At least Tekken 2 had, as you said, multiple music pieces. I enjoy extras I can USE. For a company that produced the Soul Blade Weapons mode, they've since gone down hill!

 

Tekken 4 is still the best GAME out. That's why I own it. But in terms of extras, there's room for improvement!

[Guest areacode212]

Tagging was removed, which is a negative

 

I consider TTT to be kind of an sidebar to the main Tekken series, so I don't think tagging was "removed" so much as it just wasn't implemented. I expect a TTT2 to come along sooner or later for those of us who miss tag juggles (and Anna, and Jack-2, and Ogre, etc...).