Tekken 5 sits in a kind of awkward middle ground in the realm of 3D fighting games. Virtua Fighter is the hardest of the hard-core: it can take months of training just to learn and understand a single character’s moves and strategies, and years to understand the best ways to respond to your opponents’ attacks. Dead or Alive takes the opposite approach: designed for button-mashing, it lacks depth but is great at a party after a few beers. Clive Thompson defends Tekken 5 as a sort of third way, a game that begins with button-mashing and leads to a more disciplined, nuanced approach. That’s an admirable idea, but for me at least, the game still fails to deliver.
There are a couple dozen characters, but not all of them are mash-friendly. Fast-striking Taekwondo master Baek will pressure an opponent all day long if you mash, but stance-oriented Lei will just wind up in a position that leaves him wide open for attack unless you know where you’re going with him. Mashing never did a thing for me when pinned up against a wall, or when floating in the air during one of those long juggling combos that Tekken is famous (infamous?) for. And don’t get me started on some of the more irritatingly cartoonish characters; it’s amusing to fight a boxing kangaroo, until it sweeps you with its third leg (the tail, you perv) a few dozen times.
For my money, Soul Calibur II is the best game for people who want to mix mashing with depth. Slamming buttons and wiggling the stick will get you surprisingly far with just about any character, but once you get tired of that, you’ll find that there’s plenty of nuance to be found in the spaces between the characters’ weapons.
Now, if only there was a foundation that offered game-playing grants so that I could spend a year getting good at VF4:Evo…