The problem with this game is how damage is done. A lot of offense is safe and not difficult to pull off, and there’s a good handful of Tekken characters who basically make you guess which way to block. Sometimes the visual information you get on which way you should block is not actually true, which leads to people complaining about getting “swept by an overhead” or whatever.
This leads to a game where you get in on the other guy, and start running pre-practiced offense with the intention that he’ll block wrong. Or in cases of some characters like Hugo, with the feeling that there’s nothing the other guy can do about it. Consequently, there’s a lot of ways for the losing player to feel like they’re getting punished a lot for a relatively minor mistake. “I blocked wrong once, there’s goes half my character!” Throws are horrible and some options like standing jab, mixup combos, and crossups are really good. So you never get the feeling that you’re interacting on any kind of mental level. You’re just running your offense and trying to get the other guy to guess wrong once.
Of course 3s has really big damage off small hits as well. But there’s never any mystery as to how it works and it’s easy to understand your situation and what can kill you, and so you can manage risk. If you get half your life taken away by Chun it’s because you weren’t blocking down. Everything in each matchup springs from basic information like that because the rules are universal/make sense, and the animations aren’t ambiguous. They game clearly conveys to you what the other guy is doing. You don’t have to guess whether that move was a crossup, or what direction you should’ve blocked.
That combines with the timer issues and long animations to make a weird mess of a game. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a lot of rounds go like this:
Zoning for the first 20 seconds
one dude gets in on the other, mixes him up and confirms off the hit for a ton of damage
keeps pressure on as long as it’s safe
once the game returns to a neutral state (if ever) the player who did the damage earlier and got a life lead retreats across the really long stage, activating moves with long animations when necessary to help run down the clock. the other guy frantically chases him down and throws out desperate fireball supers, all the time thinking about how he lost this round because he blocked wrong once.
if that seems like an unfair read of this game, lemme know. but that’s been my perception from stuff I’ve played as well as watching the pros play in the CC tournament and various other places.
(I know this will never happen)