I have been with the Tekken series right from the first time I loaded
Tekken into my Playstation over ten years ago. I knew it then and know
it now it is the greatest fighting series ever, in my opnion surpassing
even Street Fighter and Soul Calibur.
With each installment Tekken just got bigger and better, my personal
highlight of the series is Tekken 2. The amount of hours wasted on that
game is uncalcuable and I still play it to this day.
Anyway I got Tekken 5 DR for christmas as part of my PSP bundle and as
soon as I loaded it and fired it up I knew this game was worth waiting
for. You see I have Tekken 5 for PS2 and while found it great felt it
wasn't very advanced in terms of the gameplay. If anything it seemed a
backstep to that of Tekken 4. I discovered DR in my local arcade and
was hooked, the visuals were greatly improved and had excellent new
characters in Druganov and Lili. When I heard that this was only going
to be released on PSP I scoffed, I didn't think such a machine could
accomodate a game like this. Well I am glad I wrong, I have been
playing this game solidly for a week now and have found it is PERFECTLY
suited to the PSP despite critical comments that suggested to the
contrary. The control system I have found is excellent and I can pull
off Kazuya's ten hit combos with the same ease I could on any Tekken on
the home console and the graphics were way above my expectations of
what the PSP can do. The FMV intro is stunning and each character is
amazingly detailed while the stages look awesome. One of the truly
amazing things about this game is the very short loading times, I
expected some pretty long pauses between fights but have found that is
not the case with loading averaging a very tolerable 5 seconds.
Of course you look at a fighting game and don't really see a deep
gaming experience like on par with a RPG. Well that's not the case
here, You can unlock each characters movies to start and then with the
gold you in earn in game you can customise your characters to make them
look unique. There are also Tekken Bowl and Command Attack which are
pretty fun short term, in the case of Command Attack can prove very
useful to the master in waiting. Practice mode is very useful to learn
all the moves and spar with any character of your choice. The dojo mode
gives you a chance to boost your chracters rating by beating everyone
in the dojo and progressing to the next one. Another way of boosting
ranking is just going to arcade mode and playing with people similarly
ranked to you with the chance of promotion every so often (I have found
it is about 10-11 fights to each promotion fight)
I think a special mention should go to the game sharing option, me and
me friends have so much fun wirelessly playing Tekken with the need for
two copies of the game. The option to create a ghost from your game
data is a fantastic idea and download ghost packs even more so. I have
downloaded many ghosts and they are just way more challenging than
anything the CPU can offer up.
This truly a special game, the sheer variety of characters practising
REAL martial arts means it takes while to master a character but is
truly rewarding. It has many game modes and the Ghost and Dojo options
add a real lease of life to this game. The sounds and music are great
with some quite splendid graphics. Anyway anyone with a PSP MUST own
this game you shall not be disappointed.
