Just Tekken' the Mick

After spending 30 pounds on Tekken 4 on release day I am highly disappointed that if I were to buy it today I could probably pick it up for around eight, and that just shows that the game had no quality, there were 19 characters, 21 if you included the palette swaps, and there were no new modes, basically, we had seen it all before.

So I vowed to myself that I would not by the next game, because it did look like the start of a downward spiral, so when I rented Tekken 5 I was amazed on the impact, and played the story mode straight away, but to be honest, it was nothing new, the same thing, but you got to speak to someone at stage 4 and 7, there was nothing new to cling onto, and the thought cropped into my head.

Having completed the story mode eventually, (It is really hard to beat Jinpachi Mishima; the boss. Which can also proove a challenging factor that Tekken has never seen since Tekken against Heihachi Mishima,) but it got rather boring. Anyway, I beat the game with Julia and was highly anticipating her ending, and what did the producers at Namco give me?
A stupid ending where she dreams about the ancient rainforest and picks up a plant, then dreaming she is in the forest with it. Tekken 4 had realistically believable endings, but Tekken 5 just struck up the band, all of the endings bored me, here's just a quick summary of endings that were bad.

Lee Chaolan: He has Heihachi as a servant and swears at him, nothing much.
Paul Phoenix: Declared as the strongest fighter in the universe, he gets a space ship and travels to space to take on aliens.
Anna Williams: She’s up fighting on a castle with Nina for a film she’s going to star in and she cuts all of Nina’s armour off. Classic Anna, but it gets repetitive.
Bruce Irvin: The return of Bruce Irvin was highly anticipated by me, but I was appauled with the boring ending, he gives some young fighter his gloves back and beats a few people up.
There are also countless endings that involved Jinpachi Mishima, the theme got boring and it almost made me switch off altogether.

So, having finally gotten through the story mode (getting most endings) and unlocking all the new characters, I decided the only ending worthy of having was the Christie Montiero/Eddy Gordo ending, the only one that told a relevant story at least. So I moved onto the customisation mode which I had longed to play. You get 100,000 gold points for each character you complete story mode with (first time only) and you can spend them on re-colouring the characters, all black and white clothes cost 18,000 and the other colours are 8 grand each, but unless you are colouring Panda’s bangles, you want only Black and white, accept maybe keeping Kazuya purple, because some characters just don’t fit colours, I had a green Kuma at one point, so maybe if you like the novelty stuff like that.

Aside from colour changes there is so much more to do in the customisation mode, you can choose a name for all your characters (the one that ranks them up) and they travel up the ranks of kyu, similar to that of Virtua Fighter 4. You can also buy accessories for the characters, a few examples are spurs for the shoes (those cowboy trailer things) of Julia and Hwoarang, devil wings for both Kazuya (purple to colour co-ordinate) and ones for the Jin character that isn’t devil Jin. As well as this, you can buy a third costume for each character, however these cost 500,000 gold points, and only a few get two new, and please note: these costumes cannot be customised Ravens new outfit is recommended, he looks like a superhero, and Anna’s new costume is nice.

Moving on, I was soon overly-addicted and had spent all of my money on upgrades, so I pondered what mode would give me money, at first I thought arcade mode would be the same, but I now know that if you play through this you challenge warriors of different kyu class ratings and improve your rating and get money depending on how much stronger (or weaker) the enemy is, it’s basically just the same as normal arcade, but with some new features and the freedom of choosing when to quit and who you fight next from a drop down menu of three.

I was disappointed when I flicked to the Devil Within Mode, and saw that you could only play as Jin, but I was compelled to play when I saw “Jun’s name in the history thing at the start that retells Jin’s past and so I played the game, and beat it in about 2 hours, just getting 1 million gold because I had already unlocked Devil Jin, going around killing robots wasn’t a fun tract of the game, but I loved the Heihachi bots and fighting Ogre was a privilege. So, respectively, with a bit more upgrades and levels, this could be a game outright within itself.

The other modes of Tekken 5 were pretty obvious, the classic vs. mode that we had seen since the first game, and the return of Time Attack and Survival mode (Which is easier than Tekken 4 because you don't have to get 7 kills to scoreboard) and Team Battle that we had had since Tekken 2 was great, especially with the added customisations. Arcade History was nothing new, just a chance to play Tekken, Tekken 2 and 3 again, but only the arcade mode, and the graphics hadn’t even be refined. But it did include a cool galaga mode style game.

Now I let the downside humble out, I would not buy this game myself, and I will wait until it is indeed (as it will be in some year’s time) around £5 in the shop, then it will be worth the money. After completing the story mode it gets boring customising, and I imagine so it’d be even worse after customising everyone to the brim. So for the sake of clarity I’m giving the game 3 stars, it starts off addicting, and outright 5 stars, but it has no game life, which, sadly, is a big downfall in all beat ‘em up fighting games.