Tekken 7 is not as good as Tag Tournament 2, having played both back to back. They say that comparison is the enemy of fun, but i'd argue the costantly increasing enshittification of the AAA gaming industry over the last decade is a much more concrete threat to one's contentness.
Even so, from the moment i booted up this game for the first time to my last current session, i sensed a rush that i'd long forgotten, that i used to get whenever i tried out the "current thing". How that's possible given the game is 11 years old, we'll let the historians figure it out, and i don't know if this should in any way factor in my overall rating, but i did enjoy for once playing something that other people are liking and playing in the moment without the lingering thought that i got scammed out of my money.
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: Tekken 7 is an ugly looking game, and not because it's aged in the many years it's been around. There's an upgrade in mere horsepower going from Tag 2 to 7 that is on par for the course when a game jumps generations, with better particle effects and a higher resolution on the textures, but that's where it ends. Every character has this ugly metallic sheen all over as to create the illusion that models are more elaborate than they actually are, intro and outro animations haven't looked this uncanny since Tekken 2, clothes and hair physics are so unpolished that i thought something was wrong with my graphic card when i looked at them have a seizure on virtually every match, the UI is what you'd create on a game design course to test all the functionalities of a menu screen in the 15 minutes you're given before moving on to something else, and worst of all the arenas... i hate having to bring up Tag 2 continually here (editor's note: this is false.), but going from some of the best arenas i've ever seen in a fighting game to those depressing lifeless cubes trying to pass off as "environments" was gutting, to put it bluntly.
Music has me more conflicted. There were a decent amount of tracks that i quite liked and that i'm even keeping in the background as i'm writing this review, and none that i found offensive or particularly ill fitting for a given stage, the real problem here is the variety. The more you play, the more a vast majority of tracks will end up blending together into this homogenous pile of electronic cacophony, and the few outliers aren't enough to save the whole soundtrack.
If there's an aspect of Tekken 7's aesthetic i gotta give it full credit for is the re-designs for all returning fighters. Everyone at worst looks a bit cooler than they did last time we saw them, and at best they've been given their best fits yet with Lei, Marduk, Anna and Ganryu being the clearest examples of what i'm talking about.
How about dem newcomers though? Do they stack up against the OGs? No. No they don't. I only genuinely like Leroy, Fuckyourmom and Kasumi without any asterisk attached to them, Claudio and Lucky Chloe have a lot of underutilized potential which as far as i know only Claudio will go on to fullfill, the others though? Katarina is Cristina at home, Gigas is Jack-7 at home, Master Raven is Raven at home, Josie is annoying as fuck, Lidia is so boring i had to look up her name, Saheen's backstory behind his existence makes it impossible for me to take him seriously, and Eliza is so corny that i thought she was a crossover character from some seasonal anime no one remembers, only to find out that she's a crossover character from a free-to-play game which is the only thing worse than that. Speaking of crossovers, this side of the roster can get very subjective, and from my point of view we have a character from a game i didn't play (Geese), a character froma a game that i didn't like (Noctis), a character from a game i'm terrible at (Akuma), and a character from a tv show i've never watched (read quite a chunk of the comic book back in the day, to be fair)... no one here is titillating my senses.
No Survival, no Time Attack, no Tekken Force, no Tekken Ball. All stuff that was already a thing by Tekken 3, to give context. The Arcade mode is just that, a port of what the japanese arcade game before home release was like: 5 matches with no intro slides, no mid-ladder rival fight and no endings. But fear not! Endings are not entirely gone, they just kinda suck now. Alongside the single player story mode, which i'll get to explain in a second, there is these single fight mini-campaign preceeded by a short text blurb (not accompagnied by illustrations or narration) that grant you a unique cutscene after you win. I did enjoy a few of them, usually those more on the goofier side like Kuma or Lucky Chloe, but there's no denying that they're overall a big downgrade from the high standards of the series. And the worst part is, none of the DLC characters even get these, heck not everyone on the base roster gets these either.
While the lack of all the aforementioned modes is such a kick in the balls, in the short time i played Tekken 7 i did get a bit addicted to Treasure Battle, the spiritual successor to Tekken 5-6-TT2's deceptively named Arcade mode. To those who never bothered with that, it's an endless sequence of fights that emulates the online experience, but with a few unique twists, going as far as giving all the enemy fighters unique names, records and costumes. Tekken 7's rendition of this mode comes with a few nice changes compared to its predecessors, like being able to see your progress within a tier, being rewarded pretty much after every win with a new body part (in the previous games they could get quite expensive), adding gimmicky fights with faster speed or double damage, granting a winning streak bonus and even having special fights against non-selectable characters. This is all good stuff, and while not being able to select your next opponent on a row of 3 after each win is a downgrade that didn't need to exist, Tekken 7 does overall have the best rendition of Arcade mode.
Since i just brought up the unlockable body parts, might as well talk about the whole character editor. Like Arcade mode, it's the best in the series thus far when counting the amount of individual parts, but it comes with a few annoying compromises. Particle effects can now either be attached to the entire body or specific body parts, a nice upgrade damped by how you're limited to a single particle effect per set, and miscellanous non-clothing objects can now be equipped 3 at once instead of 2, which is good but i'd argue still not good enough. Aaaand of course there's DLC. The Originals Edition of Tekken 7 doesn't come with any of the costume DLCs, which is lame but understandable, what is lame and also a tad fucking preposterous is how you can't buy costume packs individually and instead have to purchase the 30 euro Season Passes, something i was never willing to do. This counts for arenas too but no one cares because the arenas in this game are dogshit.
One last de-tour before talking about Story mode: father, forgive me as i sinned... and bought the Tekken Bowl DLC. I can't help it, i'm a sucker for stupid mini-games like these. It should have absolutely been a free update alongside stuff like frame data and whatnot, and i wouldn't have bothered if not for this big sale, BUT it's a neat diversion that had a lot more thought put into it than i expected going in, so that's neat.
Alright. I've been dragging my feet for long enough, how high or low does Tekken 7's single player Story rank against the fierce(ly underwhelming) competition from other fighting games? Well, it's complicated.
I want to start off on a positive note, praising this mode for being THE FUCKING ONLY ONE out of all i've played to actually try and diversify each fight in a way that makes sense with the context of what leads to it, thank GOD. I never asked for much, all i've ever wanted was something more substantial than basic CPU fights i could get anywhere else in the game, and Tekken 7 gives me exactly that. Even minor stuff like the CPU being programmed to act a specific way, longer or shorter life bars, Rage being triggerable from the start, more than 2 rounds per battle or mid-game cutscenes would be enough to impress me, but then they also added NPC fights, proper boss battles, QTEs and unique mechanics like that shooting section. Am i the crazy one for thinking that this should be the standard? What the fuck.
Unfortunately, while the gameplay looks the part, the narrative and presentation both fall a bit flat.
This is a low budget game and you can definitely tell: while the pre-rendered cutscenes in CG do look every bit as good as you'd hope, there's only a handful of them and their transition to the much cheaper in-game models is incredibly jarring whenever it happens, but not as jarring as the non-stop use of grainy and graphically outdated footage from previous titles during flashbacks. Meanwhile, lots of illustrations are used to narrate the parts that don't have any fighting in them, these are all undeniably well drawn but their presence would have been more appreciated in the character chapters.
Moving on to the story itself, things frequently jump from charmingly cheesy to sincerely hype, with cool moments all throughout beginning, middle and end, featuring a mercifully limited amount of Lars/Alisa compared to the abject dumpster fire that was 6's Scenario campaign... i wish that's all i could say about it, but we can't ignore the elephant in the room: those God forsaken journalist intermissions. Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Not only they're boring as death, not only they go on for an eternity, not only they feature the worst voice acting i've heard in a videogame since the late 90's, but they're also completely disconnected from the main events of the story and could all be removed without anything else feeling out of place. What the FUCK.
It's impossible to not point out that this mode is quite short, lasting less than 20 chapters, each featuring no more than 3 fights and virtually no replay value as no rewards are being given if you beat it at a higher difficulty, nor there's secondary objectives of any kind to come back to... a set of flaws that's been present in virtually every story mode i've played, but is particularly felt with this one.
Uh. I wasn't expecting Tekken 7 of all games to be the longest review i've ever written.
My closing statement? Tekken 7 may not be all dat for my own money, but at least it's not Mortal Kombat 11.
