When the first 3D fighters came out back in the day, I was really reluctant to give them a chance. The first Virtua Fighter and Tekken just felt far too slow to me.
But that all changed when I played Tekken 2. I remember the only reason I got the game was because it got a good review from most magazines, so I figured that I should at least give it a shot. I played it, learned the 10-hit combos, beat the computer and some of my friends and thought, “I guess this game is alright.”
Then one day one of my homies who had just gotten off from house arrest (who had apparently been playing Tekken 2 NON-STOP) came to my house and played me with his Paul, and destroyed me like 50-100 games in a row. I was dumbstruck. All of those 10-hit strings that I learned proved useless because he would counter them so easily. I remember complaining about how I thought throws were cheap (I still had the old-school SF II mentality), and my friend kept saying that they weren’t because not only could you duck to avoid them, but that you could escape them as well. Mixing up high/mid/low attacks and throws, wake-up games, and so on, was just too much for my 2D fighting game mentality back then. I felt so stupid for thinking that 3D fighting games were slow, when my mind could not keep up with my friend’s attacks.
I remember after that day, I played Tekken non-stop, practicing how to mix-up my attacks, incorporating throws, learning frame rates to know how to counter and punish, and learning what is now referred to as okizeme, because I really wanted to get at least one win against my friend. In training mode, I learned when and how to counter Paul’s bread n’ butter combos, and learned how to defend against his okizeme.
I played him again about a week or two after many sleepless nights (lol, thankfully this was during summer break when I was still in high school) of training, and was finally able to start beating him.
One thing that kept on going through my head was how much of a mind-game Tekken was. The matches against my friend were SO intense, since I kept having to pay attention to my spacing, reading his movements and trying to remember his patterns, and his shit-talking while playing just added to the mind-games, haha. I can honestly say that the 2D games that I played beforehand never seemed as mind-game intensive as Tekken. In the end, I had a complete appreciation for fighting games that employed intense mind-games (especially from the 3D fighters). I mean, I heavily played all of the SF II versions, Mortal Kombats, Killer Instinct, SNK games, and so on before, but it wasn’t until I played Tekken 2 that I finally became a hardcore fighting game enthusiast.
As you can tell, I can’t hate on Tekken, even though I moved onto the Virtua Fighter series with VF4 Evo. Some of things that I dislike about the later Tekken installments (5, DR, and 6) are mainly just the increased emphasis on juggling, which in the end, doesn’t really bother me that much. Many of the characters who were once clones of main characters fighting styles (Anna (from Nina) Jin (from Kazuya and Jun) now have their own fighting styles, and console-wise, the Tekken series has given fans the most bang for their buck (alternate costumes, alternate game modes, story endings, and so on).
