Tekken 6 Wishlist

Don't you just love it when a new fighting game is announced? Instead of in-game action that will give you some idea of how the game plays, you get some random cut-scene that hardly relates to the game. I guess it's the same for almost all games, especially when you're dealing with a sequel. It would just be nice to see a bit more of these games when they're first announced. At the very least the developer could provide some details with a press release.

This is how I felt when Namco Bandai announced Tekken 6. At E3 2005 all we got was a brief, completely CG trailer, showing Jin Kazama looking better than he's ever looked. A year later we get a real-time fight scene between Jin, Lily and Hwoarang. I've got close to five minutes of new Tekken footage on my hard drive, yet I still have almost no idea how the game will play. All I really know is the game is slated for a launch window title for the PlayStation 3. I don't even think Tekken 6 should be the next console Tekken, I'd much rather see a console port of Dark Resurrection, but Namco ignored those wants. But not knowing what Tekken 6 will offer doesn't matter for a hardcore Tekken fan, because I'll just tell Namco what I want to see. Now... pay attention please.

Online Play

I know better than most gamers that a fighting game is very hard to get right when it goes online. With the current networking technology it's impossible to play a fighting game online the same way you would play offline due to the always present 2-4 frames of lag. A casual fighting game fan may not see the difference, but any tournament level player will see a significant difference between playing a fighting game online and offline.

With that said, I still want to see online play in Tekken 6. A lot of Tekken fans, myself included, would love to travel around playing the top players in the world, but we simply don't have the time or funds to do so. Online play may not offer tournament level play, but it will offer a wide variety of competition; enough competition to allow a Tekken fan to reach a decently high level of skill. They won't be the best of the best, far from it, but they'll be significantly better than the average fighting game scrub.

Having online play in Tekken 6 isn't enough though. Let's take a look at some of the recent fighters that have gone online. Mortal Kombat: Deception offers one-on-one combat. That's great, but it gets really boring playing the same person over and over, then leaving the room and finding another person to play over and over. Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting did a little better with its Quarter Match mode, allowing four players to get together in a lobby playing winner-stays arcade matches. However, these matches can't be ranked, therefore and all of the best players will prefer the one-on-one ranked matches. Dead or Alive 4 gets it almost right with rooms holding up to 16 players and every match being ranked, but the overall ranking system is more about who played the most games and less about who's actually the better player.

Unfortunately, since Tekken 6 will presumably be Namco's first online fighter, I don't know how much to expect from it. If we get the MK treatment with nothing more than one-on-one combat, I won't be pleased. I'm hoping for some DOA-style online play, but we'll have to see what Namco Bandai has in store for us in a few months.

Mini-Games

Tekken is one of the better fighting games on the market. In the 3D fighting game genre, only Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter can compare to the depth and skill involved in the Tekken games. However, the fighting aspect of Tekken is not the only draw the series has. The mini-games in past Tekken titles have been just as fun as the fighting game itself. Tekken Ball from Tekken 3 and Tekken Bowl from Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken: Dark Resurrection stand out as some of the best mini-games ever featured in a fighting game.

The PlayStation 3 uses Blu-Ray discs, which means a ton of storage space for Tekken 6. While I'm sure a lot of that storage space will be used for the main game, there should be plenty of room to include the most popular Tekken mini-games (Tekken Bowl and Tekken Ball) and give them online play as well. Don't stop there either, provide online leaderboards and maybe even a new mini-game or two.

Customization

Tekken 5 kicked things offer with the ability to customize your character. It was a great start, but the customization was somewhat limited. This resulted in seeing the same customizations over and over again; the same color outfit and the same items added on to the outfit. Namco expanded on the customization in Dark Resurrection, but it's still not uncommon to see the same exact customizations over and over again.

For the first next generation Tekken title, I want to see a level of customization that's completely unmatched. It should take me a week of online play to see the exact same customizations on another character. In addition, your online ranking should affect the items that are available to you. Assuming the online ranking system is done correctly, the better your skills are the more items you will have access to. This would also mean that you would get instant respect when another player sees a specific item on your character. Recognition of that item would automatically give your opponent knowledge that you're a solid player.

Character Count

Tekken: Dark Resurrection features a huge number of playable characters. Don't pull a Tekken 4 on us and cut the number of characters down. I want to see at least the same number of characters that were featured in Dark Resurrection, if not three or four more. The more characters you have, the more variety you'll see in online play (I keep coming back to that online play). In a game as deep as Tekken, even the characters that appear similar on the outside offer very different strategies when you break them down.

If you're having trouble figuring out which characters should stay and which characters should go, I'll make it easy for you. Make sure every character ever featured in a Tekken game is in Tekken 6. The only exception I would give you would be Gon from the home version of Tekken 3. At the very least, how about the return of Alex and Doctor B. from Tekken 3 and Kunimitsu from Tekken Tag? Add those three characters and a couple of new arrivals and you're all set.

Revamping

My last request for a new Tekken is something that many high level players probably won't agree with. I'd like to see Namco completely revamp the fighting engine. Tekken has played relatively the same since Tekken 3. There have been some changes here and there, but for the most part Tekken 4, Tekken Tag, Tekken 5 and Tekken: Dark Resurrection are mere upgrades of Tekken 3. Maybe it's time to start over and give Tekken fans a new fighting game experience. Keep the characters and gameplay depth, but make some drastic changes to the fighting engine so that strategies that worked in Tekken 5 don't work at all in Tekken 6. Make all of the high level players start over from scratch and learn a new game. So long as the gameplay is still deep, most players would probably enjoy a new beginning for the series.