Tekken 7 - A great fighting game

Tekken 7 is a game that will please veterans of the series but also newcomers. On the surface, Tekken 7 is familiar, with it's 3 dimensional stages where you can move sideways, but also front and back. Instead of a fireball feast, this game is more martial arts oriented, focusing on strikes and grapples, and not on projectiles. You need to plan your moves more carefully, otherwise careless jumping or dashing can be fatal.

The story mode continues the developments on the Mishima saga, which is core to the lore of Tekken. However, this story mode is not present in the arcades, for obvious reasons... The Mishima saga explores the loving, caring and healthy (please insert a very big dose of irony and evil laughter in here) relationships within the Mishima clan, where sons are obsessed with murdering their fathers and fathers can’t help but throw their sons into the nearest lava pit. Heihachi, his son Kazuya, and his grandson Jin are all owners of trillion-dollar corporations with military technology more advanced than most industrialized nations while trying to take each other out. While the saga tries to explain why Heihachi threw his son Kazuya into an erupting volcano decades ago, it's kinda hard to feel any sympathy for any of these members of the Mishima family.

There's some short character specific chapters in story mode that help lighten up the mood while also being a little nostalgic. When King battles Jack, Jack uses its artificial intelligence to adapt to King’s fighting style, so the famous wrestler uses maneuvers borrowed from his long-time friend Marduk and from his rival Armor King. When Yoshimitsu attempts to infiltrate the Mishima Dojo, he finds Leo and battles the young girl before having a change of heart and catching a knee in the balls as a reward. Yeah, I laughed hard, but only until I started thinking to myself: Well, does this end the debate that Yoshimitsu is a human instead of a robot/cyborg? Naaaaahhhh... Robots/cyborgs can have balls too. XD

The story presents different points of view on the Mishima saga, but the newest point of view includes Akuma (a bad guy from Street Fighter) and for that alone it's awesome! ^^ The introduction of fireballs and hurricane kicks might seem like an odd fit for Tekken, but they don't feel overpowered in light of the fact that every character comes with their own advantages. And when it comes to facing down Akuma's projectiles specifically, they can be easily sidestepped given the game's 3D movement. Street Fighter fans will appreciate how easy it is to fight as Akuma, since many of his traditional moves and inputs are present and accounted for. Even Street Fighter's meter-based mechanics (super/EX bar) have been carried over for his Tekken debut. This character's role in my opinion is so important on Tekken 7 that the developers even used him as the extra boss after the final boss.

With more than 30 playable characters, Tekken 7 offers plenty of fighters and nearly a quarter of the roster is brand new. But the thing is, Tekken 7 doesn't do a good job of explaining the ins and outs of its mechanics, let alone how you should approach learning your favorite character. The moves list for each character often has around 100 entries, serving as a mix of special attacks and combos. Except for a few icons (which represent attack properties that the game also fails to thoroughly explain), lists are disorganized, with no categories or hierarchy. The best you can do is go into training mode and shift from one move to the next. Thankfully, you can scroll through attack hints live, during practice, and without repeatedly entering menus.

But if this isn't your first King of Iron Fist tournament and you've kept up with Tekken over the years, you’ll find that Tekken 7 delivers the same great combat you know and love with a nice batch of new characters and a few new mechanics. The game includes new supermoves that can be triggered when a character's health is low, which is also the right time to unleash a rage drive (a powered-up standard combo attack). The most important new addition is the power crush attack attribute: certain attacks can absorb incoming hits mid-animation, allowing you to risk a little health to increase your chances of landing a critical blow, which gives Tekken's otherwise familiar fights a renewed strategic element of surprise.

Using Fight Money earned by playing the game's various modes you can purchase cut scenes and visual items for characters. Tekken 7 offers a lot of variations of hairstyles or glasses to buy, and an equal amount of stranger outfits and accessories, including neon butterfly wings, a floating clownfish companion, automatic rifles, etc. It's a bit silly really, but this shows how good this game is, or else it wouldn't be this comfortable inserting these crazy elements. Items can also be unlocked rather than purchased within the Treasure Battle mode, which puts you in a series of fights with increasing rewards and challenges. There's also training mode and an arcade mode where you can practice your moves and put them to the test.

Overall, Tekken 7 is a great game, capable of delivering many hours of fun. Although it might not be as newcomer friendly as would be desired, even newcomers, with a little bit of practice, will have fun and get good on it. Whether you take it more seriously or lightly with a bit of humor, Tekken 7 is a game that's easy to recommend. It's a great fighting game!

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