In terms of breaking the mechanics, most guest characters don’t actually do that very much. The devs balance and test for a reason. A guest character breaking the mechanics and being “overpowered” is just an excuse to ignore and mindlessly hate them instead of getting good at beating them like any other character. As for breaking the rules of the franchise lore and character design… I can see that argument being made for a couple of Tekken’s guests. But in general I think they just need to chill and realize that rules like that don’t really actually exist. Every character in any game exists entirely because they devs wanted to do it and thought it would be cool. There are no rules, those are all things we came up with to help with speculation/criticism. And it’s only a matter of time before every single one of those rules gets broken because creativity cannot function under strict regulation.
Tekken 7
I don’t like fighting Rash. But does he really break more “rules” than other characters? Sadira has been “outside” KI since season 1 and Tusk can pretty easily take a whole life bar without ever entering combo state. Almost all fighting games with more than 8 characters have some that break the mold. People just get fixated on it when it’s guest characters.
I still don’t get why people complain about Rash and not Arbiter or RAAM. The KI developers spoke endlessly about how they loved battletoads and that was the place they’d get their first guest character from. Arbiter and RAAM were the corporate mandates. Why hate the passion project done out of love for the series, when you have two characters who literally exist in the game solely to advertise.
I know what you mean. It’s just when I see people say the words, “NOT TEKKEN,” it kinda just baffles me a bit because they clearly aren’t. I think they did a good job balancing them too. Especially getting them to fit with the button scheme.
Mostly because Arbiter and Raam are dark and menacing while Rash is goofy. The psychology of it is pretty amazing because I think Arbiter and Raam are just as exceptional in terms of gameplay. But people seethe when they get dunked by a cartoon amphibian with a dancing taunt.
That’s a semantic argument I think. All rules are constructs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist/are not enforceable. In KI the devs have mandated that all characters shall engage with the combo game to some extent, shall be able to shadow counter and be shadow countered, etc. just because a rule is a somewhat arbitrary construct doesn’t mean it therefore doesn’t exist. KI lets various characters avoid or complicate the rules in certain ways, but the core foundation is adhered to, and I think that’s to the benefit of the game. And as can be seen in the huge variety of characters and archetypes in the game, I think it’d be a serious lift to argue that adherence to an overall design vision stifled creativity.
I don’t know that Rash being a giant anthropomorphic frog helps his case, but I think it’s much less of a factor than you seem to. Rash doesn’t break many game systems (he’s got some hitbox things that are way outside their visual cues, which is super rare in KI), but he does complicate one of the core ones. He avoids the combo game better than most, and probably among the jugglers has the most difficult to spot in-air options. I think you pointing out Sadira as hated kind of adds to my point. Rash’s air mobility (in a game where 90% of the cast fights grounded) is felt as a particular character not playing the same game as the rest, and that’s where the anger comes from. Sadira was the same. Raam isn’t hated because he has to muck around in the dirt with the rest of us poor schlobs, and Arbiter was hated when he had jumping gun loops that did 40+% with a single completely ambiguous one-chance. It ultimately comes down to a player feeling like a character isn’t playing the same game as they are. Breaking core design philosophies (huge damage for one-chances) or giving incredibly strong movement options not available to the rest of the cast are two of the easiest ways to do that. Two characters who weren’t guests who were also hated for these reasons were S2 Maya (huge one-chance damage) and SC6 launch Azwel (who walked backwards faster than some character run).
Again, I do think the Rash hate is overblown. He complicates the game, but he does still play by the rules. I can understand why people dislike him though.
Don’t tell me that there’s a list of rules on a bulletin board in Namco’s office and Harada shoots down character ideas because “Sorry, violates a rule! Characters can’t do/be/come from X”. No. That doesn’t happen. The rules change once they want them too.
I’m not saying there aren’t rules of HOW THEY PLAY. I’m saying there aren’t rules to WHO THEY ARE. There isn’t a rule like “No Fireballs” “no people from South Korea” “guest characters can’t come from comic books”. The only rule that exists is “Don’t make a character that’s stupid broken”
I didn’t say there was.
That is what I was discussing, exclusively. People don’t complain about Geese, Noctis, Akuma, and Negan because they don’t look “Tekken-y” - they complain because they feel they impact the gameplay a certain way. The list of people who complain about franchise lore and aesthetics being broken tends to be pretty small. They exist for sure, but they do not make up anywhere near a majority of people complaining about guests in my experience.
The others, sure. But most of the complaints I read about Negan before his gameplay reveal were that he doesn’t belong in Tekken. Its amazing how people can mix up the feelings of “not working for me” and “not belonging in the game”.
Consider the fact that a lot of the characters have their knees bent when they fight. Also consider the fact that Jeffrey Dean Morgan is 6’ 2" in real life, which is taller than a good portion of the T7 roster.
Akuma is actually pretty short. In Third Strike he was one of the smaller characters in the roster.
That feels… weird and wrong.
It’s just weird. Sure, he’s tall, but for his build he looks disproportionate compared to the rest of the cast.
Maybe he looks tall and lanky because he’s the only character designed after a real person. All the other characters are overmusclesd and therefore look stocky - in addition to having the various crouching stances.
That makes sense. Honestly though, they should have better translated him into Tekken’s art style.
Tekken needs a more defined art style in generally imo
Better that it looks like him IMO. No need to change the artstyle for his sake, especially if they wanted a realistic look in the first place.
Also, this isn’t the first time Namco took a real person and put them in a game so they must have had an idea of what they were doing.
It can still look like him while meshing better with the rest of the cast, IMO.