Tekken 7: a disappointment.

Before getting into the details of this entry, I would like to clarify few things; Tekken is my favorite fighting game franchise. I freaking love Tekken and have a long history of playing the game since Tekken 2. I've also been grinding Tekken for years and today I'm going to share with you a very controversial opinion concerning the 7th installment; Tekken 7 is my least favorite in the franchise and I’m not happy with what they’ve done to the game.

First of all, Tekken 7 is okay, there’s no doubt. The game is very popular now and is considered a big commercial success, but… is that enough?

In my honest opinion, from a somewhat veteran Tekken player, I think that Tekken has lost its way. I don't feel like playing the good old Tekken anymore. Maybe the game is evolving as time goes, adding new features and making some serious changes to the formula. This actually worked well when they first introduced walls in Tekken 4, even though they were broken. Then they managed to address the problem in Tekken 5 where they limited wall hits and fixed the re-splat animations. They also added crush moves and reworked many moves and characters to come up with the perfect kernel that is of Tekken 5.

Furthermore, they kept adding and tweaking things in Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag 2, but they never touched the core nor made radical changes that could redefine the game. And suddenly, Tekken 7 kicks the door in!

I remember my reaction when I first saw the "Rage Arts" trailer. I was like: Please no! Don't make Soul Calibur's mistake. You're killing the very essence of Tekken by adding " Ultimate Moves". Not only that, but they also implemented a similar feature to the "focus attack" in Street fighter 4; " armored moves" or "power crush”. These moves allow you to absorb hits and power through high/mid attacks when fighting (they could be countered by low hits by the way). This, in my opinion, kills Tekken fighting style by removing the ability to counter the animation of any given move when correctly done by any hit you do regardless of its range property. Tekken has always taught us that all moves could be negated and blocked using other moves or simply side stepping. There was no such thing as advantage using these armored moves other than whiffed moves, cold points and moves with minus frames on block. In other words, in every Tekken except for 7, there is no move that’s stronger than another move. Now in Tekken 7 you can’t cancel an opponent’s Ultimate using a simple d+1 poke or a 1 jab. Sadly, this is a huge loss for Tekken’s unmatched uniqueness.

Also, 2d characters bringing their mechanics is such a turn off to any hardcore Tekken fan. It’s a martial art fighting game not a Hadoken/fire balls fiesta. On top of that, Akuma and Geese both have broken target combos which could be abused by players who know their stuff . A good example for this is pro player Super-Akuma destroying some of the best Pro Tekken players in the world using infamous death combos.

Now let me talk about Tekken 7 biggest problem. Ranked mode! Yeah, you read that right, ranked mode. PC version ranked mode is a sad joke. You could easily get to the highest ranks using the local save file to reset your win/lose ratio. All what you have to do is to back up your save with 10 wins streak, replace the old save file whenever you lose and save your game only when you win to keep your promotion chance guaranteed. I didn’t know about this, but all of these players I encountered keeping their 10 wins streak, plus permanent promotion chance even after losing have made me suspicious, that’s how I knew about this disgusting method.

And of course. How can I forget about the best servers provided by the best AAA gaming company? Thank you kindly NamcoBandai for the brilliant Peer to Peer online that you gave us. I will never forget those fake 4 green signal bars Laws and L.Chloes that turn into 2 red bars in-match beating me because I can’t even parry or block properly thanks to their own latency.

There’s more; Micro-transactions. Do you remember when we used to beat the game several times in order to unlock characters? Those days are no more and gone forever. Now you have to pay so you could get new characters and stages. I guess Harada lied to us when he promised that all Tekken characters will be free. However, I won’t dwell on this. They want to make money, I’ll let them be.

Let’s talk about offline modes. What would you do if you’re a lone wolf and you don’t have friends to play Versus mode with or simply you enjoy playing alone? Practice mode? That grindy useless Treasure mode? Wait! What happened to Tekken force mode, Survival mode, Tekken ball mode and Team battle mode? You guessed it. They removed all of these modes. Seriously, the lack of extra offline modes is killing Tekken 7. It feels so empty and soulless.

With that said, I think that all of these features and decisions are alienating Tekken and making it lose its identity. We, fans, love Tekken because it was different, it was unique with its own flavor. It’s true we adapted and learned all these new mechanics and accepted the game as it is for now. But that’s because we didn’t have a choice. I’m talking about legacy Tekken fans, those who grew up with the franchise, many of us aren’t happy at all with the changes that made Tekken 7 looking less Tekken and more hybrid 3d Street Fighter like game.

Finally, as an old Tekken player, I could tolerate all things related to their business model like DLCs and whatnot, but if they continue pushing decisions changing the core gameplay, then I’m afraid that Tekken 7 is the last Tekken I'm playing.