Tekken 7: Heihachi’s Betrayal.

Tekken and I go a long way back. It wasn’t my first fighting game, that honour belongs to Street Fighter, but it was the first one I played on my original PlayStation. My character of choice was Hwoarang and I’d spend hours practising his 10 string combo in the hopes of using it to decimate my friends. However after Tekken 4 I never made my way back to the series, instead spending my fighting game time on Soul Calibur with my housemates and friends who’d come over to join the fray. When I saw that Tekken 7 was announced and was getting good reviews I figured it was finally time to revisit the series. Whilst I’m glad I did there was one thing I was missing from the experience, something which I think all fighting games need.

The world is still ravaged by the massive war between the Mishima Zaibatsu and G Corporation. The war, started by Jin Kazama to awaken Azazel (the source of the devil gene), has now turned into a power struggle for control of the world. Without Jin to lead the Mishima Zaibatsu Heihachi retakes control of the corporation and formulates a plan to end the war and take control of the world for himself. The story is told from the viewpoint of a unknown reporter whose family was killed in the war, seeking to find out the truth about each of the organisation’s motives for participating in it. What he finds though is the troubled past of the Mishima clan and the supernatural forces at play.

Tekken 7 has been around since 2015 in the arcade and so it’s somewhat understandable that the graphics feel like a generation or so behind. Of course with fighting games that rely on frame perfect execution visuals will often have to take a back seat to performance. Still even the cinematics seem oddly underdone, the character animations usually stiff and stilted, especially when compared to their in-game animations. Interestingly this is probably the first game in a while to run on the Unreal 4 engine that has that “unreal engine” look about it, especially with models that have high specularity. I haven’t gone to an arcade to compare the visuals however, so I’d be interested to see if this is an artefact of the porting process.

Tekken has certainly come a long way in the almost 15 years since I last played it, although there are still some things that remain the same. The core fighting feels very much the same with the same combos still working a decade and a half later. There are two new mechanics introduced in Tekken 7: rage art and power crush. Rage art activates when your health is critical, giving you a damage boost and can be used to execute a devastating attack (at the cost of the rage state). Power crush allows you to continue a move even if you get hit, although you’ll still take the attack’s damage. Included alongside this are the usual trappings we’ve come to expect from current generation fighting games including an online mode, customisable player icons and health bars, a story mode and the traditional arcade mode.

Whilst both of these new mechanics are used to frustrate the hell out of you in the campaign they actually make for a much more action packed game in the traditional 1 on 1 bouts. Rage art ensures that battles are much less one sided than they used to be, giving you a chance to even the odds if you find yourself getting pummelled relentlessly. Of course Tekken’s fighting style is still very much that of long combos and juggling, making sure your opponent doesn’t have the opportunity to respond. It also took me a while to get back into the Tekken button combination mindset as it’s vastly different to that of the fighting games I’ve recently played. Still the fighting felt familiar once I was in control of the characters I used to play which is saying something when I haven’t played Tekken for so long.

Now early on I mentioned that I was missing one key ingredient that all fighting games need. This isn’t a fault of Tekken at all, instead it was mine. After playing through the campaign and the arcade mode a few times I started to lose interest quickly and for a while I wasn’t entirely sure why. Then I remembered all the times I used to play fighting games and it was always ringed by a bunch of mates who’d be there with me for hours on end. You’d have your set of characters, who could beat who with what and inevitably there’d be the person who just unstoppable for a week or two before everyone figured out how to counter them. I didn’t have that this time around and, as a consequence, I didn’t feel as engaged with Tekken as I would have before. Perhaps the online mode could’ve been a decent substitute but I’ve never had much success with them, always feeling like I was a dozen or so frames behind where I needed to be. I may go back and try it again sometime in the future but if this experience has taught me anything its that fighting games are meant to be shared.

The story of Tekken is your pretty stock standard fighting game affair although there has been a lot more care and attention put into its telling. The Mishima Saga does a good job of exploring the back story of the series’ main characters although, honestly, the voice actor for the reporter sounds like he wants to be somewhere else. The individual character sections after that give you a little more insight into what they were doing during the main campaign’s events but are too short for any meaningful character development. Additionally whilst I’d love to believe the ending at face value if the Tekken series has taught me anything its their main characters always manage to find their way back from whatever fate befalls them.

It’s somewhat reassuring that a series like Tekken can feel so familiar after a 15 year break. Whilst the controller and platform may have been wildly different the movement, combos and other mechanics all felt instantly familiar. With all the other modern fighting game trimmings it would seem that Bandai Namco has been no slouch when it comes to modernising the series, ensuring that it has stayed relevant all this time. Indeed playing this now I feel remiss that it has taken me this long to come back, especially without my cadre of fighting game companions at my side. With all that said though Tekken 7 is still an outstanding game, something that’s easy to see even with the small amount of time I’ve put into it.

Rating: 8.5/10

Tekken 7 is available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One right now for $49.99. Game was played on the PC (with a controller, of course) with a total of 3 hours play time and 24% of the achievements unlocked.