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Comment by SliceOfWaifu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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