Tekken 2
PlayStation
Nostalgia Factor:
Growing up, I was never a huge Tekken fan. In the 16-bit era I enjoyed games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. When things shifted to 3D I became a fan of the Virtua Fighter series. Although I had heard Tekken was good, I was a big time Sega supporter and never really gave Tekken too much a shot out of sheer stubbornness and loyalty to the Sega brand.
The most I ever played Tekken was on a PlayStation demo disc where the game was featured. You could only choose from two fighters, and the disc only let you engage in a fight or two before saying "thanks for playing, now buy this game" and sending you back to the main menu. Even with these limited options, I still played this demo quite a bit, marveling at the game's CGI introduction and hoping that I could unlock hidden characters and battles if I played around with it enough. That never happened.
I lost interest in fighting games somewhere around this time, and I never bothered to give the Tekken series another look until 2013 when I downloaded Tekken Revolution for the PS3 and played around with it for a couple weeks. The game was available for free on the PlayStation Store, otherwise I never would have given it a second look. I played just long enough to unlock all the game's trophies and then I deleted it from my hard drive forever.I have not played another Tekken game since. I probably never would have returned to the series again if one of my coworkers didn't loan me their copy of Tekken 2 for the original PlayStation so I could review it for my blog. I figured why not? I am always appreciative when people give me games to review, so I accepted it and gave it a shot.
Not really being a big Tekken person growing up, I came into this with an open mind. But it is no big secret that fighting games are not one of my favorite genres. In fact, most fighting games I have reviewed for this blog have gotten terrible scores from me. Would Tekken 2 break the curse?
Story:
Without an instruction manual, it is really hard for me to tell you much about the story of this game because absolutely nothing is explained in-game. When you first fire up Tekken 2, there is a brief two-minute introduction video set to music where it shows a bunch of the fighters doing random things.
When you beat the game with any of the fighters, you get a quick 10 to 20 second long ending sequence for each of the fighters. But again, these don't tell you much about the story of the game. One character takes a motorcycle ride, but finds his path cut off by a rock slide. So he gets off his bike and punches the rocks away and smiles at the camera. Credits begin to roll. Another character gives a flower to a little girl, only to be destroyed by a satellite blast from outer space. Another character throws someone into a volcano.
Do any of these endings explain anything? No.
Gameplay:
Forget about this game's storyline, and let's move on to more important things. Mainly: is it any fun to play? It is, actually. I had my doubts coming into this game, seeing as how much my opinion has soured on fighting games over the last several years. But I had a decent time playing this.
If you have played any fighting game ever, you should have a pretty good understanding of the game's basics. You're presented with a screen where you select your fighter. You can fight against a friend one-on-one, or you can play through a couple of different game modes. The main single player mode of this game is arcade mode, where you engage in a series of fights against the game's characters.
Once you've made your way through all your opponents, you fight against the game's final boss character: Devil. Who this Devil is, why you're fighting him, his relevance to the game's story... I have no idea. Like I said, I didn't have the game's instruction manual and literally nothing about the story is explained in-game. It is what it is.
Once you beat Devil, you watch your character's ending sequence, followed by the game's credits. Back to the title screen you go. A few other game modes include survival mode where you have to beat the whole game with one life bar (yeah no), time attack, and team battle. I passed on all of these game modes. Again, fighting games are just not my thing. Arcade mode was enough to suffice for me.
As far as Tekken 2's fighting mechanics, the game is pretty fun to play. Combat is less about fireballs and projectiles like other fighting games of its era and is instead more based on actual martial arts. The characters are diverse and have their own unique skillsets. What I like about this game is that all of its moves and button combinations can be found by hitting the pause menu. No more fumbling around, trying to luck into discovering each characters' move sets. It's all right there laid out for you.
Arcade mode can be completed in approximately 20 minutes or so depending on how good you are. My first playthrough took me a bit longer as I was still getting used to the game's controls. Subsequent playthroughs were a lot shorter. With each playthrough I noticed hidden characters being added to the character select menu. If this was 1996 and 14 year old me had rented Tekken 2 for the weekend, I am sure I would have kept playing until I unlocked them all, but that didn't happen here.
I played through the game about five or six times before I called it a wrap. Yet again, fighting games are not my thing and I had absolutely no interest in playing any of the other game modes or seeing all the endings. I can only do the same repetitive thing so many times before losing interest.
Graphics:
I grew up playing games that looked like this, so I have absolutely no problems with Tekken 2's graphics. I remember how cutting-edge this game was when it first came out. I still think it looks pretty good! It's not one of those games like the original Mortal Kombat that has aged so poorly to the point where it is almost unplayable. This game is very playable.
The characters looks good (if a bit blocky) and the scenery and backgrounds all are very colorful and fun to look at. Sure, this game probably looks awful by today's standards but I don't care about today's standards. I think this is a fine looking fighting game.
Sound:
This game sounds really good too. The music to the intro video is catchy and fun. Each stage's themes are very nice and perfectly fit what the game is trying to do. I have no complaints about the sound effects either. For a 90s fighting game, everything sounds exactly as it should, if not better.
I guess my only gripe would be that there isn't really a memorable music track that sticks in your mind, nothing that you hear and instantly think: Tekken 2! To this day I still remember the music from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games that I have barely played in the last 20 years. I just played Tekken 2 a few days ago and I already can't remember most of its music. In another 30 days I won't remember any of it.
Overall:
I've said it many times already and I'll say it one more time for posterity's sake: fighting games are not my thing. I can't stress that enough. That said, I still had a relatively good time with Tekken 2. I didn't like this game so much that I would ever spend more than two or three hours with it, and in fact now that I'm done with the game I will probably never play it again. But considering my disdain for the genre, the fact that I didn't hate this game is quite impressive.
I realize that this game was revolutionary for its time. The graphics, the sound, the cutscenes, the presentation: all of it was top-notch for the 1990s. I would have loved this game as a kid and probably would have spent countless hours trying to unlock all the characters, while poring over the meaning of all their endings.
Present day Dan, however, doesn't have much use for this game. It's an interesting relic, and it is fun to play and look at just to see how far things have come. And the game does a lot of stuff right, too. The controls are nice, the characters and their styles are varied and diverse. The fact that the game doesn't hide each character's move list from you makes it easily much more accessible than most fighters of its era.
But now that I am done with this game, I am likely never going to play it again. And I won't miss it either. This doesn't mean I hate the game or that I dislike it. In fact, its final score is probably higher than it should be considering my thoughts on the genre as a whole. But I can't deny Tekken 2's impact on the fighting game genre, nor can I ignore how well-crafted of a game it is. I recognize that this is a really good fighting game, even though it is not necessarily my cup of tea.
Final Score:
B-
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