Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

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Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable.

Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo.

Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes.

And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks.

The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments.

Idk, I thought it was cool

Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly figure out how a character plays by taking one glance at their movelist. The funny thing about this is that Tekken hardly has any motion inputs, which is what most casual players are intimidated by when picking up fighting games.

You know I find that funny. When I want to mash in tekken I just remember each button corresponds to a limb. If I want to do the thingy that uses both legs then press the two leg buttons with a direction. If I want to do a left right left combination I press left right left punch in order. You can mash around with a character to see where it leads you to get really good basic understand imo.

But if you've played another fighting game before, Tekken feels clunky as hell. If you don't know all of your character's common strings, you quickly find yourself in situations where you're just stuck in move recovery for ages. There isn't a common design pattern of making every stopping point in the string feel natural.

I think that in contrast to Soul Calibur, this happens because the attacks are so fast. Watching for every string to stop at every move makes block punishing too hard in Tekken, if everything in the string was around the same level of frame disadvantage on block. Soul Calibur, by contrast, has most moves enough slower that you can identify the string ending in time to block punish when possible. But as a side effect, attacks in Soul Calibur can recover when they look like they recover. (For the most part. There are always weird exceptions.) So as a result, even when you don't know the game, attacks feel far less clunky than Tekken.

Combine that with Tekken's really bad movement (until you learn the mechanics that exploit the way input is handled), massive move lists, and very little input portability between characters, and you get a really frustrating experience that's mostly unique to starting to play Tekken.

This is exactly what I meant.

Tekken is easy to win for a button masher. Once in a while, a button masher will beat a top-tier opponent. In SF/MK, a button masher has zero chance of winning against a top tier opponent. The skill curve is much steeper.

What are you talking about? Tekken is basically Knowledge Check: The Game, and the very first level of knowledge check (df+1) is going to be completely unbeatable for someone that doesn't know how to respond. In Street Fighter, you can guess right and jump over a fireball 6 times in a row and win.

Say what? Jump over a fireball and you eat an uppercut. Unless a beginner can throw a fireball or another countering special move, they have no chance. Tekken's knowledge check only applies if you know everything about every character. If you don't, a beginner can simply surprise you. Tekken is also prone to juggles and rushdowns and highly damaging combos generated by pressing just one button repeatedly (Hwoarang? Eddie?). This is coming from someone who has played every SF since SF 2 and every Tekken since Tekken 2.

> Jump over a fireball and you eat an uppercut. Unless a beginner can throw a fireball or another countering special move, they have no chance. > Tekken is also prone to juggles and rushdowns and highly damaging combos generated by pressing just one button repeatedly (Hwoarang? Eddie?).

Or, just preemptively jump earlier and get lucky? The neutral game in Tekken is much more complex and those are all, AFAIK, unsafe strings that will get you blown up. Combine that with the fact that tekken is 3/5 instead of 2/3 by default, and you're never going to win a game against someone that's competent if you don't know what you're doing.

> This is coming from someone who has played every SF since SF 2 and every Tekken since Tekken 2.

I'm a fairly competitive player in the games I focus on: I consistently make it out of EVO pools, and take games off of top players. I haven't played much Street Fighter since SF4, but I can still take games off of good players just playing basic guessies. I've actually put time into Tekken, and the defensive responses are all nonsense, and if you don't know them, you will just eat shit until you die. No button masher is going to be able to respond to Kazuya 50/50ing them with hellsweep and ff3, because the response makes no sense (step to his left??) and is not even a button you can mash.

Knowledge checks can work against somewhat experienced players - there are so many moves in Tekken that you can be completely overwhelmed by a masher, since you will face stuff you've never seen before. Street Fighter is a more compact game and you are less likely to be surprised. What will a masher do, spam DI and jump-ins? You've seen it 1000x already.

It does not apply to top-players, obviously, but for players in the middle of the distribution curve Tekken can be hell.

Eehhh.. Tekken is far larger but that doesn’t mean random playing will result in sufficient surprise to win.

Thanks for warning me on Tekken. I was really digging the character design and all in the upcoming Tekken 8 but given I possess dexterity of a 10 year old, I should probably skip it and fighting games in general.

Dexterity is not the issue. For Tekken it’s just knowledge and experience. There’s a ton to learn and practice. It’s huge. Much higher than stuff like street fighter. And I’m not talking about fancy tech. I mean the basic controls and move lists. You will not likely get to a point where you know everyone’s moves.

The reason to play fighting games is strictly that you like the idea of honing the skill and playing competitive 1v1 matches to improve. Progression and reward is pretty different from other genres in this sense.

I wouldn't consider myself to have good dexterity at all but have been able to play fighting games and work my way up the ranked ladder. I'd say if Tekken 8 looks cool, give it a try.

The main problem with Tekken is that it doesn't really document its systems with tutorials or a manual. Fortunately, YouTube will teach you more than enough. Tekken also tends to reward legacy knowledge more than most fighting games, so you'll probably find that Tekken 7 tutorials get you farther than you expect.

Tekken 8 just released a free demo on PS5 (comes out on other platforms in a week). Try it out. You might end up liking the game.

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