Tekken’s clearly got a deep combo system – wandering into the training mode shows some massive combos that I will never be able to pull off – but that’s the thing.

The cat-and-mouse strategy of Dead or Alive 5 was highly strategic. Having come to grips with the excellent counter system of Dead or Alive 5, I find it hard to play any fighting game that lacks the ability to interrupt enemy combos. In terms of the game itself, I also have an issue with the lack of a dedicated block button. The Nintendo character costumes that are a bonus in this version of Tag Tournament 2 are a nice addition, but only as a novelty, and more groan-worthy silly than amusing.

My Wii U activity log says I’ve spent around 35 hours in the game, and I have a vague impression that I kind of like Asuka, and that’s about it. It allowed for a great deal of customisation and helped contribute to a game where I could have favourites (Bayman, Hitomi and Brad, BTW). At risk of drawing ridicule, the bikinis, bare-chested men, maid costumes and various other revealing costumes of Dead or Alive were a perfect humourous complement to the flowing dresses, the karate uniforms and more serious attire that players had access to. The costume system also contributes to a painful lack of personality in the game. On a purely mechanical level it works, but the characters have less genuine personality, and the action is less cinematic as a consequence. Tekken feels more like the arcade fighter with chunky character models and combos that string together nicely but a clunky movement system between them. To compare to Dead or Alive 5 again, each character in that franchise has a distinctive look and a fluidity of motion that is only possible by dedicating a lot of development time into each and every one of them. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 has then made me realise that I prefer my fighting games to have smaller rosters, with more care put into each individual character. A boxing kangaroo paired with a half-American Indian, half-Asian looking woman is really stretching believability even by the standards of fighting games. While I can fully appreciate that the story is about the last thing that’s important to a fighter game, a sense of continuity is far more important, and by that I mean that the characters need to look like they at least belong to the same game. There’s no sense of story or continuity amongst characters, either. There’s multiple joke characters when one would have been enough. It’s a bloated roster with parents, brothers, and all kinds of other weird relationships going on. To put it brutally frankly, there are too many characters, and too few personalities. The first problem for me with this game crops up almost instantly – the character select screen.

Tekken tag tournament 2 reviews