As Tekken struggles to gain relevance within North American professional gaming, it battles to overcome its greatest weaknesses, which also happen to be some of its greatest strengths. Trying to chisel away at the fortress Capcom has constructed in the dead center of the fighting landscape, Namco has offered a masterpiece that can only be appreciated by the initiated and will be lost on most that come into contact with the game. If Heihachi means to overtake Ryu, Sagat, Vergil, and Doom, he needs Namco to take Tekken back to the drawing board and re-think the King of Iron Fist Tournament for new generations. Its something that is long past due.
Tekken needs a reboot. The game, in its current state, has no upside for growth. Its potential is a siren song, drawing delirious fighters like Greek sailors only to gleefully crush them on the jagged edge of its staggering learning curve. At higher levels, Tekken is a test of mastery, a dance between true artists. Getting to that point, however, requires an investment of years, perhaps even decades. There are some that would simply shake their head and dismiss the complaint to them, the demand of years to be sacrificed at the altar of Zaibatsu is a big part of Tekkens greatness. To the players Namco needs to infuse its tournament offerings with vitality, that demand is the primary reason they refuse to take up the game.
No doubt, someone is preparing to name me a heretic, to smugly declare that I am calling for Tekken to be dumbed down, that I want Namco to go the route of Street Fighter 4 or Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Allow me to retort: that is exactly what I am saying. Tekken needs a dumbed down release. It needs its own take on Street Fighter 4. It needs a game that brings the series back to its roots and strips away years upon years of additions and renovations stacked on top of the core gameplay.
Namcos dedication to their diehard fans is evident. Each subsequent Tekken release sees very little in the way of old content being removed from the title. You liked something from the previous game? More than likely, its in the new game, along with a whole bunch of other new features to go with it. Its hard to find fault in such an admirable design philosophy, but when your intellectual property has been churning out titles for twenty years, never stopping to trim the fat creates a bloated, unmanageable monster that becomes nearly impossible to approach. Where would you even start?
When Capcom released Street Fighter IV, they gave the community a title that was, in essence, a modern take on the game that first drew our attentions. It featured a pared-down roster of staple characters and a simplified focus on fundamentals coupled with a few new features. The game launched a second boom period for fighting games and has helped fuel a surge in the popularity of professional gaming in North America. Namcos participation in MLG with Tekken 5 and Soul Calibur V speaks to their interest in success as a publisher of professional gaming content, yet their approach couldnt be more different than Capcoms philosophy for Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
Coaxing players into your camp requires you to have a clearly-marked entrance. People may be very interested in joining the party, but at this point, many of them lack the ability to see a way inside. When what you have is a roster of almost seventy characters, all of whom have a unique move set that creates thousands of possible action outcomes modified by venue selection, opponent, hit state, movement, and stage position? All on a ceaseless flow chart with thousands of branches? Thats not something that screams, Hey, new people! Come check this out!
Many love the fact that Tekken is so demanding, that it requires you to have an intimate knowledge of not only your own character, but also every other character you may fight. That it requires you to memorize thousands of lines of frame data, that it requires thousands of hours of hand-eye training and muscle memory development for even the rarest of circumstances. As a competitor, I can certainly appreciate that sort of richness. However, if Namco insists on creating this sort of content to appeal to players that have dedicated a decade or more to Tekken, they need to come to terms with only being able to achieve a certain level of success.
Tekken is standing at a pivotal point. Tekken Tag 2 has drawn awareness back in Namcos direction, but the game is arguably the most complex release yet. It will move units for casual fans, but it isnt going to do much to infuse new talent into a slowly diminishing pool of North American players. However, with the possible release of Tekken x Street Fighter on the horizon, Namco has the opportunity to capitalize on that awareness by preparing a release that brings the series back to its roots and captures hundreds of new recruits.
Where to begin? The roster is a great starting point. Do we honestly need so many characters, many of whom are only minor variations on the same theme? Three different capoeira fighters, all just different enough to require you to learn their individual traits? Jaycee
and then Julia Chang returns as DLC? Two different Law characters?
Tekken x Street Fighter presents an especially advantageous opportunity in that Namco can create a simpler game to serve as a springboard into the more complex titles within the central Tekken brand. With Tekken x Street Fighter, familiar Capcom characters can be leveraged with casual gamers to help introduce core Tekken concepts that get refined through simplified gameplay. Once fighters become comfortable, Namco can gut check them with Tekken 7 and release a massive game to a prepared audience.
If Namco expects to do more within the tournament space, they need to tackle these challenges head on. Often, the company seems aware of its problems and elects a passive approach to correcting them. Tekkens success at the register is often one of its biggest hindrances. After what many considered a failure in Tekken 4, the company seems far less eager to experiment with the basic formula. They can create Tekken games, sell millions of units, and still have the same faces, the mainstay players, working the circuit. However, if they are serious about moving into a space where they compete with Capcom in the North American pro circles, they have to find a way to bridge the gap between the millions that are moving units at retail and the hundreds that are actually turning out to play in tournaments.
Compounding matters further is Tekkens uneven support for, by, and from its community. Good information for the games is buried in an equal amount of bad information, all of it collected in haphazard repositories that are often poorly organized. Want to learn Tekken? Well, first, sort out good information from bad information. Then, be prepared to Google for information to help make sense of the information you Googled. Book publishers reach out to tournament pros to create content for guides, then muddle up the process with bad formatting and the insertion of content during the editing stage. If there ever was a title that could use a Mission Mode style offering, its Tekken Tag 2, and yet that feature is only somewhat implemented in fragments with improvements to training mode and the addition of the Combot pieces.
A return to a basic Tekken allows the community to also refocus in the same manner that Namco needs to refocus. Its easy to point the figure at certain forums or websites and place blame for the poor state of information about the games, but the reality is that when a community resource is trying to create content for a game that features so many characters that can do so much in so many ways, it would only be shocking if there werent chaos and disorganization.
Ideas like these are being talked about, but they meet resistance in the form of players who are paranoid that a return to base elements will create a bad experience. They also garner resentment from experienced players that have spent years playing Tekken, who feel as if having the skill divide narrowed by the elimination of many of the elements it took them years to master would be insulting to their dedication. Namco needs to decide if garnering that resentment from a few is worth sacrificing the potential of their property.
Tekken is amazing. Tekken also has a lot of problems. Its biggest problem? Its so amazing. Its hard to have the inexperienced appreciate just how great something is when they dont know how or why they should appreciate that something. Its time to take Tekken back to its roots and allow everyone the chance to get ready for the next battle.
You fighting game n!ggas go at each other's throats. I'd cop if I wasn't so bad at Tekken.
I would say it would take a good 1-2 years to really play at an elite level.. If people are that impatient, fukk em go back to easy ass Capcom, 