Tekken Arena: well-packaged garbage

When you think of the fighting genre, most likely three names are going to come to mind. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and of course Tekken. I’ve been a fan of the Street FIghter franchise for as long as I can remember, but I’ll be honest, I’ve never gotten into the Tekkens. For whatever reason, I just never gave them a chance. So when I saw that Tekken Arena was available for iOS, and it was free, I was excited to start my first Tekken adventure.

And almost immediately regretted the decision.

What is this mess?

Tekken Arena starts off by having you select one of eleven characters from the Tekken universe. You will then play as this character through the remainder of the game’s story mode. You can change characters, but it costs a good amount of your much-needed gold. But more on the gold later.

After you choose your character, you will head to San Francisco where you start your quest. As you are on your way to work you spot a car that is out of gas and decide to help the driver out by pushing the car. How do you push the car? By simply pressing a button that uses up your energy. No moves. No animation. You just give up some of your energy. You are rewarded with experience and money, but man, what a boring start.

And what’s next for our hero? A woman’s purse has been snatched and you must chase after the thug. How do you do this? By pressing a button that uses up your energy of course! Once again, no animations. No movement of any kind. Just the swift depletion of your energy.

So what is this energy? Simply put, it is one of the game’s many stamina systems, which Tekken Arena uses to encourage in-game purchases. So we haven’t even gotten to the fighting bit, and already we’ve been forced to use up an absurd amount of our allotted play time. Fun right?

Fighter – the fighting = ?

Once you catch the thug, you are able to confront him in battle. This is where Tekken games shine right? Fast action fighting, complete with an expansive library of complex moves. This is going to be good.

Or so I thought. Turns out, Tekken Arena doesn’t use the typical fighting scheme, but has opted for a timing based fighting component. When it is your turn to throw a punch, the game will randomly select your style, and then show a power meter. Once the power meter reaches its peak, you tap the screen and your character will attack. I’ve never been more bored with a game, and it’s only been the first few minutes.

After defeating the thug and returning the purse you complete a series of side quests and follow the story to Tokyo and then India. Here you have more of the same, but the competition gets a lot stronger and you will need to train your fighter to continue progressing through the ranks. This training element is Tekken Arena’s one saving grace. I wouldn’t say that it is fun, but you can use the cash that you obtained from completing quests to level up different aspects of your fighter. These include: Stamina, Striking, Grappling, and Defense. It isn’t much, but it does give you something to do while you wait for your energy to refill.