Great game and the foundation for a great series.

Tekken is a good game that, in its foundation, is a tournament fighter like many others at the time. What sets it apart, however, is its excellent story with brutal plot that was kind of dark at the time.

It all evolves around Kazuya Mishima, the most iconic and memorable fighter of the series, who is tossed off a cliff as a five-year-old because his old papa, Heihachi Mishima, the leader of the Mishima Zaibatsu family and clan, wanted to test if his son is strong enough to lead the family. Perfectly normal way to determine one’s strength if you ask me. Kazuya survives but is heavily scarred. Filled with hate and a thirst for revenge, he climbs back up the mountainside. To humiliate (and motivate) Kazuya more, Heihachi adopts an orphan called Lee Chaolan and trains him to be Kazuya’s biggest rival.

When Kazuya fell, he literally released his inner demon, a gene that grants him unbelievable strength, fed by rage and hate. He now travels the world, training and competing in various martial arts contests and becoming one of the best fighters alive. Heihachi sees his son develop and wants to test him in the ultimate contest, the King of Iron Fist Tournament. Kazuya blasts his way through the opponents and faces his old man in the final battle. He crushes him and, in an ultimate act of revenge, picks up his knocked-out body and throws him off the same cliff he did twenty-one years ago. Just epic.

The principle of Tekken is simple. Pick one of the eight fighters and start beating people up. You face different fighters throughout seven stages, then a sub-boss, who are clones of your character (but stronger and with slightly different moves), followed by the great Heihachi himself. If you beat the game with each of the eight original characters, a cutscene unlocks and you have access to seventeen playable characters, including Devil, Kazuya’s alter ego. This is basically a costume for Kazuya himself.

The graphics in Tekken are all right for the time. The game is old, but I felt that a little more detail could be added to the fighters, even for the time. Mainly because this is the only aspect on screen to focus on. The historical accurate locations in the background, however, are greatly done. The animations are a little slow and stiff, but hits on your opponent’s land where they need to and are overall not bad.

There is no music, but the sound effects are nicely done. Hits and grunts are on point and satisfying. The final blow sound is epic when you yeet your opponent to the ground.

Although still a simple game, Tekken features a lot of content and for the completionists among us, offers you the satisfaction of unlocking many more characters then the original eight the game begins with. This is a game from the good old days, in which you actually need to work for your content instead of it just being there.

In the end, Tekken is a great game with a solid story and a lot of content. I must admit that it did not age that well because of its slow and stiff movement, but this is because of the time period back then.

It is still a great classic and, of course, the foundation for a great series. Definitely recommend this blast from the past.

Not really something I would ever see myself playing at all, but one day I randomly got the urge to play Tekken. For no particular reason, and I really didn't knew Where To Start Playing A Tekken Game, so by my own rules I just started by the very first game in the franchise.

And well, the very first Tekken from 1994 is, indeed, the very first Tekken from 1994. It's a game definitely of its time and a very primitive 3D fighter, being really closely connected to Virtua Fighter since both titles share the same game designer, but Tekken is pretty much a step in the right direction and was practically revolutionary for its time, for its graphical fidelity in comparison to its smooth framerate, for its fast gameplay and fun combo potential coined its great critical reception. I also want to think they gave merits to it because of its really good soundtrack and honestly fun in-game movies you get at the end of each characters' arcade mode coupled with the creativity of some of the playable characters and their backstories (Only really included in booklets and in summaries since the in-game cutscenes don't really follow a cohesive story).

Looking at the game in retrospect there's a bunch of glaring flaws about it, mostly the stiffness of the movement when trying to engage with a combo or trying to punish your enemy more often than not this'll take a while to actually happen so you can be very vulnerable and then be a victim of a grab attack that'll drain a quarter of your health from one second to another, rounds in this game are so short because of that and most games are pretty much decided from the first few seconds unless you actually clutch up and combo the other person which is a hard task, at least with the AI that very unfairly reads your inputs and perfectly deflects any attack that you do at them, making the only resource you can have to punish them be to bait them into attacking you somehow, it is still pretty difficult.

For the singleplayer completion list, you have unlocking all the "secret" characters which is a pretty easy task just by completing every arcade mode, and then unlocking an alt of Kazuya Mishima being controlled by the Devil Gene by playing a really hard game of Galaga to perfection, which is something I didn't really do but I can imagine how back in the day this was an incentive to pop in the disc every now and then and try to unlock new stuff, so that's cool that there's a couple of unlockables here and there besides only the fighting game.

And overall I don't have much else to say, having played it I was surprised on how in many aspects Tekken has mantained its roots pretty gracefully, this game wasn't short on the visual department and a lot of things in it look very good for its time, and there's also this cool PSX-era cool ass charm the game exudes which is something unremarkable from this era of video games, Tekken isn't an exception. This series of games still kinda rules nowadays, so that's a testament of how beloved the series is and how its original trilogy still kind of holds up.

Yoshimitsu my beloved space Robin Hood...