Street Fighter X Tekken

Guh. Look, I'm not somebody that goes in for any kind of 'it was all better in the old days' bullshit in any medium, and it specially rankles when people pull it with gaming, but this game really made me wish fighting games hadn't progressed the way they have since the mid-'90s.

I've never really been big on fighting games in general anyway, but Tekken 2 [鉄拳2] took an absolute hammering off me in the PS1 days, and I have occasional fond memories of playing the first couple of console Street Fighter games around various other people's houses as a kid. Hell, even though I owned neither and only played them with other people, I was pretty great at Dead or Alive (as was anybody that could counter properly, in fairness) and enjoyed SoulCalibur II and 3 a lot as well. But it feels like since then, fighting games have been pushing down a road that has made them more and more needlessly complicated, and more and more demanding at the expense of simple fun. Because that's what these games were, right? There's no doubt that skill could be involved depending on the people you were with, but you could quite happily switch off and mash some buttons if you wanted to. Street Fighter in particular was a late-night post-pub classic, and there's much to be said for that.

That's what drew me to this game when it became free on PS Plus - fond memories, and the idea that the franchises might have stuck to what made them great in the first place. No such luck.

Street Fighter X Tekken has a tutorial mode, which handily outlines most of the game's flaws from the off. It has, for one thing, 30 steps. These 30 steps go right from insulting (did you know you can kick people? And wow, you can also punch them!) to bewildering, as Super Arts, Gems, EX Attacks, Cancels, Switch Cancels, Cross Gauges, Pandora Mode, and more are all introduced. If you'd asked me at the end of the tutorial what any of that meant, I wouldn't have been able to tell you - I wasn't sure what the hell I'd just played through or why any of it was relevant. I've played 100-hour RPGs that spend less time explaining the game mechanics and been less confusing. Why does a fighting game need this many features? Surely, if all of this had existed in the first two Street Fighter games, the series would never have got off the ground?

Things get worse when you realize that there's no 1v1 mode, and every battle has to involve tag teams. Oh, and the button to tag out sometimes doesn't work because it's also an attack button, because everything on the damn controller is an attack button. Unsurprisingly, this makes learning to properly block, counter, or tag out a faintly depressing process. We're compensated for this by being able to amass in-game collectables and customize the colour of our characters' clothes though, so hooray! Everybody cares about features like that.

I just don't get why you'd fuck so badly with a perfect formula. I also don't really understand why lessons haven't been learned from other franchises that have done this right - the recent Mortal Kombat on the Vita made itself more complicated in a number of ways, all of them either incidental to the gameplay itself (a lengthy, well-developed, well-executed story mode) or effectively sandboxed within the game (the tower mini-games, which could easily be totally ignored but were a very smart way to diversify the gameplay and take advantage of the Vita's features). Even the collectables bit wasn't totally awful, with the graveyard mechanic turning the whole thing into a lottery. It's a great model of how classic '80s and '90s fighting games can drag themselves into the new millennium without losing their personality. Street Fighter X Tekken, on the other hand, ranks as a great example of how not to do it. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who play fighting games all the time and who have been crying out for something as complex as this so they can really test their skills against other great players online, but I am the 99%, and I hate what they've done to a couple of games I used to adore.