As many may know, Tekken 7 has been a much-anticipated title both in the FGC and the larger gaming world. Bandai Namco’s latest 3D fighter has been making the rounds in arcades for over two years now, molded and measured every day of its incubation. Outside of Japan and Korea, the rest of the world has waited with bated breath. I was among the impatient.
Well, the wait is over–and the wait is worth it. I am ready to say that Tekken 7 is a fantastic game and a great consumer product. Having played it both at Wizard World Austin and at Final Round 20, I knew Tekken 7’s gameplay was good. The actual complete package, however, has been a larger mystery to us all. The world wants to know if they are getting their money’s worth, or if they are just kick-starting an esport.
Well, consider those fears quashed.
Tekken 7 is complex, beautiful, and rewarding.
Tekken 7 is not so astronomically different from older games that you’ll think it’s a different series, but the execution of this (long labored-on) product is captivating. It rarely feels like there isn’t some new mountain to climb in this game, and not once did that feel unattainable. Tekken is a notoriously difficult series to play and while 7 is no exception, I feel like this game finds ways to make any accomplishment seem really rewarding. Both presentation and graphics have such punch and confidence that doing literately anything feels great. We all know about Slow-Mo Finishes and Rage Arts by now, but just to make it clear: Tekken 7 feels great to play. Pokes in the neutral are rewarding, but so are your up-close gambling launchers. The juggle system is wildly flexible, and the main limits are gravity scaling, walls, and your imagination.
Training Mode has every option that you need to test every situation in the game on your own.
If you have any creativity in your bones, you’ll find a way to put it to use in training mode. Tekken 7 is a system-mechanic heavy game. There’s 187 million ways to get off the ground (approximately!) after you’ve been knocked down, and just that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the sorts of micro-situations that you’ll run into in your Tekken career. You can’t just automatically know how to deal with these, and not everyone immediately has a friend on standby to jump in and game with. Training Modes, particularly in 2017, need to be an all-encompassing sandbox to satisfy the curious gamer.
Lab monsters should rejoice. If you are the type of furious note-taker that wants to recreate weird situations you’ve had in live games, Tekken 7’s training mode is robust enough to satisfy. There has not been a single scenario that I’ve thought up that I wasn’t able to recreate or figure out in Tekken 7’s lab. Every oki situation, every step situation, every bit of nuance you could dream up, you can figure it out with the tools presented.
If there is any significant slam against Training Mode, it’s the lack of in-game frame data. However, this information is already public for the most part, and the “Recovery Animation” option clearly shows you where block stun ends, giving you a visual understanding of what is plus, and isn’t.
Online is great–thus far.
The connections on four and five-bar connections were great, and some of the best 3D online sessions around. This is no indication of what your day one experience might be like; after all, nothing can prepare a new product’s server like launch day. I was probably one of 20 people even online pre-launch, at most. But It was possible to block Bryan’s Snake Edge on reaction, and that felt wonderful. If the game’s netcode remains as solid as it currently is now, Tekken 7 will be a juggernaut for many years to come, and it will deserve it.
There is a questionable omission, however: there is no replay feature at all. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones have their own native capture, and PC players can obviously run OBS if they wanted, but it’s still a surprising exclusion, since ultimately it means you won’t get to see other people play via their own replays.
The Single Player modes are actually fun, and worth playing.
I hate single player modes in fighting games. I have a cold, black heart and forever remain uninterested in the grinding experience older games used to force upon you to unlock characters. Tekken 7 made me briefly reconsider my cynicism.
Story Mode is fun. It is a good balance of seriousness and ridiculousness. It’s not exactly A Tale of Two Cities, no fighting game ever will be, but it’s serviceable enough of a plot. More importantly, most battles actually felt like they moved the plot along in some way, and there were a lot of twists to the gameplay that kept it interesting. Rarely was Story Mode “Normal Battle a Dude, Cutscene, More Normal Fights.” Each battle had (sometimes bizarre) twists to the gameplay that only existed in story mode. These were, without spoiling anything, the absolute highlight of the mode.
And then there’s Treasure Battle Mode. While it’s not required here to unlock characters, you do get many item unlocks from it. And playing dress-up with items you’ve unlocked is something of a trademark of the series now, so these modes need to be top notch. First impressions are: they’re good! Treasure Battle Mode is to the point, and has never been a tremendously big compromise of time, due to the fairly large rewards you get from it.
Arcade Battle Mode is exactly what you think it is, and I honestly don’t see the appeal of it. You fight a few CPU-controlled enemies without context, then you fight a final boss. I can’t really recommend this mode over the previous two mentioned modes, but I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it: it’s just very expected. Maybe it’s for you. It’s not for me.
Customization Mode is every bit as fun as it has ever been. It’s not a total chore to get the in-game gold that you need to unlock things, there’s a lot of content to unlock, and I can’t immediately remember the last time I ran into a piece of equipment I wanted to color edit that I couldn’t. You’re even able to color edit King’s Rainmaker outfit, which really surprised me. For some players, I can see the flexibility of this mode being more than enough to warrant the price.
You can play the music from any Tekken.
Jukebox Mode let’s you change all the music in the game to whatever Tekken you want to pull music from. It’s kind of a genius touch, particularly for a series with as noteworthy set of soundtracks as Tekken has.
All of that aside…
I didn’t have access to any VR-related equipment for this review, and cannot rate VR Mode because of that. I apologize for the lack of insight on this, but I can also say I had no interest in this mode in the first place, and didn’t understand what exactly it was trying to accomplish. That’s almost universally my feelings towards VR in general.
Now, here comes the part of this review where we talk about some of Tekken 7’s egregious flaws. As good as Tekken 7 ultimately is, there are real problems in the game that you should know about before you speak with your wallet.
There is no Tutorial Mode.
… at least not in game.
This is the sort of thing that doesn’t bother some players, and there’s a chance it doesn’t matter to you. But I know there for some people this is a make-or-break feature. It is, perhaps, a little odd that Namco has forgone any sort of teaching mode in 2017, when its competitors have shown how much it can add to a game. (Guilty Gear Xrd immediately leaps to mind.)
This is not uncharacteristic of Tekken. In fact, you could say that Namco has been more transparent then ever with helping players, given the guides they’ve been putting up on their website. But you must know about this site in the first place (you’re welcome!), and it’s unadvertised in-game or on the box.
Training Mode’s combo counter is broken, and other oddities.
This likely won’t bother longtime Tekken players because, frankly, Training Mode’s combo counter has never worked well in this series. Very simply, the combo counter just counts every hit in a string as a combo regardless of whether it’s blockable. So, make sure you set second action as “Guard All” when testing strings.
Even more confusing is that there are instances of OTG combos that are completely inescapable not being counted as combos, when they should be. For example, a grounded hitting Gigas’ DF+1+2 string’s last hit will never be recognized by the game as a combo. It’s a minor thing, but it’s worth noting–you’re going to need to test various escape options yourself using the game’s programmable settings.
Also make sure you test the way the engine works for yourself using the record feature. The computer is blatantly capable of doing impossible things. For example:
- Set the computer to sidestep towards the foreground after getting hit
- Do a move that forces them into crouch (For example, Kazumi DB+3)
- Watch the computer sidestep towards the foreground from crouch
The problem here is you cannot, as the player, sidestep from crouch towards the foreground. It’s simply not allowed by the system. That doesn’t stop the computer, here, though, and may lead to confusion when you’re testing things.
You can avoid players in Ranked Mode.
If, for whatever reason, you think Ranked Match will be worth your time, I’m afraid I’m going to have to rain on your parade a little bit.
The ability to see both the connection of the person connecting to you, and the player themselves, means that you can pick and choose who you play in Ranked. Picking the connection is understandable–we all want to have good connections when we play. But nearly every person that I met online would avoid me after they lost, denying every connection attempt while they sat in Warm-Up mode (this game’s “training mode before a online match”). Keep in mind that these are people that also got their game early, so they are either reviewers or just players dedicated enough to try and break street date. If this is happening now, you better believe it’s going to happen to you after launch date.
“So, do you recommend getting Tekken 7?”
I am hopelessly biased towards the 3D fighter genre. Guilty. That said, I am still convinced this is the best-made 3D fighter we have had in years, even with some of the quibbles above. Every single aspect of this game feels like it was lovingly made by people that wanted to put forward not just the best fighting game possible, but the best game possible. Namco has a very particular view of what that means, though, and I think it sometimes does them a disservice. I have claimed multiple times on this site that Namco’s release cycle, frustrating as it may be, is necessary for the birth of a finely sculpted, complex product.
Overall, the most fair score we can give Tekken 7 is an 8/10. Its gameplay rises far beyond its contemporaries, it’s gorgeous, it’s well crafted, and it deserves to be the FGC’s premiere 3D fighting game for quite some time. But Tekken, a series well-known for being impenetrable for new players, does itself no favors by not adapting to the training and replay standards set by modern fighters: no tutorial mode, no in-game frame data, weird Training Mode problems, no replays, the ability to ignore particular players in Ranked Mode… these are all real problems that keep Tekken 7 from being a perfect experience. And while its online is fantastic now, this score could drop drastically if it’s Online Mode buckles under the weight of retail release.
And absolutely none of the criticisms above are going to stop me from losing basically all of my free time to it. If you’ve watched the 3D genre curiously from afar, now’s the time to jump in. And Tekken 7’s gameplay and flair will make it feel worthwhile.
Score: 8/10
