The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/ArhWJKf9rKA

As video game genres age, developers tend to reuse aspects of previous works as a medium to plant their new ideas within, allowing them to focus on creating new assets instead of reinventing agriculture every single time. In the past, there wasn’t a default first-person shooter player controller so many developers experimented with different styles to see what best resonated with their audiences. Nowadays, character controller styles have homogenised after developers discovered what players liked most. This has caused many games to function fairly similarly, but it also leaves re-examination of older attempts in an interesting place. We can expect the roughest examples to originate from a new gaming technology’s introduction, I mean, have you seen movement systems in VR games? Some genres lend themselves to being played with simple controls on a limited controller, but others often struggle to keep things simple. Fighting games, for example, are notorious for requiring complex inputs and precise timing, putting a lot of pressure on the game’s controls. These games are immensely popular, and are often one of the few video game genres that allow those involved in their development to earn continuous revenue from purchases of the next instalments, re-releases, downloadable content, and official partnerships for competitive events. Excessive input delay or awkwardness in execution could spell disaster for any game hoping to establish a competitive scene, risking potentially millions of dollars over a single mistake. In 1995, with the introduction of Sony’s Playstation, 3D rendering video game hardware was entering homes worldwide, signalling the beginning of the race to be the first to publish a fighting game for the new system that took advantage of the hardware capabilities. Shortly thereafter, Namco’s Tekken would solidify itself as the most popular among those first 3D fighters, with its immaculate performance, stylish characters, flexible playstyles, and a surprisingly intuitive control scheme that assigned each of a character’s limbs to its own dedicated button on the controller. 28 years later, Bandai Namco are about to add an eighth instalment onto their Tekken franchise, an entry fans are very excited for after the success of Tekken 7. Inspired by this, as well as my randomiser’s unflinching recommendation, I figured now would be the perfect time to see what all this Tekken stuff is about, and where better to begin than the first game.

Likely to be the biggest hurdle for most is the game’s presentation. Early 3D has undoubtedly aged pretty poorly, and anyone seeking to replicate the visual style of the original Playstation tends to draw inspiration from the system’s later games, as well as taking some technical liberties. Modelling for games was obviously a totally new thing: rendering would have to happen in real time, forcing the models and animations to adhere to stricter optimisation practises than necessary for 3D animation for film. Since the speed of fighting games during the early 90s was picking up drastically, Namco knew that Tekken would have to run well in order to seriously compete. Tekken’s director, Seiichi Iishi’s 1993 project Virtua Fighter was illustrative of this issue. On the Saturn, Virtua Fighter cannot maintain a steady framerate, a flaw that Iishi wouldn’t permit within Tekken. As a result, all of the game’s stages are flat, infinite arenas with a scrolling background to represent the stage’s location. Some of these, like the Fiji stage and the King George Island stage, seem to be hand drawn artworks, while others like Acropolis and Venezia could just be photographs. Neither style is particularly exciting or interesting, and the lack of a stage select option in Versus mode signals to me that nobody at Namco felt strongly about any of the stages either. The stages have been made this way to allow more processing capacity for the game’s character models. The majority of these models are genuinely really charming and characterful, even if I can count the polygons by eye. Of the eight main roster characters, Law’s permanently agape mouth is my only big complaint. Kazuya’s design is iconic and his outfits are great. I like Paul’s sleeveless red gi and square hair, but I don’t care much for the leather. Jack looks surprisingly good considering his exaggerated proportions, and King’s leopard head fits naturally on his model. Nina and Michelle look really good too, though Michelle’s casual outfit is a little bland in terms of palette. She’s also called Michelle Chang despite the Native American themes in her primary outfit and ending animation which is a bit strange. Yoshimitsu completes the eight primary characters, and while his armour looks okay I feel like how he holds his tiny sword seems very awkward. He only ever uses it when a specific command is input, so he could’ve just had it sheathed the whole time otherwise. There are 10 other characters in the game, whose visual designs are a mixed bag; Ganryu is a solid looking low poly sumo wrestler, while Kuma’s model is rough. Poor bear doesn’t even look good in the renders. I can definitely see how people thought this was a guy in a suit and not an actual bear. And there’s also Heihachi’s Grindr profile picture. I understand that P Jack is an incomplete version of Jack, but he looks much more like an action figure than any fictional military robot I’ve ever seen. Wang is this game’s plain old man, Lee is trying to get into one of those K-Pop boy bands with 20 members, and Anna is unfortunately just as bland as Michelle’s palette. The menus in this game are awful. They aren’t particularly pretty, they’re arranged in strange ways, and if the Arcade mode is selected, the player can’t back out to the main menu. The only way back is to reset the game entirely, or pick a character and lose the first fight. Though, I suppose the menus aren’t the main draw of the game.

Fighting games live and die by their controls, and while it has its problems, Tekken’s controls on PS1 are surprisingly solid. Triangle and square control a character’s arms while circle and cross control their legs. Movement and blocking are all performed on the d-pad, the Playstation’s Achilles Heel. The d-pad buttons are brutal. I hate them so much. How many other controllers give you calluses? Movements are mostly done through tapping forward or backward instead of holding the direction down, with subsequent taps triggering different movement speeds. There isn’t any real side-stepping yet, aside from Heihachi changing his angle of attack which doesn’t really do anything except show off that this is indeed a 3D game. As for the controls for the fighting, players hold back to block and can either block high or low. Blocking high leaves the player vulnerable to lows, while blocking low leaves them vulnerable to overheads. Which attacks are lows is pretty obvious, but determining which attacks are overheads is less clear, though fortunately most overheads won’t lead into a combo or a knock down. There are methods to beat blocking outright, but generally the neutral game involves a lot of blocking and repositioning, as both characters try to move into a range to hit their opponent with a move that passes their block, while also avoiding being hit themself. There are a handful of attacks that are truly unblockable, as well as grabs that beat blocking and some other moves that briefly stun a blocking opponent. Fully unblockables are very slow and easily punishable so they aren’t really worth worrying about, but grabs are pretty good when they actually hit. To input a grab, the player needs to know which series of button presses result in the move they want, it isn’t as simple as pressing the grab button. These inputs are often different depending on the character, and the player either needs to memorise all possible inputs or at least have a list of moves open somewhere. The manual lists a handful of special input attacks that each character might have, but it doesn’t include all of them, so I referred to a list I found online. A standard grab input typically uses triangle and square pressed simultaneously which I found easier to press with my index and ring fingers instead of trying to press both with just my thumb. I’m unsure if this is a failure on the game’s part - not using the L or R buttons at all - or the controller’s design but either way I definitely felt the game would play way better on a stick. Inputting the directional components of the special attacks would also be way easier on a stick. Pressing forward, down, and down-forward in sequence is Kazuya’s entire gameplan, and hitting that with a thumb took some time to get used to. The rest of the cast vary in terms of technical requirements that leave a fair amount of space for skill expression, as well as a pathway from simpler to more complex playstyles.

Tekken launched with an initial roster of eight playable characters, but when it was ported to the Playstation players were able to access an additional ten unlockable characters. Those extra characters are all derivatives of the main cast, and are usually unlocked by clearing the arcade mode, though there are two that differ somewhat. Most discussions of fighting game characters often use colloquial language to describe particular character archetypes, though Tekken kind of shirks the normal labels by the nature of the game’s mechanics. There isn’t a Ryu-style “Shoto” character since there isn’t a single projectile in the game. Instead, Kazuya functions more as a 50:50 style character, given that his strongest combo starting tools both require the same input to initiate and only differ when choosing either punch or kick. Opponents have to guess which height is the correct one to block, else they’ll be eating Kazuya’s full damage. Paul, in contrast, hopes to bully his opponent into blocking low with the threat of his incredibly painful two hit combo. Unfortunately, what Paul actually gets from forcing his opponent to block is barely worth worrying about. He can grab, or commit to an extremely risky jump kick to try to get comparable damage to the sweep-punch combo, or he can swing with single attacks. Michelle and Law unfortunately feel very similar to each other, both characters have long one button sequences that deal a hefty chunk on hit, and cause a knockdown. They also both lack a means to stun a blocking opponent, and Law even has trouble hitting most characters after knocking them down. I don’t really understand Nina’s gameplan, but I did finish her arcade mode on the default difficulty relatively quickly. The CPU likes to grab a lot as Nina, but I wouldn’t call her a grappler by any stretch. Even King, who is arguably the closest thing to a grappler in the game, isn’t really a grappler. He has more grab attacks than anyone else, but I found his more standard moves to be just as effective as any other fighter’s. King’s elbow attack also stuns on block so getting in to deal damage is fairly easy, unlike a typical grappler. Yoshimitsu functions similarly to Kazuya in that his main game plan revolves around forcing the opponent to guess between one of two options, except in Yoshi’s case the guessing revolves around whether the second kick is going to come out or not. The fact he has sword swings that are unblockable is entirely irrelevant to anybody picking Yoshimitsu, even the CPU doesn’t try it. They’re just unreasonably slow to start, and Yoshi doesn’t have any moves that’d realistically lead into hitting a sword swing. Jack functions as a keep-away character on account of his massive stature and long arms. The guy just swings normals and most characters have to respect him doing it. Well, most characters that aren’t Jack, which sounds strange but there are the additional characters to mention, a bunch of whom are Jack. P Jack is obviously Jack, Kuma is also Jack, even Ganryu is Jack. Kuma and Ganryu aren’t exact copies, but they use almost all of Jack’s moves. Ganryu’s arms are shorter than Jack’s, but he has a few Sumo-themed moves to set him apart. Kuma, on the other paw, has the longest arms in the game. So long, in fact, that it’s possible to tech-lock a knocked down opponent to death, including hitting them if they don’t tech. It’s super cheap, but I was able to beat the arcade mode extremely fast this way, though doing it as Kuma doesn’t actually reward anything. The only way to unlock Heihachi as a playable character is to beat the arcade mode in under five minutes as one of the original eight characters. On the default difficulty, and using the standard 2 round matches, I couldn’t finish all ten matches in the time limit without taking advantage of Kuma’s tech-trapping, so in order to unlock Heihachi, I had to drop rounds to one per match and learn to actually play as Kazuya. I had been playing as Armour King a lot prior to discovering Kuma since I liked using King’s elbow attack to stun blocking opponents, and then following that up with Kazuya’s powerful uppercut. Both of these moves are present on Armour King so it felt natural. That being said, Armour King most definitely isn’t the best of these unlockable sub-bosses. Lee is Kazuya’s penultimate fight in arcade mode, though he derives most of his attacks from Law. Unlike Law, however, Lee’s kicking string doesn’t have to end. The guy just keeps going. And it can’t be ducked like whenever Law gets swinging. Finally, there was one character that I saw but never managed to unlock. In order to play as the final character, the player needs to perfect the shoot-em-up minigame they can play while the game boots. It's fairly long and, honestly, it isn’t that fun, and any mistake forces a restart. But if you manage it, you can unlock and play as the final character in the game: Devil Kazuya. Who is just Kazuya but purple. What a prize.

Fighting game single player content is always a little thin, and Tekken is predictably rather limited. There’s no VS mode against the CPU, there isn’t a story mode, there isn’t even an easy way to access the shooter game mode without resetting the console. The only option is Arcade mode, which is slightly different depending on the chosen character. Arcade mode involves fighting each of the eight main cast characters consecutively in a random order, with the CPU strength getting slightly higher with each new character. Then, the ninth match is against the chosen character’s specific sub-boss, followed by the tenth match against Heihachi, victory in which earns the player an ending animation, provided they’re playing one of the main cast. Arcade mode as a sub-boss will make their penultimate fight their main cast counterpart. So, Armour King’s ninth fight is against King, Kuma fights Paul, Lee fights Kazuya etc. Heihachi’s Arcade mode is different by randomly ordering the sub-bosses instead of the main cast, before Kazuya transforms into his Devil form for the finale. This is the only way to fight against a CPU sub-boss while playing as a character that isn’t assigned to their main cast counterpart. So if a player wanted to play Ganryu versus Anna, they need to find a friend to play with. Gross. I did find the Arcade mode to be enjoyable, at least, but without a greater goal like a tournament or something, once I made it through a few times as the characters I liked, the game’s content basically ran out of stuff. I couldn’t even do the same Iron Man challenge I did when I played Dawn of War to get more out of my play time. And as funny as some of the ending animations might be, I didn’t laugh every time Kazuya smiled at me.

As a starting point for fighting games, there are plenty of worse options besides Tekken. It lacks a tutorial and it isn’t likely you’ll be able to get many opportunities to play against other people, but the game is simple to understand while also having some hidden depth to explore with the right time commitment. For someone who has put any time into a standard fighting game, there’s nothing really here aside from the historic perspective. All the things in Tekken are things any intermediate player would already be well aware of, even if they’ve only ever played 2D fighters. Aside from some mild juggling techniques, the top end of the first Tekken game isn’t particularly complex. It's impressive, but I think the third game is the landmark of the series for a reason.

At almost 30 years old, Tekken still controls remarkably well, runs immaculately, and laid the foundations for one of the genre’s most beloved franchises. It isn’t as visually revolutionary as it used to be, nor is it the pinnacle of gameplay expression, but for something that was among the first of its kind Tekken is remarkably flawless. In a modern context, Tekken serves as more of a niche tutorial than a competitive platform, but it wasn’t ever that competitive anyway. The character designs are simple, but still mostly great, and the animated endings are still relevant even now. The game is most certainly antiquated and the series will move further away from this basis with each new entry, but if you’ve ever been curious about the origins of an iconic series, Tekken is totally tolerable and definitely has value in retrospect.

Next up, the first multiplayer game I’ve featured on the channel.

Tekken's arcade nature makes it a rough game to enjoy, especially since there are much better fighting games on the Playstation.

Despite all this and the pretty much luck based nature of the game, Tekken has a certain charm that grabs you and with the power of King's grip, holds you until you finish it. Sadly, the game's final boss is another weak point as he is the pretty much the king of unfairness.

I did not like the roster too, as I only enjoyed to play with King and Jack. Others were rather unpleasent, and rough.

Knowing that Tekken is considered a legendary franchise, I believe things will improve for sure.

After his involvement in the first Virtua Fighter as designer and coordinator, Seiichi Ishii went on to design and direct the original Tekken. Which became a competitor to the Virtua Fighter series and for the first game this is honestly fine. I definitely made sure to play on easy so I'm not stuck fighting the same opponents hours on end like I had to suffer through in my childhood, but it's surprisingly snappy and fun enough to play, even if it's not on the level of its sequels. Tekken has a more gritty tone here and the characters just have a bit more sauce compared to Virtua Fighter(I love its characters and the Sega charm personally) which gives it a broader appeal, though for the first game it also has a very strange, ominous vibe and it's clear that Namco was trying to capture something even if it's not fully fleshed out yet.

Playing this without nostalgia is... oof.
My Tekken knowledge is very limited, i only played a single T7 aracade run with King and that's it.
I wanted to play some PS1 fighters and decided to try the first Tekken game out of curiosity... it has not aged very well.

It's not horrible, but it's stiff and not very fun to play. I felt like the cpu never let me do any cool moves (oh yeah, the game has no training mode or movelist so i had to go watch King's movelist on youtube) because it would counter me with their cool huge damage moves so all i did was spam crouching LP (almost always hits them because they want to do big moves) and grabs. It works and it's consistent but it's not fun.

Beating it was worth it just for the ending cutscene, it was so weird and charming i had to go watch all the other endings on youtube.

Not a terrible game and a good starting point compared to the first entries other fighters had, but i don't feel like there's much here unless you're curious or played it back when it was new and have nostalgia for it.

Aonde tudo começou, joguei pela primeira vez num arcade de Mauá em São Paulo.
Julgando somente pelo que joguei na época não era um jogo bom. Dano era altíssimo. Personagens levantavam do chão lentamente e num tempo determinado, fazendo com que certos personagens tivessem um okizeme muito poderoso piorando o problema do dano. O cast era fraco, alguns personagens secretos eram apenas reskins mais poderosas dos personagens que já apareciam na tela, mas no geral uma boa tentativa da NAMCO no 3D Fighting.

Played the arcade version inside Tekken 5.

It really shows its age with immensely outdated graphics and gameplay. You can't sidestep, so it's technically still a 2D fighting game, mix-ups are natural combos and the roster (especially King) is terribly unbalanced. All considered, it still is the birth of the most legendary fighting game series ever. It has that old school 3D pioneering charm that is really hard to find anywhere else, with a good sense of humour and, dare i say, original approach to a story.

Also Kazuya smile at the cliff.