Tekken 5

3D fighting games have been my favorite genre for about ten years now. The first one I played was the game that started it all - Virtua Fighter. I was in Las Vegas at The Luxor hotel and got to experience it for the first time on an enormous screen with a loud sound system. I could get more technical, but I was eleven years old at the time and had just "graduated" from elementary school. I get cobwebs trying to remember what I did just last week, so this is about as precise as I'll get for now.

Needless to say, about eleven months later I bought a Sega Saturn for $400 USD (plus tax & RF adapter for the junk heap TV I had at the time) at the tender age of twelve. Yes, that's somewhat psychotic, but pales in comparison to the $1,000+ I paid sixteen months later to get myself a new television, VCR, and Cambridge Soundworks Ensemble IV home theater system. That's a lot of damn newspapers to deliver and quite a bit of diligent saving power for a thirteen year old.

At any rate, after playing VF2, Fighting Vipers, and Fighter's Megamix well beyond reasonable amounts of time, I finally caved in and got a PlayStation on my fifteenth birthday. Resident Evil 2 and NBA Shootout '98 solidified the system's worth from the onset, and the rest of 1998 was a relentless assault on a teenager's wallet. Metal Gear Solid and a little PC game by the name of Half-Life were certainly the highlights, but PlayStation managed another terrific feat - it provided me with a new 3D fighter to pour hours and hours into. That game was Tekken 3. It's still one of my favorite PlayStation games.

Fast forward half a decade and I've since had a blast with Tekken Tag Tournament, Virtua Fighter 4, Soul Calibur, and was left dissapointed with Tekken 4. While Namco certainly put effort into adding new features, most of it seemed out of place. I really enjoyed the Tokyo skyline rooftop stage with the nicely designed spartan statues, but the rest of it was a snooze. The wall push maneuvering was counter-intuitive, and it usurped the secondary throw button combination that I had grown accustomed to. On top of that, many of the stages were poorly designed and claustrophobic. The "fight club," parking garage, and freezer arenas must have seemed like a good idea in the concept stage, but were genuinely lackluster when it came to how they were implented in the game. Add in the fact that Jin Kazama was an overpowered nightmare and King looked like a mexican furry enthusiast, and you had a game that fell far short of its predecessors.

The release of Soul Calibur II in August 2003 didn't do a whole lot to convince me that Namco was going to get their magic back. It was and still is a good game, but it ultimately seemed like the original game with walls and nicer graphics thrown in. The whole mess that the dolts at Nintendo created with special characters being thrown into each version was highly annoying as well. I passed on buying a new copy on release day, since the far superior Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution had been spinning in my PS2 for two weeks before then. As luck would have it I managed to pick a mint condition, barely used copy of the Xbox version of Soul Calibur II not even ten days after the initial retail release. It provided some worthwhile entertainment, but whereas Tekken 4 made too many changes that betrayed the formula of the series, Namco seemed satasfied with an "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality for Soul Calibur II. After pouring so much time into the original on Dreamcast, there was nothing about the sequel that caught my attention. Namco had probably expected that ressurecting the "Weapons Master" mode would be a enough, but with what VF4 Evo offered for only $19.99, I was left unimpressed. The fact that the traditional team battle mode (where you could select up to eight fighters for a quick play session) had been bastardized into a three on three arcade mode just made matters worse.

At this rate I was convinced Namco had lost "it" and may not reacquire "it" until the next generation of consoles came out. Fortunately, that is not the case. They seemed to have been taking notes over the last two and a half years, they've just hit the nail on the head.

Tekken 5 is just what the doctored ordered. Namco took heed what had dismayed fighting fans in Tekken 4, and took note of what AM2 was doing to innovate so wonderfully with VF4 Evo. Anyone who has enjoyed the previous installments of the serious will be right at home. The clunky wall push has been dropped in favor of bringing the classic control scheme that everyone knows any loves. Rather than poorly designed areans with various objects cluttering the foreground (as was the case with Tekken 4), Namco has opted for a mixture of walled arenas and infinite plain fields that were the series standard up through Tekken Tag Tournament.

Heavily improved character balance and a wealth of modes, features, and unlockable items help round out the package. The "story mode" is worth running through once with each fighter to view their CG ending and to unlock all but one of the hidden fighters (who are "time released" in the arcade version). But the real draw, in addition to the highly refined fighting engine, is the replayability of the arcade mode and the customization options that players are afforded with each subsequent victory. The best way to put is that Namco simply streamlined the "Quest Mode" that AM2 brilliantly crafted for the console release of Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. After each victory in arcade mode, you are given a choice to select one of three possible opponents (or varying skill levels and rankings) to face next, or to exit out to the main menu in order to check out what items you can buy in the customization mode. While this isn't as feature laden as VF4 Evo's "Quest Mode," it is a lot friendlier and does not require that a new profile be created for each character. In fact, after losing or exiting an "Arcade Battle" match, you can simply switch to any of the available fighters and work your way forward, fighting to increase your ranking with said character. This just makes for a very straight forward, yet deep and intuitive experience that will keep you playing for hours. I've already had several fifty fight sessions, only to pimp out my fighters some more and jump back into the fray.

How can you not dig that?

The graphics are terrific. The arenas a visual spectacle, while not intruding on the core gameplay. The sound effects are as good as they have been in the series, and the music is quite good as well. If there are any minor faults, its that no tag function was brought back into the fold (perhaps Namco will be kind enough to hit us over the head with TTT2 on PSP?), and Jinpachi Mishima is the worst boss in the series. We're talking DOA/MK levels of cheese here. Fortunately he only has to be conteded with once per run through the story mode.

If Namco can take the effort and intelligent design that was put into Tekken 5 and work it into Soul Calibur III, they will once again be neck and neck with AM2 as the kings of 3D fighters. While there's murmers that Soul Calibur III will also be a System 258 based arcade game, I can only imagine what Namco could pull off with a state of the art nVidia GPU and the 25 gigabytes of space that a Blu-Ray disc would afford them. Make it happen Namco. Please. Make. It. Happen.