Tekken 7

#391

I do remember people complaining about Arbiter, actually. Mostly his gun loop.

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#392

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.

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#393

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”

#394

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.

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#395

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”.

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#396

Why is he so much taller than the other characters

#398

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.

#399

I can understand that but… it’s just really weird for him to dwarf Akuma.

#400

Akuma is actually pretty short. In Third Strike he was one of the smaller characters in the roster.

#401

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.

#402

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.

#403

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

#404

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.

Starkiller3
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#405

It can still look like him while meshing better with the rest of the cast, IMO.

#406

I really want is playstyle to return

#407

So in what can be best described as “only focus on DLC and exclusives for PS4” I finally bought Season Pass 2, as 3 of my old mains were in the bundle and because I heard Negan’s gameplay is actually good. Marduk plays better than I remember in Tekken 5, and though I never played this redesigned version of Armor King before (I never played Dark Resurrection, only vanilla T5) I already like him more than regular King. Julia is as I remember, Anna plays more like how I wanted Nina to play as, and I still don’t care for Lei.

Negan is odd in that he’s the least bombastic of the 4 guest characters, at least animation-wise. On one hand I can see why people called him “Miguel with a bat” but the more I play him the less I use him like Miguel overall, mainly since his bat attacks have actual range. I will admit I was expecting his attacks to feel heavier like Noctis’s weapons, but unlike Noctis who plays more like a mid-range zoner Negan is a straight-up rushdown character by comparison. I still like Negan more than Geese though, since Negan actually has juggle combos.

Overall I feel I got my money’s worth, considering the season pass is technically $5 a character. Also I tried to make Negan look like the Joker (since according to my small amount of research they have a bunch of similarities) but it didn’t pan out. Instead I made him look like the TF2 Scout, and made Noctis the Joker instead.

Strange, when I was using him as a training dummy for practicing Lei’s moves I noticed Negan fit too well aesthetically. I honestly feel Negan has the same issue as Geralt in SC6, where there are times where he doesn’t actually feel like a guest character to me. At the very least he doesn’t completely stick out like a sore thumb like the other 3 guests (Akuma, Geese, Noctis).

#408

What on earth are you smoking? Negan is in a completely different art style than the rest of the cast. He’s realistically proportioned and has a more realistic face sculpt compared to the more anime-esque designs of the entire rest of the cast.

#409

Well there are multiple factors that lead to my conclusion. For starters I main Miguel and Gigas, so I am no stranger to playing as characters that tower over everyone else in the roster. Second is the fact that because Negan’s animations were pretty much done from scratch (versus the other guests which had proper animation references from their games) they feel more Tekken-like in terms of flow; even people I’ve encountered online that despise Negan have also admitted that he animates more like a traditional Tekken character than Akuma or Geese do. Third is that outside of close-ups, (intros, winposes, Rage Art) because of how fast the game is I don’t notice he has a realistic face when everything just feels like a blur of attacks and particles. Also realistic wouldn’t be the right word IMO, since Tekken Project’s use of UE4 seems lacking on that front (just pay attention, you’ll see it).

As for your question, I did Lei’s training session against Negan in the Kinder Gym stage so that probably didn’t help. Either way my point still stands that in my eyes, he’s not as blatant as the other guests when the fighting actually happens. In terms of silhouettes, With Akuma I can still tell he’s from Street Fighter even when I’m focusing on the fight, same with Geese and Noctis and their respective franchises. With Negan I just see a guy with a bat, which to me somehow feels more natural to Tekken’s art style than the others. Obviously I’m in the very small minority with my statements, but this is how I see the whole situation.

On a side note, I just noticed how the bat has a constant Nightmare aura when Negan is in Rage mode (as in not using the Rage Drives/Rage Art). Between that and the weapon trail looking like a less saturated version of Nightmare’s weapon trail in SC (red/black color scheme instead of Nightmare’s red/purple), I am half-expecting Namco to say his bat has a piece of Soul Edge embedded in it (which could also double as a reference to SC2, which Heihachi was in).

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#410

That IS a fair point. Because he has no point of reference in terms of gameplay, since he isn’t from one, they had to build a moveset from the ground up just as they would any other new character. Because of that, they totally could have made him play like a Tekken character and it still wouldn’t break away from any source material. I usually prefer the alternative route of incorporating other elements, but when arguing about how a character fits, this is something to consider.

Especially for all those people that hate the 2D characters lol

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#411

Eh, maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. Aesthetics are aesthetics, so there’s a fair bit of room for differing opinions on this subject. For myself, I tend to agree that Negan “fits” Tekken a lot better than say, Akuma or Noctis; he just looks like he belongs in the same world as Miguel or Dragunov or Brian a lot more than an Akuma does. -shrug-

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