Iron Fist Tournament: Pocket Sized for your Convienience

Author's Rating:

Pros: Slick sense of style, fun combat, wildly entertaining cast of characters, tons of game modes

Cons: The D-pad on the PSP can be unresponsive, there isn't any online gameplay

The Bottom Line: 
A superb fighting game for fans, newcomers, or players just looking for some portable beat-downs

Author's Review
Let me just get something out of the way right now.

“Tekken 5” for the Playstation 2…is awesome. 

The game play...awesome.

The characters…awesome.

The graphics…awesome.

The fact that you could play the arcade versions of Tekken’s 1-3 and the old school space shooter “Starblade” as a bunch of bonuses?  Awesome, awesome, and, again, awesome.

            So, now that I’ve made it perfectly clear that Tekken 5 is…well, you know…I can safely segue into why “Tekken: Dark Resurrection” for the PSP is a must own for any PSP owner.  Not only is this stellar update of “Tekken 5” a nay-flawless fit for the PSP handheld, it’s a fantastic game on its own merits, and well deserving of your consideration.

***Story***
            “Tekken: DR” continues the very strange and convoluted storyline of the Tekken franchise, taking place just moments after the ending of series protagonists Jin Kazama’s “Tekken 4” story thread.  While transforming into a black winged demon and flying off into the night, Jin leaves his evil father, Kazuya Mishima, and his equally evil grandfather, Heihachi Mishima, battered and bruised in an abandoned dojo, where the sinister duo suddenly find themselves attacked by killer robots launched from helicopters.  After dog piling on Heihachi, the robots self destruct in a phenomenal explosion, apparently killing the evil muscle bound senior citizen once and for all.  Unfortunately, the explosion also frees a much greater evil from imprisonment deep below the dojo, one that…somehow manages to organize the King of Iron Fist Tournament 5 to do…something.

            If you haven’t guessed by now, Tekken: DR shares a weakness common in fighting games; an incredibly ridiculous and nonsensical story.  Not that it really matters, mind you; the whole purpose of a fighting game is fighting, and any semblance of “plot” is just an excuse to get a bunch of strange characters together to duke it out. 

           It’s a good thing then that Tekken: DR never tries very hard to take itself seriously, with ending cut scenes for each character that run the gamut from silly to crazy to cool with gleeful stride.  This is a game that never tries to be Shakespeare, and because of that it achieves a fun campiness that’s impossible not to enjoy. 

***Design***
            As a port/update, “Tekken: DR” is structurally very similar to the original “Tekken 5” on the PS2.  The classic quick battle, story battle, network, and arcade modes remain intact with essentially no changes to speak of, save for a few cosmetic differences in the interface.  Just like in the console version, the majority of your time, at least in the beginning, will probably be spent in the story mode, where you can unlock beginning and ending cinema’s and make a little cash (more on that later.)  It’s a little disappointing for fans of the console version that the storylines for each character haven’t changed whatsoever, but this is a port and not a new entry, so there’s little point in begrudging it.

            What is certainly not disappointing is the inclusion of three new characters with their own fully fleshed storylines and move lists.  The new faces include Lili, a spoiled rich girl who has a talent for breaking jawbones, Dragonov, a gothy albino version of Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago, and Armor King, a returning character whose moves mirror the luchador King’s but with less dependence on grabs.  All three are great additions to an already impressive roster, each providing a new gameplay style that is wholly unique, ensuring you’ll enjoy playing as at least one of them (I’m fond of Armor King myself.)

            In addition to new characters are some new game modes that really bolster the overall package.  There’s “attack”, which is a collection of three sub-modes: “time attack,” which tasks you to finish a character storyline in record time, “survival,” which has you fight endless challengers with a limited health bar, and finally “gold rush,” in which your opponents basically bleed gold coins whenever you punch them, adding more to your Tekken wallet.

            “Practice” mode returns, but with some serious improvements.  Aside from training the tradition freestyle way, players are now given the chance to fight a full fledged CPU opponent to hone their skills, learn defensive maneuvers, read a complete tutorial, and learn individual character commands one by one.  On top of this, “freestyle” practice allows you to train while the command list is on screen, letting you cycle through individual button imputs with the analog nub.  This means you don’t need to go through the tedium of pausing the game, cycling through command lists, and then jumping back to training; all of it can be done in real time with satisfying results. 

         As a guy who’s played a lot of fighting games, I can easily say, hands down, this is the best training mode I’ve ever used; I learned so many moves, for so many characters, so fast that I’m amazed my brain didn’t explode from information overload; it’s that good.

            But I haven’t even talked about the best mode yet; “Tekken Dojo.”  This one is essentially a series of miniaturized tournaments, each sectioned into separate “dojo’s” in terms of player skill and CPU difficulty.  The more opponents you defeat, the higher your player ranking will become, letting you face off against tougher rivals in tougher tournaments, granting cash prizes for every tournament won.  The feeling of progression you get from this mode is exhilarating, providing a sort of Daniel San, Rocky Balboa, Bruce Lee-in-Enter-the-Dragon sort of thrill that can only come when you feel yourself truly mastering a character.  The only thing that would make the feeling of accomplishment any better is if you somehow unlocked a video of your character practicing the crane kick while balancing on a narrow pole at the beach with some 1980’s training music rocking the PSP’s speakers.  Then again, something like that would totally be worth putting on its own UMD disc, but I digress.

            The last two modes worth mentioning are “Bonus Games” and “Profile.”  The former is really just a collection of silly mini-games that serve as a break from the fighting status quo.  “Tekken Bowling” is probably the most notable of them all, but to be honest, most of these games won’t hold your attention for more than a handful of minutes before you want to go back to fighting.  The latter mode, “Profile,” is a little more interesting. 

           Aside from doing mundane things like changing your player name or whatnot, you also have the option of purchasing unique cosmetic items for each individual character.  This is where all that money you’ve been earning comes into play, and while it’s a really cool idea, it’s frustratingly hampered by just how unreasonably expensive everything is.  Just to give you an idea of what “expensive” means in this game, consider this: beating a character’s story mode gives you 100,000 G.  That sounds like a lot, right?  Well, the Tekken universe must be going through one hell of an economic crisis because the least expensive item, aside from color changes, that you can buy for a character costs 40,000 G, and that’s just the unimpressive stuff.  The really cool stuff, like rocket packs or pointy samurai helmets, costs 500,000 G, meaning you’ll need to either play the story mode five times or spend a huge amount of time scraping up cash in the other modes.  As you might guess, it’s pretty much impossible to buy everything for every character, and that just isn’t acceptable to a person as obsessively completist as myself. 

     There’s a lot more to talk about with Tekken: DR’s options, but if I keep going this review may end up being longer than the Bible.  I haven’t even talked about ghost sharing or trading yet, but I’ll let you find those out for yourself (long story short: they’re great.)  I’ll just end by praising the smooth ad-hoc multiplayer but also questioning the lack of true online capability.  If this game could be played over the internet with friends, it would probably consume my soul and I’d never ask for it back.  Sadly, I am still very much in the possession of a soul.

***Gameplay***
            Anyone who’s played any past Tekken title should be familiar with Tekken: DR’s controls.  For the uninitiated, here’s a rundown: the d-pad controls character movement, and each face button is assigned to one of your character’s four limbs.  Punching, kicking, and everything in between is performed by entering specific button combinations, often with directional commands thrown in for variety.  This may sound like a simple system, but appearances are definitely deceiving where Tekken is concerned.  True, entering most attack commands is a cinch, but throw in parry’s, sidesteps, back rolls, side rolls, tackles and grabs, and you’ve got one of the most in depth and sophisticated fighting systems for any fighting game. 

            Newcomers needn’t be scared off though; basic button mashing will usually result in victory on the games normal difficulty settings, and, as mentioned earlier, there’s a terrific training menu to show you the ropes if you want to enter high tier play.  Overall, the balance between depth and accessibility is wonderfully executed in Tekken: DR, and it should prove a good jump on point for newbies and a good returning point for vets, especially due to some key tweaks and improvements made to many characters from the original Tekken 5.

            Speaking of characters, Tekken: DR has quite a lot of them, with 34 unique ones total and two palette swaps (Panda and Eddie Gordo) thrown in for the heck of it.  It’s a very diverse cast, with no two characters playing quite the same (excluding Mokujin, the weird wooden doll thing that imitates other peoples fighting styles as a hobby.)  The move lists for each character are typically quite long, the smaller ones having over seventy moves total and the longer ones reaching triple digits.  You could literally spend the rest of your life trying to master the quirks and styles of all the different characters, and the superb balance between all of them means that true mastery can always prevail over supposedly “high tier” characters.

            There are some problems that need mentioning though, namely with the PSP d-pad.  While it works fine for most horizontal and vertical button presses, things get uncomfortably iffy when diagonal inputs come into play.  Crouching diagonal attacks are woefully hit and miss, as are the jumping variety.  Worse, there’s no easy way to tell what you did right when a diagonal works and what you did wrong when it doesn’t; it really does feel like the game isn’t cooperating, as if entering a diagonal command somehow reminds it of some traumatic event that gave it an angle phobia as a kid.  The inputs aren’t unmanageable though; with practice, you should be able to pull diagonals off with little difficulty, but it still feels like a lot of effort for a simple thing.

            Still, the game definitely feels complete and uncompromising with its gameplay, and it succeeds for it.  This is one of those portable fighting games that doesn’t sacrifice anything for it’s handheld release, and it shines all the brighter for it.

***Presentation***
            Tekken: DA is, as you might expect, a downgrade from its PS2 counterpart.  But what’s amazing is how little of a downgrade it actually is.  Character faces and movements all move convincingly, even during the in-game cutscenes, showcasing just how much a developer can get out of the little PSP with smart design decisions.  Many of the backgrounds from the original version return with neat little tweaks added to keep them fresh; levels that were once night are often day, levels that were on fire are now lush and alive, and so on and so forth.  The music for each stage has also gone through some changes, with the changed stages offering some new tunes to rock out to.  A handful of new arena’s has also been added, the most bizarrely hilarious being a pink cotton candy LSD trip with big pink hearts falling from the ceiling.  Honestly, every time I play this level I keep expecting “California Gurls” to start playing as a smug looking Snoop Dogg looks on. 

            Most good looking games on the PSP come with the sobering price of long load times; the developers of Tekken: DA seemed to have said to themselves “…nah, let’s not do that” and found some ingenious way to make loading fast and painless.  Sure, it’s still a millisecond or two longer than the PS2 version, but the wait is so negligible you’ll probably forget about once you play for a while. 
            Bottom line: pretty game, quick load times.  Moving on.

***Conclusion***
            This game is a miracle.  Everything about it, aside from a few controller nags, is spot on perfect and wholly immersive.  Nothing about it feels trimmed or cut down, and it only becomes more addictive because of it.  The characters are great, the gameplay is solid, the presentation is fantastic…it’s just great on all fronts. 
If you like fighting games even slightly, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up and give it a spin.  It’s actually better than the newest entry in the series, Tekken 6.
Yeah.
I just said that.