I’ve played every Tekken there was prior to Tekken Tag Tournament 2. I started off with Tekken 2, but I did eventually play Tekken and hated it. I could’ve used Tekken 2 on here, but it’s improvement is, in my opinion, nothing compared to the improvement Tekken 5 did from Tekken 4. Not only that, but Tekken 2 never brought hope back to the Tekken series for me; Tekken 5 did just that.
You would notice on my Sequels Done Wrong blog that I put Tekken 4 on that list. The game was so un-Tekken like that it made me lose hope in the Tekken franchise. I had no idea if Tekken 5 was going to come out and even if it did, I had no idea if Tekken 5 was going to learn from the mistakes of Tekken 4. Well, in my opinion, it learned from ALL the mistakes that Tekken 4 made. Joy was brought back to the Tekken franchise!
Obviously, I will be talking about graphics first, but in this case, graphics was so important as Tekken 4’s graphics were worse than Tekken Tag Tournament’s. The character models were improved and they looked even better in progressive scan. Seeing the background stuff and the floor breaking on every fall (though that’s a little too excessive) was totally mind-blowing. The pace of the game was faster and more intense than Tekken Tag Tournament and it totally made me forget about Tekken 4, even though I still have Tekken 4 in my possession.
Tekken 5 got rid of replay mode and I was alright with it; if you can’t do replay mode right, then don’t do it at all. Tekken Force mode was replaced by Devil Within mode and even though it wasn’t as great as it could’ve been, it was many times better than Tekken 4’s Tekken Force mode in my opinion. And oh, we so gotta talk about the last thing about this game that was so awesome: the music!
Tekken 4’s soundtrack for the most part sounded bland; it was just as boring as the game itself. There was no uplifting music or anything and it left a lot to be desired. Fortunately with Tekken 5, the music was so much better and so much more memorable. I sometimes can’t get the Moonlit Wilderness theme out of my head nor the Ka-En-No-Mai music. The music fit the theme of the game well and they’re never boring. I could listen to the soundtrack of that game all day as that’s how much I love the music; I think I should do a Tekken theme of the day like how Sam31007 did his Sonic Theme of the Day. Yeah, I think I should do that!
This next game will move us to the current generation and it was a game whose demo got me to get the original to precede it against my will…
Massively Multiverse 