Tekken 5 Review

Platform Reviewed: PS2

Good to See You Again, Tekken

Namco, the bad asses that brought you the fighting genius of their other acclaimed title, Soul Caliber, have done it again. The story of a fighting game has never been all that important, mostly because it’s hard to keep a story going where the whole premise is that they have to keep fighting each other, but Namco does a damn good job with Tekken 5. Not saying that the story’ll be winning awards in the near future, but if you look at fighting games in general as the Special Olympics of story, then this would get the gold. To reiterate, it’s like watching a bad kung-fu movie that you can’t help but love.

Still, there’s another mysterious tournament to be held, Tekken Iron Fist Championship 5. A plethora of characters await you in this installment, a good blend of old and new alike, each with their own fighting style, speed, and strength, each player is given the opportunity to find a character who suits their own playing style without the feeling that certain characters have an unfair advantage over another.

Who Wants to Fight?

Like every fighting game since the dawn of time, Tekken 5 is not a lot if you don’t plan on playing it with a friend, but Namco seems to have taken notes from their success with the single player mode in Soul Caliber, making the single player mode a somewhat crucial part of the game.

By beating the game a few times, you’ll notice that you can easily unlock most of the characters with little or no difficulty. If you aren’t looking for the practice the opportunity offers, you can turn the settings down on the game (single round elimination and easy CPU battles). There are no drawbacks to doing this; you still unlock characters by simply completing the arcade mode with any character and upon beating it your first time you’ll notice a new feature: Prize money.

This was the best idea introduced in the entire game. They allow you to buy costume pieces and entire costumes with the money you earn in single player modes. Now you can pimp out your own characters, bring your memory card with you to a friend's house, and battle your tricked out versions of each others characters. The tragedy of this system is that Namco decided to make it nearly impossible to purchase all of the various accoutrements. You earn 100, 000 G the first time you beat the game with each character and nothing for each time they're beaten after that. There’s another Arcade mode that allows you to bank between 800 G and 4,000 per victory, but this is still a very slow and grueling journey. After a while, you will feel your progress screech to a halt.

That’s where the Devil Within story mode comes into place. It’s not as good of a choice as I would like, but unless you have a dex drive and are able to download other people's hard work, it’s the only option those rat-bastards left you.

If you’re familiar with the Tekken Force mode, you won’t be in for any surprises. This is weird version of Tekken, where you play Jin as he battles through his personal growth in this story within. It’s a third person clasher, similar to the action adventure games like Final Fight, but with a style all its own and completely revamped graphics. How this relates to grabbing some loot is that whenever you beat this mode, you nab 100,000 G again… the bad news is that this takes a lot longer than beating the game once with each character, but there are pay-offs to your hard work:

First of all, beating the Devil Within mode will unlock a slew of things that couldn’t otherwise be obtained (like new levels and such for the fighting game). Secondly, if you play through it a second time, you’ll find that many of the expensive items that you were looking to purchase in the first place are scattered through the levels for you to pick up. Still, there’s a lot of stuff to buy and it will take a long time… but in my mind it was entirely worth it to create a totally decked out character.

Finally, I couldn’t end without saying that they really outdid themselves with this one (probably because of how poor Tekken 4 was compared to what it could have been). Complete in Tekken 5 you’ll find the old school arcade versions of Tekken’s 1-3. *applauds* This was just that extra nudge that Namco gives, like giving the middle finger to those who would create a rival fighting game of its caliber. Of course, I suppose competition is the spirit of any good fighting game, so it is to be expected.

The Doctor’s Orders

If you’re reading this you probably like fighting games and you know all about the Tekken series. Maybe you’re a little skeptical because of the last pooper, but I assure you, they fixed the issues and then some. This time you get a huge chunk of playable characters and I was happy to see that they got rid of the uneven terrain they experimented with last time as well. If you have ever gotten enjoyment from a fighting game before (and especially one of the Tekken series), then don’t even bother renting this one: Go out and buy it. You won’t be sorry you did. Invite the neighborhood kids over and give ‘em a whallop, it’ll be worth whatever you spent on the game.