Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
Ever since I first laid eyes on the original Tekken at an arcade in Florida in 1995, the series has been a favorite of mine. What first hooked me was seeing Michelle Williams hit a fisherman suplex – a pro wrestling move rarely seen in gaming form by that point and never as smoothly-animated and what kept me glued to it was the pro wrestling-influenced King. As time went on, both Tekken 2 and especially Tekken 3 smoothed out the gameplay a lot to the point where it flowed a lot like Virtua Fighter, but had more impact in its strikes. Tekken Tag Tournament holds a special place in my heart because it was the first time an entry in the series blew me away graphically thanks to its PS2 port.
The original arcade release of Tekken Tag Tournament was a nice refresh because the key to arcades at the time was ensuring that players always had something new to play. With a fighting game, you would see a lot of iterations on the same concept, but with some retooled mechanics. The entire Vs. series came about due to King of Fighters showing how popular team-based fighting games could be and the Vs. series took that to a new level – but it wasn’t a concept we’d seen for polygonal fighters. Virtua Fighter’s comparably small roster didn’t make a ton of sense for a team-based game even with it getting one in VF 3tb, but Tekken’s massive roster of both sheer number and types of characters available made a lot of sense.
There you could have fast-paced grapplers like Armor King and especially King mix it up with quick characters like Hworang or Lee and really try out a variety of different combinations. I started out preferring a King/Armor King mix and then shifted to King and Paul Phoenix to have a lot more blunt force damage being done with Paul’s special attacks. They could take a while to wind up, but landing them dealt a ton of damage and King was the the best at starting off an attack chain and then sending someone into mid-air to crush them with various holds mid-flight.
The core game is very much the Tekken 3 engine with a tag team mechanic, but the gameplay flow was faster than Tekken 3 thanks to the tag mechanic keeping the action even faster than it was before. Being able to start an air juggle with one character and then finish it off with another character, with a fresh health bar for the new partner, added a lot of strategy to the core fighting action. Being on higher-end hardware on consoles had a lot of benefits as well, including a higher polygon count and a more consistent framerate.
As a game, it evokes a best-of compilation without quite being that as most characters from prior games are present beyond Tekken 3-only characters and that’s partially due to this being a non-canon game, so you can have characters that died in prior games here as a special guest appearance and enjoy them in an all-new entry for the first time in years. At the time, it was the smoothest-playing experience in the series and even over 20 years later, it’s held up nicely in both its regular PS2 release and the updated PS3 re-release as a part of Tekken Hybrid.
Tekken Tag Tournament kept in a lot of what made prior games great without losing anything on the PS2 side of things because that version brought in one-on-one fighting for those who wanted that and a round robin mode of sorts with teams of up to eight fighting it out and offering the possibility of having to defeat eight foes back to back in succession without a loss. The addition of Unknown as a more fully fleshed-out character in the PS2 version wound up adding to the lore of everything as that character also served as the final boss in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
The PS2 version added in not only graphical refinements, but also one of the greatest secondary modes in gaming history: Tekken Bowl. This bowling game is something I’ve come back to over the years in Tekken Tag and later made a return as DLC in Tekken 7 much to my delight with revamped mechanics and an even larger, more absurd roster. One of the greatest things about Tekken Bowl is the presentation of bowling over Heihachi-headed pins not only with regular human characters, but with a bear in Kuma and Panda. The goofy roster adds so much charm to the game anyway and it gets even funnier when you throw bowling into the mix.
It’s rare that a sub-game would ever have a chance to outshine the main game, but Tekken Bowl nearly did that with Tekken Tag because of how much fun it is. It’s one of the best games of virtual bowling ever and for its time, things like the reflections of the lane with a suite of lighting effects were jaw-dropping in 2000. Namco also went all-out when it came to animating everything because they did have to create all-new animations for every character bowling, the background characters and create basically a whole bowling game in another game. The overall value that this mode added was huge because it could easily act as a gateway game within a game – kind of like how Super Monkey Ball’s sub-games had an appeal beyond the regular gameplay.
The overall best way to play Tekken Tag Tournament now is to enjoy the PS3 version as a part of the Tekken Hybrid physical release, which came with a Tekken Tag 2 demo and a CG movie alongside an HD remaster of the PS2 version of Tekken Tag Tournament. It has sharper textures and runs great at higher resolutions while still keeping the core PS2 art style intact. It still plays like a dream with the Dual Shock 3 and it’s surprising that it didn’t get a PS4 release as well given that so much work already went into getting everything up to snuff for HD resolutions – but I thought the same thing with the Sly Cooper Trilogy and the rest of Sony’s first-party HD collections and they seemed to be happier just re-releasing them via the PS2 software backwards compatibility in some cases. Still, for a game that’s 23 years old, it’s incredible how well every part of Tekken Tag Tournament has aged and it’s still a must-play.
