Download added: ttt2_zafina_custom.jpg (100251 bytes) "Heading into a Ghost Battle with a customized Zafina."
Massive summer blockbuster of a fighting game in which every member of the huge cast seems to end up producing the same punch-splode team juggles. Vast character customization mode is absolutely ridiculous in every sense. Feel like I still need to try way more characters but the fights I've been in so far have all ended up bouncing around the same way. Maybe I'd have more of a clue if I hadn't gotten stuck like a moron (and had to use the PS button to abort-quit out) in the first step of the tutorial. Oh yeah that reminds me, at some point (1'32"27) I hit a weird bug where both my character and the opponent just flipped out and spasmed past each other for a while.
TTT2 succeeded Tekken 6 and redid the character models and fighting engine that had been in use since Tekken 5; it remodeled all the characters, completely rebuilt the feel of the fighting and the way in which combos work, and expanded the detailed customization system introduced in Tekken 6.
Some of the characters look better, I think (some like Baek and Hwoarang had been looking weirdly square and stiff for a while). Marduk, who had a unique hulking physique and stance previously, became just a bigger version of a more generic physique.
The new fighting system makes it so that everyone in effect hits the same, even if their striking animations look different; at least to this noob, it feels like everyone just does the same long combos, which starts to feel really, really boring and lacking in impact.
This genericization was probably done since it's a tag battle game, and it made it so they could interchange characters and still have everyone work together as tag partners who can juggle opponents back and forth to each other in extended combos.
The game feels like it had the most money injected into it of any fighting game I've ever played; the production values are off the chart, and you can feel it as soon as you land on the main menu. Everything looks amazing. There are an incredible amount of disgustingly detailed CG animated cutscenes. The cast size is absolutely ridiculous. The amount of stuff you can manipulate in the customization mode is absurd.
Although it was probably invented for the tag team fighting here, the genericized-feeling battle system--as well as the character models--would carry over into the next big game, Tekken 7 (see entry 1392).
