Take Alisa, for instance. She lack good strings, she’s purely a turtle/defensive character. She lack tools and resource to maintain pressure; she lack mix-ups - ie, she doesn’t even have “2 or 3 variations of 50 strings”.
How about knowing the game beforehand, instead of making such silly assumptions?
I mention 50 characters, and you retort with Alisa?
Look, albeit a slight exaggeration the fact of the matter is there’s a huge time investment before one becomes familiar with each matchup. Huge roster aside, each character just has too many moves to get familiar with.
You may have time for it, but not a lot of people (older crowd) have all that time to invest in learning the game between work and what not.
Ok then. I’ll list way more characters who lack said strings that you’re claiming to be a problem:
Alisa, Roger/Alex, Ganryu, Jack/P.Jack, Lili/Sebastian, Jinpachi, T.Ogre, Feng, Kuma/Panda, Wang - on top of my head.
Said characters don’t rely on a strong mix-up or strings to net any kind of advantage.
Outside Alisa, Ganryu, Roger/Alex and Jinpachi, I know pretty much only the basics of the characters I mentioned - and this is pretty much enough to a basic level of play. Character match-up comes after this to enrich any player’s knowledge.
That Tekken all along have something for both casuals and hardcore players alike? That most moves are design to cater for each? That those flashy moves that are not really necessary on competitive play is what makes casuals fall in love with tekken? That steve’s dempsey roll made me main steve and become serious at Tekken despite how hard he is?
P.S. Steve is the first and the true HnI tribute. Dudley can’t com close.
“Honest” means it takes SKILLS to win. Not ultras, x-factor or any noob-friendly mechanic. If you lose, YOU SUCK. That’s honest fighting.
And Tekken doesn’t have to take much time in a day to practice. You can master BDC just by practicing 10-15 mins a day, 3-4 times a week or even shorter than that. Skills in Tekken don’t come overnight, they come by regular practice…
No.
Not that I’m bragging but I have school and work too, and babysits on top of that, but I can spend just a little time to play. Look, if you have time to post on the forum, and you still have time to play AT ALL, you got time to practice… The time to practice these skill aren’t time consuming, or you don’t even really bother practicing at all…
Second, again, you don’t need to learn ALL, you just need to learn to ADAPT, play solid DEFENSE and have good SPACING… We KEEP SAYING THAT ALL ALONG… If you still don’t get it, you’re just straight up hating…
@brennan yeah forgot about magic 4s and sweeps… Magic 4s work like b+1s anyways so…
You can’t really make a “tutorial” for each character in tekken, you can play AK as a aggresive WD pressure character, or you can play him like a whiff punish turtle. There’s almost no right or wrong way to play a char, you can be as creative as you want.
That’s why we’re against dumbing down the game. Each character have almost a infinite creative ceiling that can’t be matched by any dumb-down fighter out there, which makes the game one-of-a-kind and fun. Cutting down the movesets don’t promote that.
I find this discussion interesting because back when I was playing Tekken hardcore in the 2, 3, ttt1 days the perception was that Tekken was the casual gamer’s fighting game, easy to pick up and mash out cool looking moves and get some wins. It was basically the perfect mall arcade fighter, especially part 3 thanks to Eddy. It was much easier for a scrub to eek out a win every once in a while than in x-men vs sf or sf alpha. I checked out of the Tekken series after the abomination (part 4) dropped, so don’t know what’s all changed to put the game in virtua fighter territory
It got updates…just very minor ones but the system was beyond fixing after the first few. Kinda like how MK9 is. All Tekken’s got some kind of revision in the Arcades.
A reboot may not even be a mechanical change. It could be just a change in aesthetics. IMO, what got people to play SF4 wasn’t the mashable DPs and such. It was because it was a game that got people’s attention in terms of viewing.
A lot of the friends that I have, who aren’t big Tekken heads, still love the sheep stage in T6. Tekken can be pretty fucking goofy. Putting those ideas in the forefront might be a good way of capturing the hearts of new people.
:eek: Touching on what Purps said, part of the charm of Tekken is that it refuses to take itself too seriously.
You can see the dry humor in some of the characters, some of the moves, some of the stages, and even parts of the story if you go that far into it from an outsider’s perspective. I think making that more of a selling point or a priority would appear, to insiders, as if the series is trying to gimmick its way onto store shelves, as if it had to do that to be a strong game.
I think we can all agree that Tekken stands on its own two feet and, despite what it may have borrowed or stolen from other titles, that it is a totally unique offering within the fighting game market.
Now the question seems to be if Tekken should undergo some sort of transformation on some level to appeal to players who aren’t part of the franchise without having them drop the game within a month because of the learning curve. I think we’ve established that the curve isn’t impossibly steep, but for a fighter from this current generation, it’s up there with VF5 and KoFXIII and it certainly isn’t something you can just jump into.
If you’re talking about something that tells people, “this is a defensive character, this is a pressure character,” I disagree with this, and the reason is because not only can some characters (most, actually) be played in different styles, but at the core of that idea is the notion of telling someone else how to play a particular character; it’s not about the player and how they should be “finding it out on their own,” but rather that players should determine how they want to play a character. Now, if there were an in-game something that focused on characters’ unique tactics (like FC stuff for Ganryu/Anna, stance stuff for Lei/Yoshimitsu, etc.) and how you can incorporate them into your game, then that is something I can get behind 100%. There is nothing quite like having stances or tactics for a character and not knowing what they do or what their properties are (talking from the point of a casual, mind you, so no TekkenZaibatsu for references) and when you’re experimenting with your friends or the CPU you’re just getting smacked in the face.
Something I wanna touch on real quick is that this point of view, while valid in the context of a greater argument, is increasingly becoming the cornerstone of some sort of “Tekken takes forever to learn” mindset. In the opinion of someone who loses to tons of people, sometimes due to strings I’ve never seen or strings I haven’t learned how to beat yet, learning strings is like the least of your worries, honestly. When you get “randomed out” in tournament, it’s very rarely to a person employing tons of different strings and mixing it up each time…it’s more likely that you don’t know the matchup, don’t know a few critical strings, and don’t know any character specific caveats that you need to be aware of (played a Kuma at SJ6 in like a 30 game set with my Asuka and realized about 10 games in that I needed completely different combos because her stuff just did not work on Kuma and I didn’t know that). Yes, knowing strings is important, but knowing the important strings is what’s actually important. You, as a player, need to be focused more on your gameplan, executing it, and preventing the opponent from trying to get their rocks off if you’re sniffing them being mashy.
And honestly, at the end of the day, if you’re worse than me and I know it and you’re just mashing out strings, I will stop blocking taking standing damage from your chip lows and start guessing if I haven’t figured your string out yet and when I guess right, you’re fucked. Random players don’t go into tournaments and mash their way to victory in this game…you can steal rounds, but after a while competitors who are truly inferior to their opponents will just not be able to keep up in a set and their buttons won’t save them. Tekken is one of the few games where when you don’t know how to do something critical and your opponent sniffs it out, you get exposed–this game provides the tools to make you look OMEGA FREE when you’re not on your opponents level.
To me the harsher aspect of learning Tekken has been getting solid rocked and not exactly knowing why. It is discouraging to a new player because your understanding of high mid low game and Oki is limited so you are basically left wondering “Why can I not stand up?” Or “I was blocking high how does that move hit?”
It’s more obvious what you are screwing up on say (yeah I know) SF4 where you can identify that you fell victim to excessive tick throw pressure or you were unfamiliar with a few basic setups.
Sometimes I lose on TTT2 and just go “Damn… What happened?”
See, I’m sceptical about this “no right or wrong way to play a character” thing, I mean unless the characters are all homogenised lumps of “who the hell cares what you pick it’s all aesthetics” then surely they do have strengths and weaknesses and whilst you may be able to play a character with a strong rushdown as a turtle, you’d probably be better off picking a character who may not be as safe on the attack, but has sick punishers?
Just because a character can be shoehorned into any role doesn’t mean they don’t have something they are particularly good for or something they are particularly bad at and it wouldn’t hurt to just see a general overview of that somewhere, we can figure out the specifics later, but it seems like quite a few people could end up hammering in screws because you can do it and it’ll work for a while when there’s a perfectly serviceable screwdriver on the bench nearby.
I mean I may be wrong in my assumption and maybe every character has no particular strengths and weaknesses but somehow I doubt the game would be as popular as it is if there was such little difference between characters.
:eek: It’s not that characters don’t have strengths and weaknesses or that you can play a faux-rushdown with a turtle character.
It’s that their properties of their movesets can be employed differently or you can even dissect the moveset and focus on an area that changes the character completely.
Let’s take Asuka and Jun, for example. These are both defensive characters at their core. With Asuka, I am content to sit back and block/parry/sabaki/reversal all day and let you damage yourself. The interesting thing about Asuka, though, is that for a defensive character, it’s rare for as many of her good moves to be as safe/evasive as they are. If I want to, I can completely drop the slow strings and duckable high/low mixups from her repertoire and completely focus on safe mids, her awesome tracking, safe SS stuff and CH launchers and play her completely rushdown. Now, while my options become a bit more limited when I play her this way, she’s actually very effective–a little predictable (obviously, with fewer options available), but still effective in this role.
Michelle, on the other hand, is purely rushdown. She closes gaps and mixes up pretty well. She has no defense to speak of and has no real way to play passively.
Now, is playing rushdown with Asuka smart? That actually depends on the type of player I’m playing against. Is playing defensively with Michelle smart? Almost never. These are the different dimensions Tekken characters have; some can morph and change depending on the circumstance and some just can’t and definitely fall into an archetype.
That’s good to know, and I’d like to point out that just that little bit of knowledge is tremendously helpfull when it comes to a newer player trying to find out about characters looking at Asuka and Michelle.
I’m aware not all characters will fit into a “I do just this really well” mould, they don’t in 2D fighters either but even something like “Asuka has a good defensive game but can also launch a safe and effective offense with her safe mids and options out of a sidestep and counterhit launchers” is really useful to a newer player, as is knowing that Michelle is a pure rushdown character.
This is exactly the kind of information I’m talking about that seems to just be assumed while people go from talking basic universal stuff to talking about top tens and combos.
Thanks for the Asuka and Michelle information anyway, as I said stuff like that is very helpful to newcomers.
Sure, you can play anyone into any “style”, but with some characters, you’re better playing with their strenghts.
ie, Alisa:
Good pokes, good punishers, good movement. Almost-to-none mixups, awful strings, subpar damage, poor oki options.
With that in mind, one should know that Alisa is horrible at being agressive in a pitbull sense, since she lacks the tools to do so. No wonder that she’s the better turtle character in the game, since you cam lame people pretty easily if you have the basics down.
Now, with Roger/Alex:
Short range, pretty high damage on combos, excellent throw game, good mix-ups, db+3 (unseeable low that juggles), poor pokes, awful tracking, etc.
With all that in mind, one should also see that Roger/Alex is optimal at close-range, being “in your face” all the time to force stuff with their tools. Sure, Roger/Alex can turtle - but they lack range and tracking to do so.
And then we have Leo, which is pretty much a “jack of all trades” type of character - being way above average in everything, lol. So she ends up being more “versatile” to playstyles than some of the cast.
The beauty of Tekken’s roster is the big variety of characters and playstyles. Yes, even with “clones” (just look at Sebastian - he’s DR Lili, which was a pretty different character than current Lili at TTT2).
Again thanks for the information, love playing keepaway and poking but never clocked Alisa as a defensive character, might have to give her a few test runs over the weekend.
Regarding Alisa, when you pick her at the weekend, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
She lacks mixups and strings, while having good movement and pokes (safeness and range, which are key factors to keep spacing).
She also have good punishers (both block and whiff), so whenever you’ll try her, practice her movement and spacing. Once you grasp that, everything is pretty easy.
Plus, take a look on the little snippet that I gave at her thread here (I’ll also work on add more stuff ASAP).
Practice her key moves before the juggles - since knowing how to juggle alone isn’t enough if your gameplan lacks good use of one character’s tools.