- Joined
- Aug 20, 2000
- Posts
- 60,434
Soul Calibur should crossover Sam Sho 64 II and bring in Amakusa, Enja, Earthquake, and Gen-an.
Sadly, DoA is destined to be Fisher Price Virtua Fighter with embarrassing real doll titillation for lonely weebs until the end of time.
As for Tekken, the goofiness has always been part of its charm to me. The more recent Final Fantasy games are what happens when inherently stupid Japanese shit takes itself too seriously. Tekken tries to balance the melodramatic ridiculousness of its core story (people with stupid hair being repeatedly thrown in to volcanoes) with dumb shit like bears and sumo wrestlers and pro wrestlers in tiger masks. Not sure how Bob or the robot girl are any more ridiculous than Kuma or Roger or the sumo wrestler or Angel. Seems pretty well in keeping with Tekken's history.
Taking notes from VF and borrowing aspects from its art direction and gameplay is what got me into DoA5. The initial direction was good, with more emphases on martial arts and less on sex (it still had mild T&A stuff going on, but it was subtle). Even the pre-release builds had smaller tits lol. Adding the critical stun system and incorporating some VF mechanics into its fluid and dynamic gameplay made it both fun and deep. I actually ended up liking it more than VF. My only grip was the female / male ratio in the roster. I think the free-to-play version offers more characters now. If you have a good internet connection and willing to give it a try, we can give it a shot online.
I used to like the goofiness in Tekken too, until it became dominant in TTT2. My ideal art direction in a fighting game is one that concentrates on fist to fist martial arts as a core, and then have the other aspects revolve around it (whether its super powers, comic-relief, T&A or whatever), not the other way around. Not asking for Shakespeare material here. Just a general good art direction and setting. My main beef with T6's roster was with Lars, Lilly and the robot girl, which seemed to be inspired by anime as opposite to martial arts characters. Bob was alright. The new characters in T7 are cool too, except Chloe (IMO of course)
Generally speaking, I feel some aspects in the series didn't evolve much, especially the animations and stage designs. Again, T7 is a step forward on this regard, but I believe it still needs some more work to make it feel fresh.
Edit: One more thing I forgot to mention that I feel hurt the series: lots of characters with similar movesets (regardless of how different they play)
I haven't spent any significant amount of time on anything DoA since 3 so I would have to take your word that the changes made in 5 were significant enough to change what I've always felt was an incredibly basic 3-way guessing game that is, at its core, just a simpler version of what Virtua Fighter does much better. I did hear from multiple people that 5 actually made a couple of interesting changes mechanically but the plastic, real-doll look of the characters is pretty much a guarantee that I'll never play DoA. I play anime games and even I think that shit is embarrassing. I also don't play VF though so my chance of playing a lesser VF that emphasizes empty titillation is pretty much nil.
I think you put too much credence in to a Tekken that never really existed. Your prerogative, of course, but I think Lars is just another layer on to the stupid volcano-chucking part of Tekken (his hair isn't any more ridiculous than Heihachi, Jin or Kazuya's) and Alisa and Lilly are just the next iteration of the ridiculous/comic relief part of Tekken (Dr. Bosconovitch, Yoshimitsu, Paul, Xiaoyu, Kuma/Panda, etc.).
In general though, I agree. T7 seems like they're finally making significant changes to the base mechanics of the game for the first time since T4 but I doubt Tekken will every really be my thing. I just don't generally enjoy the game's meta, the chicken blocking and the emphasis on guessing right on low/mid mixups in the neutral.
Also, find me a game that doesn't have a lot of characters with similar movesets and I'll show you a game with a small roster. Mostly.
The gameplay isn't always bad, but from what I've seen of T7 its kind of a letdown. Like, it almost looks like Tekken 5 would be more fun to play or something. Wasn't a fan of the "dynamic stages" which really just turn games into really stupid reflex stories or w/e. I watched a playthrough and the whole thing was a mess and I had zero interest in playing it myself. The thing that happened with Tekken is they lost some crunch to their story and they diminished in style. Just compare the costumes, personalities, story arcs of Tekken 3 to any of the other games. Tekken 4 was sort of interesting storywise but you could see it start to fall. When Tekken 3 came out we were shown a realistic world of corporations, fighting, and some very unconventional mythology (Aztec fighting god Ogre was a neat supplement I think). The characters had really good costumes, the music went with the atmosphere, it just made everything about Tekken BELIEVABLE, as was the whole point in the game in general, a 3D martial arts based fighter.
It just seems to me that the tired bullshit between Heihachi and Kazuya should have stayed fucking dead and never come back. I dont know how present it was in Tekken 6 but it was the same fucking garbage in Tekken 5, shitty new characters included.
Its a fan service game and this is a fan service DLC.