#tekken 1

I don't care if People Love Heihachi because they enjoyed playing as him and how he's Important for making the Iron Fist Tournament because I HATE him so much and I Cannot Stand looking at his Stupid Face...

Tekken 1 was the first game i've ever played. I have vivid memories of telling some old lady at the hotel me and my parents were in for the holidays (i miss Rimini...) about how fucking cool i thought Yoshimitsu looked after i first saw him at the arcade nearby. I also remember laughing at some girl who lost against a Jack specifically while i was in line, i was such a kickable little shit LMFAO. It's been so long that i have no memories whatsoever of me actually playing the game, and Tekken 5 has the first 3 arcade Tekkens, so why not? I could have emulated the PSX port with the extra modes and such, and spared myself the horrible looking artifacts that come from playing an emulation within an emulation, but i hate myself.

Feels weird playing Tekken without accidentally stumbling into some hype combo just by carelessly pressing buttons. Movesets are understandably limited given the circumstances, there is a lot less emphasis on movement than what you'd see later in the series, and side-stepping isn't a thing yet, not that arena awareness would be relevant in these infinite voids stripped of any ring-outs or walls. It's a fun if a bit simplistic system overall, and i never understood the Virtua Fighter comparisons... Tekken 1 plays a lot closer to 2D fighting games of the time than anything that would become synonimous with 3D fighters.

Even for '94, only 8 characters is a pittance. Imagine if there was no Tekken 2, and 3, and 4 and so forth, imagine someone at Namco looked at this construct of digital mediocrity and decided to kill the whole thing dead to spare the company any further embarassment... would you look at the chonky pre-rendered graphics for guys like Paul or Kazuya, or worse yet their stubby in-game models, and think "these losers will go on to become the coolest dudes in all figthing games"? Eh. King was always rad, i'm sure they'd have repurposed him somewhere else.

The concept of stock photos wasn't something the general public may have been too familiar with back in '94, does this allow my modern perspective to look past the fact that Tekken 1 stages are nothing more but badly cropped stock photos of unremarkable scenery on a parallax? Uh... no, not really. Virtua Fighter 2 that came out the same year had fully modeled polygonal environments, and on the 2D side of things pixel art was already capable of such good looking backdrops. This would look any decent only if you got sent 10 years in the future from when Super Mario Bros was the peak of what graphics could be like.

The music is good, actually. Nothing comparable to the better soundtracks in the series (the correct order is TT2 > 4 > 2 > 6 > the rest), but there's something to be said about how it encapsulates that cheerful upbeat mid 90's vibe, setting it apart from the edgier and more industrial tones the following titles would adopt.

I thought the CPU was tough but manageable. There's definitely a little bit of input reading here and there which is hard not to notice when opponents do those specific miniscule movements that wouldn't be possible to replicate on a controller, and sometimes they will just take the initiative to perfectly block anything you throw at them until it gets boring, but overall i felt the challenge was nowhere near as frustrating as stuff like Street Fighter 2 or any of the classic Mortal Kombats... until i met Paul at stage 6 and that son of a maligned whore walled me for like 20 minutes. Given how rounds in most occasions will last less than 15 seconds and more often than not i didn't get my round in, that sure is a lot of imaginary quarters being munched.

Eventually i remembered this arcade port has dip switch settings included and decided to lower the difficulty so i could see the end of this stupid fucking ladder. I also allowed myself to change characters after a game over and turned the blood from red to green because me so scawed mommy. Game felt exactly the same, and i got walled by Paul AGAIN.

TEKKEN 1 | TEKKEN 2