This, in a sense, becomes your score.Īs for the other modes, time attack tests how quickly you can dispatch an enemy, versus battle is a formal one-on-one, and survival mode pushes to see how many opponents you can take out with a single energy bar. Second, your own skill level increases during decisive ranking battles against opponents more skilled than you. First, after winning a fight, you can choose from three opponents whom you'd like to battle next, all given a ranking based on their skill level. Two nice variations are the battle choice and the ranking system. The arcade battle mode is just like the upright model you'd play at your favorite mom-and-pop arcade you fight the computer in seemingly unlimited matches - no need to worry about quarters here - and a second player can jump into the battle at any time. The modes are traditional favorites with few twists. It offers five difficulty levels, almost a dozen different battle modes and 20 immediately playable characters with at least 11 more unlockable ones. If options are the air that fighting games breathe, then Tekken 5 is alive and well. Two buttons punch, two buttons kick, and you press the opposite direction to dodge or block. Two players go man-to-man or woman-to-woman in a 3-D square arena, usually battling to win the best two out of three matches. Luckily, Namco remembers what we came for and keeps the style consistent with that of the previous games. It makes a gamer wonder why Namco tries to come up with a context at all. The convoluted concepts include mercenary spies, flying devils and killer wrestler robots. Taking the whole genre as a gaming cliché, Namco's Tekken 5 does what it can to improve the formula.įor Tekken fans, Tekken 5 will start suitably enough as any longtime Tekken gamer will tell you, the interweaving plots are more melodramatic telenovela than Shakespeare. The Street Fighter series alone had about a dozen sequels in that decade, not to mention SNK's King of Fighters or Sega's Virtua Fighter series. Like old-school shooters, fighting games have pretty much worn out their welcome thanks to the pure glut of titles in the '90s. Now, more than a decade later, Tekken 5 feels more like a bookend than an evolution.

Only Sony's PlayStation, which came out the following year, could handle Tekken's complexity. Tekken was the first good-looking 3-D fighting game, making 2-D Street Fighter look old and the Super Nintendo, with its simple graphics, obsolete. In 1994, back when Street Fighter II was king of the arcade and Super Nintendo ruled at home, classic gaming outfit Namco released an arcade game that would dethrone them all.

Tekken 5 arcade history