The PSP finally shows it potential with a portable masterpiece.
I have been with the Tekken series right from the first time I loaded Tekken into my Playstation over ten years ago. I knew it then and know it now it is the greatest fighting series ever, in my opnion surpassing even Street Fighter and Soul Calibur.
With each installment Tekken just got bigger and better, my personal highlight of the series is Tekken 2. The amount of hours wasted on that game is uncalcuable and I still play it to this day.
Anyway I got Tekken 5 DR for christmas as part of my PSP bundle and as soon as I loaded it and fired it up I knew this game was worth waiting for. You see I have Tekken 5 for PS2 and while found it great felt it wasn't very advanced in terms of the gameplay. If anything it seemed a backstep to that of Tekken 4. I discovered DR in my local arcade and was hooked, the visuals were greatly improved and had excellent new characters in Druganov and Lili. When I heard that this was only going to be released on PSP I scoffed, I didn't think such a machine could accomodate a game like this. Well I am glad I wrong, I have been playing this game solidly for a week now and have found it is PERFECTLY suited to the PSP despite critical comments that suggested to the contrary. The control system I have found is excellent and I can pull off Kazuya's ten hit combos with the same ease I could on any Tekken on the home console and the graphics were way above my expectations of what the PSP can do. The FMV intro is stunning and each character is amazingly detailed while the stages look awesome. One of the truly amazing things about this game is the very short loading times, I expected some pretty long pauses between fights but have found that is not the case with loading averaging a very tolerable 5 seconds.
Of course you look at a fighting game and don't really see a deep gaming experience like on par with a RPG. Well that's not the case here, You can unlock each characters movies to start and then with the gold you in earn in game you can customise your characters to make them look unique. There are also Tekken Bowl and Command Attack which are pretty fun short term, in the case of Command Attack can prove very useful to the master in waiting. Practice mode is very useful to learn all the moves and spar with any character of your choice. The dojo mode gives you a chance to boost your chracters rating by beating everyone in the dojo and progressing to the next one. Another way of boosting ranking is just going to arcade mode and playing with people similarly ranked to you with the chance of promotion every so often (I have found it is about 10-11 fights to each promotion fight)
I think a special mention should go to the game sharing option, me and me friends have so much fun wirelessly playing Tekken with the need for two copies of the game. The option to create a ghost from your game data is a fantastic idea and download ghost packs even more so. I have downloaded many ghosts and they are just way more challenging than anything the CPU can offer up.
This truly a special game, the sheer variety of characters practising REAL martial arts means it takes while to master a character but is truly rewarding. It has many game modes and the Ghost and Dojo options add a real lease of life to this game. The sounds and music are great with some quite splendid graphics. Anyway anyone with a PSP MUST own this game you shall not be disappointed.
