I'm not going to act like I'm exactly top player status, but I certainly understand high level tekken. My dislike for tekken tag 2 is because I didn't think it was a good competitive tekken. It was too heavily dictated by a bloated cast and bloated movelists full of moves that led to ridiculous combos that lasted too long. It was like a less exciting version of mvc3 where everyone takes turns on their 50/50 launch setups.
This is all on top of keeping the rage system that I despised in 6, only worse.
To summarize:
- Hated the combo system, especially on the walls
- Hated the comeback mechanic of rage (although tag1 had netsu, I found I hated it much more in this game because of the overall damage output)
- One of my favorite characters wasn't fun to play anymore because his play style didn't lend itself well to the system for my personal tastes (King, but they've made him cool in 7 again)
- While not important to the actual gameplay, the customization options and implementation were quite laughable
- It didn't "feel" like a good tekken for me. Personal tastes and all that.
If you are the same k30 that I think you are, then you definitely know what you are talking about in regards to high level play. No need to be so modest.
Disagree. Tekken would've been better off going down the 10 hit combo route and keeping stringed combos, because they gave an opportunity for the opponent to counter. Juggles weren't as bad as they are now in earlier Tekkens, because of the way the opponents would float after a launcher, as well as overall character movement speed. You couldn't chain much more than two flip kicks together as Marshall Law in T2. Everything now is achieved with a quick launcher and then your opponent is largely defenceless apart from an opportunity to techroll sonetimes, if they're lucky. Some of Lee's current juggle strings are ridiculous because his launchers can be so quick.
'First to land a launcher' really isn't the best direction the series could have taken. An expansion of the 10 hit combo system which would provide opportunities to stun at key points in the chain and therefore keep the chain going or conversely opportunities for the opponent to break it, and would've been a much fairer momentum based system.
Also, the command list was always in the game and it was common knowledge that a button corresponded to a limb. The lack of knowledge about Tekken applies to later games, not earlier games, because there are far more mechanics now. Tekken didn't really have many mechanics up to T4.
You, on the other hand, have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here.
In Tekken 1 and 2, launch into like 2 jabs into an ender was well over half life. Don't believe me? The next time you load up Tekken 2, pick Heihachi and do twin pistons, 2 jabs, then twin pistons again. 60% - 70% off of a life bar just like that. Also, those games didn't have sidestepping outside of Kazuya's mist step, so it was pretty much just a game of guessing mid versus low. The series evolved far beyond that by introducing proper sidestepping into Tekken 3, which is really the basis for nearly every mechanic that has carried over into the series today.
Your request to make it a string based game that's about guessing which strings the opponent use is also ridiculous. DOA already has a system based around that. Tekken has always been about movement and positioning to get the most out of your attacks. Turning the game into starting a string and going into "am I going mid, or am I going low?" style offense would turn it into the most boring fighting game out there. The game already has too many canned string mix ups that you need to learn how to deal with as it is. The 10 hit combos are an archaic mechanic that they kept around just to appease your average person that is only interested in learning move lists, but not necessarily interested in really competing at the game. They are just filler. At the very least, they buffed some of them in Tag 2, but as an overall mechanic, 10 hit strings are expired.
Why's that? Nobody really clarifies what was wrong with T4. Sloped stages didn't affect the gameplay, neither did wide stages. It still fought the same. Walled, tight stages were remedied by the grab move (since removed - brilliant), and the wall run kick option as a counterattack. Without bound combos wall punishing was never as bad as it is now. Other than that, a few pillars or telephone boxes just added some humourous physical feedback to the stage. The gameplay was otherwise the same. Auto tracking was removed (wherein upon you recovery you line back up to face your opponent) due to the grab moves and sidesteps allowing you to face an opponent's side, but that was a good thing - and everybody had the pad in their hands to get themselves out of said blindsided spots.
There's a lot of problems with Tekken 4's mechanics. I'll just list the general ones that I know.
- Backdash canceling went bye bye. This was a knee jerk reaction to how dominant it was in the earlier games. Instead of working to implement it intentionally and in a balanced way into the game, like Capcom did way back with combos in Street Fighter, they instead removed it and made a game where you had to stair step by canceling the backdash into a sidestep. This was nowhere near as great of a way to create space, which leads to the next problem.
- Jin. Jin absolutely dominated this game mainly with two moves. 2,1, which he still has in the current game, but in this game it was + on block, and had almost zero pushback. ZERO pushback in a game where backdashing is absolutely crippled. On top of that, he had just frame laser scraper, which was a 3 hit string that would score him an unblockable launcher in the end if you hesitated to do anything for even a fraction of a second after the second hit. Of course, he can just do the regular laser scraper if you try to get aggressive after the second hit. There's other stupid things about this character, but these are two of the stand outs.
- The slopes on the floor very much effected gameplay. There were grounded hitting moves that you could spam on your opponent if they were on the floor and on an upward slope. Paul's d+1 hammerfist for example was free over and over again until the grounded opponent would get pushed off of the slope. There's also lots of other weird semi-infinites that the sloped floors caused.
- The wall system in this game was absolutely fucked. While the slopes gave semi-infinites, the walls, specifically the corners, gave 100% infinites. They also played around with strange ideas like wall techs, and giving every characters a universal push/side switch grab. This system stuck out the most as more of an incomplete idea that should have been in a beta rather than a fully realized idea in the final version of a game. It was much improved in the following games, though still far from perfect.
If you want some examples of the kind of nonsene that happens with the slope and wall system, there's a few in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxDjSxLwE8Q
I'm sure there's tons more with even worse stuff, but I'm not gonna be sitting here digging up 10 videos to further prove my point here.
