User Blog:
Are fighting games about to be KO'd?

A friend recently asked me how excited I was about the announcement of Street Fighter X Tekken (and its counterpart Tekken X Street Fighter) at the Comic-Con convention in July. Having had a few months to reflect on this meeting of two of the great names of fighting games, I ultimately concluded that I was indifferent to the news. Why was this? I recall years of my childhood, wasted trying to beat Akuma on Street Fighter Ex Plus Alpha on the PS1 (did I ever beat him in the end?), as well as the glee I felt when I realised how to make Yoshimitsu stab himself in Tekken 2 on the same console.

Naturally, this means that I have affinity for these two franchises, especially since I own Tekken 6 and have borrowed Street Fighter IV for the PS3, and the coming together of these should give me the ultimate fanw*nk moment. However, I can’t help but think about the lack of progress made by both franchises, and generally, the entire fighting game genre in recent times. For me, the genre appears to have stopped, with some developers resorting to adding different features to their games that don’t really add that much to the experience. To prove my point, I will look at some big hitters in the fighting game arena.
 

A big part of Tekken 6 was its Scenario Campaign mode, which was a successor to previous instalments’ Tekken Force mode; a linear third-person, 3-D version of Double Dragon-esque mode where the player takes control of a character to continue the Tekken story. This, however, still feels somewhat tacked on, with the player models in this mode being the same as the ones used for the side-on conventional fighting modes, making the experience feel somewhat jarring at times. As well as this, the same generic thuggish enemies charge at you in the same way in every level, with the only challenge being the number of enemies and varying amounts of power. Coupled with Tekken’s slower-paced engine, the mode ends up feeling extremely repetitive and not as fluid as the arcade mode, making it an experience that is probably best experienced once. I would imagine that Namco wished for this to be the core experience of the game, especially considering the rather questionable decision to have all characters unlocked for use in multiplayer modes from the very start, thus nullifying any real need for the player to engage in the arcade mode. While this may be an attempt by Namco to branch out in the Tekken series and to offer the gamer something different than other fighting games, this kind of mode has now become a staple of the Tekken series, having featured in four different Tekken titles (albeit under different names), and it still has not been polished enough.