Fighting games and gripping narratives usually go together like pineapple on pizza: Terribly and no dammit this debate still isn’t over. Point is, you seldom find a fighting game that has a story that makes sense of all the fisticuffs that happen on the small screen. That’s the curse of the genre, but one that developers have recently seemed to able to counter lately. Take NetherRealm for instance, whose Mortal Kombat and Injustice games have actually had superb stories, in a cheesy kind of way.
That’s a pretty decent benchmark to aim for, and one that Tekken 7 is going to try and punch down when it arrives later this year and brings the tale of the original iron fist clash to an end. “Tekken 7 is the first numbered instalment in eight years, so one of the main objectives we had was to actually progress the canon story,” Game Director Kouhei Ikeda said to IGN.
The way we chose to do this was in the story mode, which is one of the main features of the game. The story this time around mainly focuses on the famous face-off between father and son, Heihachi Mishima and Kazuya Mishima. And so this time we’re going to see some kind of conclusion to that battle.
And as people play through that mode they’re going to find that it’s very seamless to go from the cinematics and the CGI straight into the battle. So players are going to feel very immersed in the action. And we realise that with other fighting games, one of the main difficulties that players have is trying to control a character that they’re not familiar with in order to progress through that mode.
So this time we have mechanics implemented to kind of help them out, where there’s more simplified methods of performing certain techniques that are very strong for each character when you’re playing through that mode.
Fair enough. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten my hands on a Tekken game, and I’m looking forward to attempting to introduce Al to the finer aspects of this cult classic franchise. I’m especially looking forward to pissing him when I select Steve Fox and proceed to practice ducking and weaving around him, while humming the theme tune to Rocky when we play. Babbababumbumbumbaumbbumdadadadadadadaaaaaa!
Tekken 7 is out on Xbox One, PC and PS4 on June 2.
Last Updated: February 15, 2017
