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Tekken 5 dark resurrection1/2/2023 ![]() The arcade mode, for example, simulates playing against a series of arcade challengers, with you struggling to hold on and climbing higher and higher up the rankings. Of course, you get the traditional one-player story mode, complete with cartoon intros, the mandatory bizarre storylines – time travel, curses, family drama and sibling rivalry a speciality – and neat CG endings (Anna’s being a particular highlight), but there’s also much, much more. You may also be surprised to find this is a beat-em-up with hidden depths. ![]() For maximum dexterity you might want to play with the PSP on your lap, so you can hit all four face buttons with your fingers instead of relying on your thumbs, but most sensible Tekken players would say the same of the PS2’s Dual Shock 2 controller, and while it’s a little trickier to pull off any diagonals, this shouldn’t adversely affect your play too much. It still works here, and whether you’re a dumb button masher or a combo-cutting ninja, it’s surprisingly easy to pull off complex moves with ease. The series’ strength has always been its relative simplicity: take two buttons for fist, add two for feet, then mix and match with the D-Pad to pull off moves and killer combos. Yet none of this would matter if it wasn’t for one thing: Dark Resurrection plays superbly. It sounds utterly fantastic through bass-boosting headphones. Meanwhile, the full range of grunts, roars, screams and the heavy smack of foot or fist on face is as good here as in the best Hong Kong fight flick you can imagine. I dare say the Tekken style of music isn’t to everyone’s taste, with its blend of heavy guitar, weird oriental noises and blistering dance beats, but Dark Resurrection doesn’t skimp on any of the listed ingredients. The audio efforts deserve just as much praise. And across the board, the lighting is as good as it gets on PSP. There are sunlit gardens and ruined Buddhist temples, grimy urban spaces and weird pink love palaces, plus rocky platforms with waterfalls behind, and – best of all – a nightclub dancefloor surrounded by sexy bikini-clad dancers. The characters are beautifully animated, with flowing hair and wonderfully-rendered costume details, and while some of the arenas are fairly plain, with little going on beyond the actual fighting area, others have the intricate, multi-layered backgrounds we’ve come to expect from Namco since Soul Calibur. Somehow, using texture and lighting effects to mask the handheld’s relatively low polygon count, the Tekken team have produced something that, even under fairly close inspection, looks fantastic. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how Namco could have got closer to the arcade or PS2 versions given the hardware limitations of the PSP. With minor exceptions, all are superbly balanced, and there’s such a wealth of options here that whether you favour power-combos, high-speed offense or sheer force, there will always be a handful of fighters to suit you.Įven better, Dark Resurrection doesn’t look like a watered down Tekken 5. In a departure from usual form, all are available from the start, and Namco has even bundled in two new ones from the Dark Resurrection arcade game: Lili, a pampered princess with a taste for kicking ass, and Dragunov, a sinister pasty-faced Russian specialising in brutal high-powered combos. You get a huge selection of play modes, and a vast range of over 30 characters to choose from, going all the way from old-school PSX-era heroes (Law, Nina, Yoshimitsu) through more recent additions (Christie, Bryan, Raven) to those weirdos that always creep out of the Tekken woodwork (Mokujin, Roger the Kangaroo). What’s so impressive about Tekken: Dark Resurrection is that it doesn’t feel like a watered down version of that Tekken 5 experience – in fact, you can safely argue that it’s been enhanced. And this being Tekken, the characters and the moves were hard-hitting, varied and superb. After the disappointments of Tekken Tag Tournament and the misplaced formula fixing of Tekken 4, Tekken 5 showed the series getting back to what it did best, throwing out showy multi-layer arenas and treacherous ground surfaces to just give us two guys or girls in a ring, each armed with a cart-load of wince-inducing special moves. ![]() Of course, it has been built on some pretty damn solid foundations: the arcade update of the best Tekken of the last eight years, Tekken 5. It’s a game that makes all the usual cheap PSP ports look not just weak, but pitifully lacking in ambition. Simply being a great handheld incarnation of Tekken is an achievement, but this is one of the best Tekkens on any system. It would have been enough to be the best fighting game on PSP, but this is a contender for the best PSP game, full stop. Phenomenal – if I had to pick a word to describe Tekken: Dark Resurrection, phenomenal is the one I’d choose.
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