With people rightfully slamming the game for its egregious balance and mechanical issues and also rightfully praising the game for its strengths in aesthetics and ambition, Tekken 4 has slowly claimed its status as a black sheep and a cult classic over the years, seating itself as an example of the industry's peak development and experimentation in 3D.
For fighting games, this meant an awareness of a real z-axis, real dimensional depth that allowed for greater movement and possibilities in developing a space. While Tekken and other 3D fighting games (Virtua Fighter, DOA, etc) of its ilk had understood this to a technical and mechanical degree, what did that meant for aesthetic and narrative design?
Tekken 4 feels like a strange glimpse at a hypothetical timeline where Tekken had finally achieved a cohesion in aesthetic design work that breathed a coherent worldview, tone, and sensibility that feels fully formed. Obviously this isn't a novel concept to fighting games to begin with, where aesthetics are judge, jury, and executioner, but how many of them can achieve this level of primal emotionalism and immediacy in its tone and atmosphere, not much less of its characters?
On a merely impressionistic level, Tekken 4's foreboding gloom, laden with cold tones and rather muted, garish lighting and palette, facsimiles of now real mundane places turning into grand fighting stages with deliberate changes in elevation and interior and exterior design that feels lived-in and tangible in its usage of 3D space, a droning techno and drum and bass electronica soundtrack matching its 2000s zeitgeist, mechanical changes meant that now on a basic and primal level, Tekken's fights felt like brawls rather than a structured match, an insistence on pokes and free movement and repositioning meant kill or be killed. Some say this meant Tekken had only pivoted to being "realistic", but perhaps it's better to see it as an evolution to a heightened, stylized reality, where the acknowledgement of a wider world finally becomes the grand stage for Tekken's theatrics on power and balance.
One could mince that for all these achievements, it still means nothing on the notion of actual gameplay, where Tekken 4 is nothing but a noble failure of broken infinites, uneven balance in elevation in terrain, uneven consistency in collisions in walls and obstacles (the pillars!), the list goes on.
Obviously fighting games should be appreciated on a purely mechanical and systematic level, where competitive play really matters. But where does one go if that all fails? Are they doomed to a 9 to 5 loop of combo grinding, frame data, numpad notations, match up learning, and tier lists, mumbling underneath about "yomi" and "unsafe on block"? Maybe that's just how it is. Can you blame them?
For fighting games, this meant an awareness of a real z-axis, real dimensional depth that allowed for greater movement and possibilities in developing a space. While Tekken and other 3D fighting games (Virtua Fighter, DOA, etc) of its ilk had understood this to a technical and mechanical degree, what did that meant for aesthetic and narrative design?
Tekken 4 feels like a strange glimpse at a hypothetical timeline where Tekken had finally achieved a cohesion in aesthetic design work that breathed a coherent worldview, tone, and sensibility that feels fully formed. Obviously this isn't a novel concept to fighting games to begin with, where aesthetics are judge, jury, and executioner, but how many of them can achieve this level of primal emotionalism and immediacy in its tone and atmosphere, not much less of its characters?
On a merely impressionistic level, Tekken 4's foreboding gloom, laden with cold tones and rather muted, garish lighting and palette, facsimiles of now real mundane places turning into grand fighting stages with deliberate changes in elevation and interior and exterior design that feels lived-in and tangible in its usage of 3D space, a droning techno and drum and bass electronica soundtrack matching its 2000s zeitgeist, mechanical changes meant that now on a basic and primal level, Tekken's fights felt like brawls rather than a structured match, an insistence on pokes and free movement and repositioning meant kill or be killed. Some say this meant Tekken had only pivoted to being "realistic", but perhaps it's better to see it as an evolution to a heightened, stylized reality, where the acknowledgement of a wider world finally becomes the grand stage for Tekken's theatrics on power and balance.
One could mince that for all these achievements, it still means nothing on the notion of actual gameplay, where Tekken 4 is nothing but a noble failure of broken infinites, uneven balance in elevation in terrain, uneven consistency in collisions in walls and obstacles (the pillars!), the list goes on.
Obviously fighting games should be appreciated on a purely mechanical and systematic level, where competitive play really matters. But where does one go if that all fails? Are they doomed to a 9 to 5 loop of combo grinding, frame data, numpad notations, match up learning, and tier lists, mumbling underneath about "yomi" and "unsafe on block"? Maybe that's just how it is. Can you blame them?