Wii U: The worst thing to happen to Tekken

If you've not seen the Tekken for Wii U trailer look in awe as Nintendo ruins a one respectable game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DnaLXrjQYc&

At the beginning of summer Tekken was shaping up to overtake Duke Nukem as the coolest game ever created, with Nukem's newest incarnation being something of a flop, Tekken was all set to take the reins with Snoop Dogg recording a Tekken themed song and his image was to appear in a special stage in the game whereupon he would have hoes dancing around him. That is one effective way of creating a cool image for your game. Later in the summer though Snoop Dogg becomes Snoop Lion and everyone double takes "WHAT?" Who suggested he name himself Snoop Lion, to me it sounds like some kind of flower, like a dandelion. Sure lions are fierce animals, but if that's what snoop's going for he's not achieved it. Another larger disaster to the street cred of Tekken is the Wii U release. A Wii U tekken release had the capacity to bring the console some kind of credibility, nintendo is now a joke, designed for children, old people and unfit women (Men are more likely to get fir through sport than a games console). A good hard Tekken game would be appealing to those who still love the adventure games that nintendo is so good at but like the more grown-up titles too.

I love Zelda, like many other 20-somethings, but I'm not buying a Wii U on the strength of it. Tekken is an excellent franchise, a well balanced and appealing fighting game that's audience isn't Nintendo's core demographic. The downfall of the brilliant idea to make Nintendo a little bit cooler is that Nintendo just made Tekken a little bit less cool. Not content with ruining their own fighting game with 'Brawl' now they've managed to ruin my favorite cool fighting game by dredging up their stupid old haggard overused 'favorites' in the form of costumes. Nobody wants to see Kazuya dressed as Link, we want to see Kazuya beat the shit out of his dad and his Son in the same tag battle. We want to see a bear toss his enemy around the arena and destroy him, we don't want to see him dress as Donkey Kong throwing barrels at a cartoon!

Tekken has it's own humor about it, Tekken has a schoolgirl who's inexplicably friends with a panda and an alien swordsman, the humor fits the entire style of the game, Nintendo shoehorning in it's own 'lovable' characters to already well defined character roles is a definite oversight, if there's one thing I'll never tire of it's Tekken's diverse character stories. If there's one thing I'll never find refreshing, it's Nintendo big ideas that their overextended characters are lovable.

Tekken 3D: The merits

Many people including myself have been incredibly critical of the lack of game modes in Tekken 3D and it's useless bloody waste of time online mode, furthermore if I wanted to watch a Tekken film I'll just realise that would be a stupid idea and find a nice high dangerous bridge to jump off. I certainly don't want it tacked on to a game like a porno magazine that comes with free football stickers. Nobody gives one about football stickers. It's essentially a training game for me before Tekken Tag Tournament 2 comes out.

But today I want to discuss the positives of Tekken 3D: good graphics, forty characters all with good move sets and fairly well balanced.

And that was my wonderfully detailed discussion of the positives of Tekken 3D, learn from it Bandai Namco!

What I'd like to see from Tekken Tag Tournament 2

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (or TTT3) is scheduled for release in September of this year and was shown off in exciting fashion at E3 with a bangin' track from Snoop Dogg, apparently to attract a different audience. I don't know why Namco seems to assume that this will bring a new audience since fans of Snoop are obviously the kind of people that should be playing this game series anyway. Avid Tekken fans will remember that the original Tekken Tag Tournament had no story mode and as such was considered a non-canon game enabling characters who had fallen by the wayside in the story mode to return. The second installment of the non-canon games follows suit with a wide cast of over 40 characters, both from classic and more recent games. Some of the things I'd like to see have already been confirmed such as snoop dogg in the background of a stage with his hoes hilariously dancing around him and it's also been confirmed that we will never be asked to pay for downloadable content (Hooray!) but there are a few things we'd still love to see in the new game.

Flaming Jinpachi

Jinpachi first appeared in Tekken 5 as the final boss but still an unplayable character. Jinpachi is yet another addition to the Mishima bloodline which now spans four generations with 6 characters (including Kazuya's half-brother Lars and adopted brother Lee). Jinpachi fought in an incredible flaming form with unblockable stunning moves and irritatingly powerful double fireball moves - seriously i've spent hours at a time tackling him, but then it's not called very hard for nothing. The best thing by far about Jinpachi was the awesome flaming body, pointed hair of fire and generally awesome style of the character, the power of the character will obviously be toned down in TTT3 but I'd like to see flaming Jinpachi as an alternate costume.

A use for suicide

The most useless move of the series so far has been Yoshimitsu's use of his katana to stab himself. Come on Namco, what were you thinking with that one? The only possible use would be to skewer your opponent on the end after going through yourself, not the cleverest of fighters is our Yoshimitsu, no wonder he's never won the King of Iron Fist Tournament! I'm proposing that in attacking his own health Yoshimitsu is supercharging his partner Kunimitsu who gets a 5% speed boost that might work like rage mode or might last until Kunimitsu is damaged. Have some common sense Namco, make it worthwhile.

Tekken Dance

The first installment brought us Tekken Bowl, well why not Tekken Dance? The silly bonus game that once seemed irrelevant could become one of the main attractions of the game, dance dance revolution has sold over 6.5 million units, now could you imagine how many sales it would have made had Panda and her glowstick wristbands been prancing around our screens as we pumped our feet. TTT2 is interestingly going to be available on the wii U, the perfect place to launch the new Tekken fitness franchise, Heihachi Michima could be the old grey face of... nursing home fitness, and his adopted son Lee Chaolan the playboy to motivate women and homosexuals alike to get fit.