Hi everyone, Cathy here. I am going to share with you my strategy for taking out the Sniper Wild Heartless in Kingdom Hearts Final Mix. I used a lot of guides because I had trouble with this Heartless and I’m going to tell you right now, this video is slightly different than my usual strategy, but it is the one that I took the trouble to save, so here we are.
So, first thing, we take out the first Heartless. We just sneak up on her and take her out. Ideally, what we would have done is waited for her to get in a position closer to where the next two spawn. The way it works is one Sniper Wild, take her out, two more spawn, take those two out, another three spawn, and then it repeats. So, you want to take out six Sniper Wilds to get one Power Stone, if you’re lucky. So, ideally, after the first one’s out, I would put myself between the next two and cast Stop. If you’re watching this video, you can see that did not happen. But that would have been ideal because it would have been faster, but this still wasn’t so bad.
I actually got kinda lucky here because as you can see, I try and go up to that one, and I don’t see her. And, oh, I guess that’s when she jumped down. She jumps down and thankfully she just missed me. The Sniper Wilds, if they see you, and they call for backup, they will start sniping at you and calling and more Sniper Wilds will spawn. And that will happen endlessly. You can’t take them out, I mean, you can try and take them out, but there’s no point because they won’t stop spawning. So you have to make sure that if they see you, they don’t call for backup. ‘Cause in this video, I think almost all of them actually do see me, but I take them out before they finish like “Aah!” sounding the alarm. I take a moment to breathe. *deep breath*
Alright, so this post with the light by the stairs, is my preferred spot. The camera can be a bit of a pain, but it makes for a kind of nice hiding spot and a little easier to figure out and strategize where to go next, to find the next one. Is she staying over there like this one is? She was not moving so fine, I’ll go up to her. I prefer not to do that because you see, I’m completely across from where I want to be. It’s easier if they happen to come by the stairs, but that can also take a very long time. So, you just kinda have to go with what feels best at the time. And here I can see that one of them went to my preferred spot by the stairs, so I waited a bit before heading over there, trying to be careful and hoping they don’t see me.
There’s going to be a bit of waiting involved here, so I will also tell you some of the strategies that I read or watched on YouTube. One of them involved, I think it was stopping the first one and then using Dumbo. A lot of the strategies involve using Stop because you want to get to them before they sound the alarm. So, use Dumbo, another one, Stop, use Mushu. Actually, I don’t think that one involved Stop. I think it was just Mushu and make sure you take them out fast enough.
Alright, so here’s the first of the last three. As you can see, she spotted me, but I got her. Yeah, I think all three of them spot me, but like I said, take them out before they call for backup, and we’re good. The main strategy that I remember reading involved like a lot of Stop. I don’t remember if you had to stop the first one or not, but ideally, you would stop the first one, stop the next two, stop the last three. For the last three, it’s probably better if you have Stopga. I don’t know if it’s necessary. And I didn’t bother to find out or re-look it up because Stopga involves the Phantom. I was going to take out the Phantom last. I wasn’t going to involve myself with that.
Alright, so we’re on our last one here, and in this video, this is the only time I cast Stop. But in most of my efforts, I would have cast Stop when the set of two spawn. So, here, I leave right away because this whole thing makes me really nervous. But if you don’t get as nervous as I do, by all means, go for it again. And that’s it. The End.
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This video may contain spoilers for the following games: Persona 5, Tekken 7, Tales of Berseria, Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, and Tiny Bird Garden.
Last year, I didn’t cover what I played during 2016 so I’ll tell you now a lot of it was Persona 4 and Persona 4 Golden, which I loved. I have friends who like the series, and I was interested after seeing a Persona 5 trailer. I also played Tales of Vesperia, but anyway, back to the Persona series.
I enjoy summoning personas and strengthening and leveling them. In Persona 4, I loved the concept of confronting that part of you that you don’t like and embracing it to then actually empower you. My Jin Saga 2 fan-fiction works to that same end. Persona 5 wasn’t really like that. The personas of the party members revealed themselves at especially tense, often angered, moments as opposed to being an antagonist, an antagonistic presence within. So, with all that said, in case it has not been clear, the first game I played, at least in full for 2017, was Persona 5, a turn-based Japanese role-playing game.
I thoroughly enjoyed the combat of Persona 5 with summoning personas, the usual physical attacks, and the addition of the baton pass. I thought the music was really good in some of the dungeons, called palaces in the game, the casino probably being my favorite. I liked the main character’s outfit and smirk. I like to play New Game Plus iterations a lot, so I even played it a good three times over, or more.
I didn’t really care for the prison aesthetics, even given the full context of the story. I honestly don’t really think it’s a very good story. Too much hinges on conveniently not showing you certain things for a special twist. The first dungeon made me really uncomfortable, and it was a chore to get through every time.
I played Persona 5 up until Tekken 7 was released on June 2nd. Then after that, I shifted gears go ahead and focus on Tekken 7, a 3D fighting game, and I gave Persona 5 only a little more time in between to wrap up a few loose ends.
If you are unfamiliar with my views on the Tekken series, they amount to that I’m more of a Jin and Devil Jin fan first and not really much of a Tekken fan since Tekken 6, when the game itself ditched a story mode and replaced with an entire mode specifically for two expansion characters, one of them being my most character ever. Tekken 7 did very, very little to compensate for the general awfulness from Tekken 6. So far as the story presentation goes, the nicest thing I can say about it is that it delivered what it promised: a confrontation between Heihachi and Kazuya. There was hardly any Jin, and he was basically there to be chased and held. I’m also going to point out that this is the first time we see a Mishima character who is a woman, the first time one is playable, and her story is that she’s dead because Heihachi had to kill her. All around, I considered the story to be really bad. You can see my further comments in it in my review for Tekken 7 from earlier in 2017.
The customization was also lacking though points for having a nice, rich black color. They took it away at some point and eventually added it back, so, I was glad for that. I enjoyed practicing my electric wind god fists and sharing my first time ever of doing three in a row. I learned a few cool combos to do in practice mode.
I watched some competitive tournament-level Tekken in 2017, and Qudans, the best Devil Jin player in the world, won the Tekken World Tour, so that was really cool. I made a video about that too if you want to check it out.
At the end of July, I had to take a trip up to Michigan with family and I could tell before I left, and I felt it when I came back, that I felt I was pretty much done with the game, and I was.
We’re going to backtrack for a moment here because I want to talk about something in between the games. Before I played Persona 5, I tried playing Tales of Berseria and while playing that, I found out that you cannot take screenshots or save clips with the PS4 SHARE button for almost all of it, the main exception being the administrative zones, which are kind of like the coliseum. I was annoyed by that since I consider the sharing feature a really great option for this current age of technology. So, I just, I set aside Tales of Berseria. I was annoyed and frustrated and then I found out the same thing applied to Persona 5. You cannot share screenshots or save clips except for like, the very beginning. And I really, really wanted to play Persona 5, more than Berseria. To anyone listening and watching with any power here, I really resent that that was done, and I think that Namco, Atlus, and any other company that does these things should stop. I can spoil things to people without a PS4 SHARE button and in Berseria’s case, I can do those things, saving screnshots, saving clips, on the PC version, so really, other than annoying people like me, what do you think you’re actually accomplishing? A work-around, for anyone wondering, is that if you have a PC that can do PS4 remote play, to do that.
I like to tweet about my gaming and I would have liked screenshots or small clips, especially for a video like this one, and that is exactly what I did with Tekken 7 and something I really liked about it and found significantly better and more enjoyable in the whole experience, compared to both Tales of Berseria and Persona 5. At some point, I bought a PC that could do remote play for this reason and admittedly am now saving up for a PC that can actually play these games, that have PC versions.
Anyway, so after some cooling down and having a PC where I can remote play, I started up Tales of Berseria again. I really enjoyed it. I think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. The Tales games are action Japanese role-playing games, rather than turn-based like the Persona series. I played Tales of Vesperia during 2016 and even a little bit, some of the beginning of 2017, but it was sort of like the tail end of that game, I was almost done. In Tales of Berseria, the main character is Velvet, a teenage girl who becomes a special kind of daemon called a therion: a daemon that can eat daemons. The story, in my opinion, was extremely interesting and engaging, exploring philosophical differences, fascism, slavery, fear, consequences of one’s actions, and personal growth. Some of the themes I find questionable, but I think the story itself admits that by continually reminding you that your party is a group of selfish characters who do questionable things. Even so, I liked every character in the party with perhaps Magilou being my least favorite because she can be a bit annoying and abusive toward her malak, Bienfu with the story playing it up for laughs, as if he is deserving of the abuse because he’s such a creep. My favorite character is Velvet, by a lot. I was honestly very happy to play as an angry dark-haired girl with powerful demonic powers. I wish her default outfit weren’t so awful, I admit.
At some point, I found myself dedicating a lot of time and in-game money to creating the most powerful versions of weapons and eventually I gave up when I started to realize how much time that was amounting to. After all, you can’t even keep your weapons into a New Game Plus anyway.
Eventually, I started up Kingdom Hearts, another action JRPG, again, because we now have the PS4 Final Mix version and partly because my daughter seemed interested from a video she was watching of Kingdom Hearts II. She’s 4 and half now, and she’s really enjoying it. She can actually do a lot on her own, but I get to help with things like figuring out how to progress the story and do boss fights. I’m helping her on her own save file, at first it was in Beginner mode, but she’s also got one in regular [Normal] mode that we’ve been working on. I don’t think I’ll be going all out with completing the journal, ’cause I mean, I’ve already done it twice, at least two full games of Kingdom Hearts years apart. This PS4 version does let me share things too and even includes information about what is and isn’t allowed, which is way better than just outright intentionally removing the ability to do these things, Atlus and Namco, so, thank you Square-Enix.
I followed an artist on Twitter named Daisy, who was kind enough to return the follow, and she is the artist for an independent game called Tiny Bird Garden. I saw the trailer some months ago, and it looked really cute. I downloaded it on the iPad for my daughter and on the iPhone for me. It is indeed very cute. You have a garden where you can fill a feeder with seed and check in on cute Tiny Birds. They say things, leave feathers to act as currency in the game with their comments in the mail, and you can buy them toys, treats, and hats to connect with them and fill up their hearts. There’s also a feature I’ve only used a little bit where you can put pictures of them and stickers on your own photos, so that’s pretty cool. So, great work Daisy, I hope things go well for you as an independent game developer.
Those are the main games I played in 2017. Surprisingly, they were all released in 2017 even if Kingdom Hearts Final Mix for the PS4 is a remaster of an older game. It’s not altogether unheard of for me to play a game the year it is released. It is pretty rare for me to willingly pay for 2 of them day 1 (Persona 5 and Tekken 7 in case you’re wondering). Berseria was a gift for my birthday. Up on the horizon for 2018 is possibly reviews of games I’ve already played or just playing them again because I enjoyed them. My husband recently reminded me that Dissidia is coming out for the PS4, so I might check that out. I have some other non-video-game hopes and projects as well.
All in all, that’s a wrap for this video, and I thank you for your time.
Tonight at The Game Awards, a Soul Calibur VI Announcement Trailer premiered. It’s short with mainly a young Mitsurugi and Sophitia. The narration begins, “Just as shadows are cast where there is light, history hides away more than one truth,” so I take that as a hint of either a retelling of past events or new events in the past will be both though I suppose it could be some combination of those things.
As for other characters, there is little shown here. There is this part, I’m not sure who this is:
And the final shot which could be a new character, or not since the narration says, “Welcome back to the stage of history.”
I’m more of a Cassandra player than a Sophitia player so I hope she, Cassandra, is not erased from even being acknowledged as existing again since there was no mention of her, that I remember anyway, in Soul Calibur V. I want to see claws too, preferably with a long-haired Siegfried-Nightmare though that hasn’t really happened since Soul Calibur II. This likely look to the past sets the stage for such a character or one like him (“more than one truth”).
PlayStation Experience is this weekend so there might still be more on the game in the near future and if not, well, I’m sure I’ll hear about it from somewhere such as on Twitter or Andrew, who keeps up with gaming news.
I had given up on any more Soul Calibur games so this news is welcome as it is one of my more favored fighting game series.
You can see the trailer here on Bandai Namco Entertainment America’s YouTube Channel:
Please check out the gallery below for an ever closer look at some screenshots from the above video.
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Hi everyone, I’m Cathy. This past Sunday, Qudans, the best Devil Jin player in the world, also proved himself to be the best player in the Tekken World Tour where he faced off against both JDCR and SAINT, players for the team EchoFox. They are very, very good players, so that was no small feat I can assure you.
Qudans is one of the best from the Tekken 5 era. At some point, he injured his wrists, and he also went into the military service. In fact, I was reading some tweets and one person on Twitter said that, that was how he injured his wrists. And here all these years I thought it was because of-while he was playing Tekken. Admittedly, I don’t know. I never asked him myself. But, he didn’t play at the level that he’s at now for quite some time, so seeing him back was really cool. Devil Jin is my favorite character ever, and he is also a very difficult character to play as, so watching someone at the highest level conceivable to me play and win is really special to watch. I was very happy to see that win.
He made good use of hellsweeps, electrics, and demon steel pedal, and especially the Rage Art. So, I’m going to go ahead and share a few of my favorite highlights with you from watching the final matches of the tournament.
In the first round of the first match against JDCR, for the top 8, Qudans made use of Devil Jin’s Rage Art, at the exact right moment to win that particular round. Let’s take a look.
[Highlight start]
Aris: …huge here, he’s got the Rage Drive, yeah, he’s going to use it, big damage, not quite – oh, he might die.
Mark: Is that going to hit?
Aris: He might die. Ohhh!
Mark: Oh my Gosh.
Aris: It didn’t even touch him. He went over it. Wow. Unbelievable, okay…
[Highlight end]
In fact, this same thing happened with the last round of the match too, followed by an exciting hug over to Knee, so let’s watch that.
[Highlight start]
Aris: This is an outrage! Ohhh!
Mark: Oh and the rage art! Is that going to do it?
Aris: Ohhh!
Mark: Oh, he’s killed him.
Aris: What the, I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!
Mark: Oh my gosh, and he hugs Knee right afterwards.
Aris: I cannot believe my eyes!
Mark: I feel like this was your reaction the last time…
[Highlight end]
Afterwards, he moved onto SAINT and lost that set, but I do have a few highlights I want to share for you.
Funnily enough, in the first round of the first match, he again won with a Rage Art. Here it is.
[Highlight start]
Aris: Is it going to pay off?
Mark: Oh, the trade.
Aris: The trade. He got the combo, nice work.
Mark: This guy likes the Rage Art.
Aris: So aware. Yeah, it gives him a moment to think about what he’s done. Nice work. Man, he does…
[Highlight end]
There was also an excellent comeback in round two of the second match.
[Highlight start]
Mark: Wow, look at all this damage here, and-uh oh, fighting back.
Aris: He’s going to need a miracle comeback though. The wall is in his favor.
Mark: Went for the mid again.
Aris: Oh my god, is that a teabag?
Mark: No, he’s buffering a low block for a potential mix-up here. Oh, he did not want to get hit by that. That is going to be big damage.
Aris: Oh my God…
Mark: Oh no, he missed the wall, but he still got it.
Aris: Oh! He got him.
Mark: What a comeback from Qudans…
[Highlight end]
After the overall loss, Qudans had to play against JDCR again, and he beat Dragunov a couple of times. And then at the third match, JDCR picked Heihachi after being cheered on by the crowd to do so and so then JDCR and Qudans played in the Forgotten Realm stage. The first round finished with a strong combo from Qudans with a Rage Drive to Heaven’s Door, that almost finished it, so a while rising 2 near the wall did the rest. It was really cool to watch. So, let’s take another look.
[Highligh start]
Mark: He could go downstairs. That should be it.
Aris: Yeah, he’s going to kill. Nice…
[Highlight end]
Heaven’s Door is my favorite move so watching the top player in the world do it is a lot of fun all the time. I mean, I love watching anyone do it so to see it at that level is really amazing.
And finally, he had a rematch with SAINT to finish it all up. There was another excellent comeback in the first found of the reset.
[Highlight start]
Mark: …could be the move that changes it as well.
Aris: Mm-hmm.
Mark: The down, forward 2.
Aris: That direction, the tracking on that side, it could be a big factor. Hellsweep.
Mark: And that is always a common factor here with the Mishimas, especially with Devil Jin.
Aris: He’s going to need such a miracle. He’s going to need such a miracle.
Mark: Oh my God, he got him.
Aris: Not much more of a miracle left.
Mark: Oh, no, and I don’t think he hit a button at all.
Aris: Ohhh! He got him. I can’t believe it. What? I mean, he-
Mark: Qudans…
[Highlight end]
And here’s a part where he finishes with a Heaven’s Door in the fourth round on the second match of the reset.
[Highligh start]
Mark: Oh my gosh, he’s going to get it. He’s going to get it. Oh my gosh…
[Highlight end]
And then, let’s take a look at the final moments into the win and led to another exciting Qudans standing up and hugging Knee.
[Highlight start]
Aris: Oh!
Mark: Oh! He got it
Aris: He got it! Qudans is your global champion.
Mark: And they torso touched…
[Highlight end]
So, yay! Pretty cool. And then before I go, I want to share some analysis with you from my friend Newton on Twitter.
Watching the Qudans matches from the Tekken World Tour finals and seeing how many Rage Arts he landed just goes and proves my point about how strong Devil Jin’s Rage Art is. Other Rage Arts have to actively absorb something or land as a whiff punish, but Devil Jin’s simply crushes, so he has a less chance of dying mid Rage Art.
Not just that, it is also a super evasive Rage Art, which means armor frames aside, he can use it to straight up crush some stuff, which comes in really handy in pinch situations like that jack df+1212 string Qudans crushed.
Devil Jin’s Rage Art also has the distinction of actually hitting Xiaoyu in AOP~d and completely ignoring Dragunov’s df+4 pushback which makes a lot of Rage Arts whiff. In my opinion, the best i20 RA in the game.
So, that’s from Newton. That’s interesting to me because I don’t play competitively, but I used Devil Jin’s Rage Art all the time when I was playing Treasure Battle. It was fun, yeah, go, do your thing.
Anyway, the win was really special. Qudans had not been to the U.S. in ten years for competitive Tekken play. So, way to go, congratulations Qudans. Thank you for giving me the chance to watch someone with my favorite character at such a high level. I really do appreciate it. So, that’s a wrap for this video. Thanks for watching and/or listening and/or reading. Bye.
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Greetings, all. I’m Cathy also known as Cat to some people. I’m going to review Tekken 7. If you’re unfamiliar with me, I’m a huge fan of Devil Jin and Jin Kazama. In fact, I mostly play these games for those characters. I do not play at a competitive level and mostly practice and fight the CPU in modes provided by the games. I will approach the game from this viewpoint, and a very large chunk of it will be about the story.
In fact, that’s where we’ll start. I am not going to shy from spoilers, so if you care about that, stop watching now. The story presented to us throughout the trailers over the years is Kazumi asking some figure, we later learn to be a guest character, Akuma from the Street Fighter fighting game series, to kill Heihachi if she can’t. He’s going to do all these terrible things, he being Heihachi, and the trailers build up this big final showdown between Heihachi and Kazuya with Jin not at all present. Kazumi aside, Tekken players have seen this story before, and it ended with Jin being a big factor-by that, I mean Tekken 4.
Well, in the case of Tekken 7, we got the story that was advertised. I’ll say that. And I had a lot of complaints about Tekken 6 not being that, because that was going to be some big showdown between Jin and Kazuya and instead, we got an entire mode dedicated to two crappy expansion characters. Of note, Alisa is one of my mains, but my head-canon of her is extremely different from Namcanon. I even change her name to Melissa to indicate she’s my version of Alisa.
I think the story mode was handled better in that I got to be some different characters as opposed to stuck with two expansion characters. Overall, I still prefer the Tekken 5 approach best. In that game, characters get prologue art, a cut scene or two I call interludes with other characters they meet at the tournament, of relevance to them, and then an ending.
The story itself is really bad. Let’s start with the voice-over telling us repeatedly throughout the story that fighting is about who’s left standing, nothing else. That’s it? Nothing about training? Nothing about learning through failure to be better? And while we’re at it, “left standing” and “still alive” can mean two different things, but the context of the climactic moment in this game is Kazuya kills Heihachi, which would mean that main theme of the story then is that in order to fight, you should kill the person so you are the only person left standing. I don’t think that’s a good message. And I think even if the message were that the game seems to confuse fighting with winning and to me, they’re not the same thing.
Another bad component of the story is the Jin hunt. There are a lot of characters who should be going after Jin in some capacity: Kazuya, Raven, Miguel, Hwoarang. Nina was having the Mishima Zaibatsu search for him, but when Heihachi showed up and took the Mishima Zaibatsu from her, his logic went that in order to expose Kazuya, he needs Jin and my initial reaction that was, “No, you don’t.” And then the story proceeds with them not getting Jin and exposing Kazuya anyway, so that pretty much confirmed exactly what I thought. And do not get me started on Lars. Oh, nope, it’s too late, we have to do this. If you don’t know me, Lars is my most hated character ever. He goes after Jin under the pretense of, “We have to put everything on Jin. Now my initial reaction was, “I don’t know what he means. What, like execute him, put him on trial? What?” And by the way, no, he doesn’t.
So let me see if I have this straight. This turd from the last game, last mainline story game, went and took over half of the Tekken Force, as part of some rebellion to the hostile world take-over and then after he gets exactly what he wants in Tekken 6, he still think she needs Jin, that Jin can solve the entire world’s problem because Jin was the entire world’s problem. Now I have always had a problem with the fact that Tekken 6 includes this “over half” line of the Tekken Force because I don’t actually believe some half-baked expansion character can do that and this now half-baked plot point only further convinces me. But anyway, Jin’s like, “yeah, the solution for everything is for me to kill Kazuya because I have the Devil’s blood.”
Now, they could have made this work better with instead of saying, “We need Jin for reasons that don’t make sense, actually, we don’t want Jin’s body in the wrong hands because the likes of Kazuya or the UN may not simply kill him but try experiment on him, and he’s dangerous because Devil.” Oh, and you do not save people from tyranny by killing one person.
I really wish I could be done talking about Lars, I hate him so much, but this story is so, so bad. I hated playing Scenario Campaign, and I especially hated the contrived drama of Alisa’s shutdown as some dramatic death and the ridiculous excuse for a friendship these two had and all of this awfulness is shown as, “yeah, we really did that, and we’re sticking by it.” Alisa could be so much more and better without him. But anyway, back to that annoying butt-head. The story also says that the only reason Heihachi fathered this turd was to prove that he did not have the devil gene. The story also says Heihachi dropped Kazuya off a cliff to prove it to him that Kazuya had the devil gene. Otherwise, the fall would kill Kazuya. So, based on the game’s own logic presented in its own story mode, Lars should be dead because Heihachi would have killed him in trying to prove he did not have the devil gene and yet…what a failure.
The narration is by a man who lost his family to the war, and one of the reviews I skimmed said the deadpan narration was comical though perhaps not intended to be so. I mainly found the opening funny because I wondered what story I walked into that started talking about a son’s love for his father. Anyway, I kept wondering if he’d be Gigas or something, but no, and overall, I don’t think I cared for it. The story mode focuses on the Mishima family so a lot of characters do not make the cut for having a presence here, yet nameless here does.
Can you believe that I’m still not done in telling you how bad this story is? So, as mentioned earlier, Kazumi asked Akuma to kill Heihachi and, we later find out, Kazuya too. Akuma, he’s in this story even though a lot of other Tekken characters aren’t, goes to do that, defeats Kazuya, and given that he was asked to kill him, said he was there to kill him, guess what he did not do? He did not check to see if Kazuya was dead, meaning he did not kill him. He just left!
I feel disappointed that Kazumi really was dead because that means we have five Mishima characters throughout the series (Heihachi, Kazuya, Jin, Jinpachi and now Kazumi), and the only woman among them is the one who is so definitively dead, her role in the story is actually a flashback even though she was the arcade boss.
I’m almost done on the story part. After you beat the story mode, you can get endings for other characters by playing their episodes. On the one hand, this made unlocking their endings really easy. On the other hand, most of these endings were not very good and even if they had good points, they were generally pretty short, presumably because of time and effort dedicated to the awfulness of the Mishima story. Devil Jin appears in his own and Hwoarang’s episodes. Jin appears in Miguel’s. I knew going into this game that I couldn’t think of any version of the story that would satisfy me after the debacle of Tekken 6 so my main bar was some good Jin and Devil Jin footage and there was so little of it, I’m overall disappointed.
Onward, to everything else.
Arcade Battle is only 5 matches and left me confused with the ending of Akuma flexing his power and then getting a Game Over screen, thought I’d done something wrong. I haven’t really looked back since playing the story mode. Treasure Battle is similar to past Ghost Battle modes, but you do not get to pick from three different opponents and you do have to deal with these gimmicks like turbo battle, double damage, aerial combo and Special Matches against certain characters. They are Kazumi, Heihachi, Devil Kazuya, Jin Kazama, and Akuma. After awhile, these gimmicks are mildly annoying and if I’m not in the mood, I will exit. Rare items are too rare. After awhile, you’re mostly earning money and just waiting around to hit the 2,000 battle mark to unlock everything at once. I mainly wanted Jin’s Tekken 6 coat and since I’m not very good at using him, I tried Katarina and Lucky Chloe some, that also took a long time.
The practice mode is great. It has the usual elements and maybe past games had this feature, and I didn’t notice but you can practice at specific points in the stages that have wall, balcony and/or floor breaks. I’ve done a lot of practicing. I think because I didn’t play Tag 2 much and my mind struggles a lot since November 9th of last year, it helps alleviate stress and maybe one day, I’ll be able to do those electrics every time or almost. I can say that I’ve been doing them more often and even got up to 3 at once.
New game-play mechanics include a Rage Art and Rage Drive. I love using Rage Arts. I usually don’t even try for a Rage Drive but if I keep practicing, maybe I’ll work them in. Devil Jin starts with a hellsweep, but the one or two times I focused on trying it in a Treasure Battle match, it didn’t go well and I guess I gave up on it. I saw this really powerful Rage Drive combo with a Katarina player on Twitter and tried to learn it. I never did, but I learned the first part, and she has since become one of my mains. Hopefully, I’ll remember to go back to trying it. My mains this time around include Devil Jin, Jin Kazama, Katarina, and Alisa. To a degree, you could include Lucky Chloe though I admit, it was mostly for manipulating the CPU. I picked up at least one combo. And you know, I wanted to add more mains, but when you start dedicating time to specific characters to learn more. well, it feels like there’s only so much room in my brain for them sometimes. I missed Xiaoyu and Lili so played them a little but when I do a rotation of my main characters in Treasure Battle, I don’t even think of trying them. Maybe I will, now that I’ve written this review.
That was quite a tangent but back to mechanics. Bound is gone, and now we have um, a tailspin move, and I don’t remember on Tekken Zaibatsu if the “s” stood for “spin” or for “screw,” and the game itself doesn’t seem to actually say, so, but it’s a spinning move. And the spin can be used in combos. There are also, some moves have new properties called Power Crush, like Jin and Devil Jin have had Corpse Thrust for at least since Tekken 5, no, even longer um, but that is now a Power Crush move. Um, and for someone like me, that was extremely helpful against the CPU in Treasure Battle. The game lacks other usual modes from past games like Survival and Team Battle. Um, I liked Team Battle so I miss it. Survival’s nice too, I mainly like miss Team Battle though.
Customizations are again not as good as what Tekken 6 offered. My Alisa customization in Tekken 6 wore a blue best over a long-sleeved black shirt, not an option. She wore shorts with her Battle Boots. You can get the Battle Boots this time but if you want to use them, they are with the bikini bottom. Again for all the tops like in Tag 2, you cannot pick say a specific pair of gloves you want with a shirt or jacket. Gloves either come with it or they don’t. The hair options regress even more because I can no longer get the bushy ponytail I used to be reminiscent of Leona from King of Fighters for Alisa. For me, that is a significant part of my vision for the customization I want so that was a loss. I’m thinking about making a video of how backwards customization has gone for another time.
Another thing that’s gone is replays. They’d be a few seconds to show what happened at the end of the match, and you could use that time to pick a button for a specific win pose if you wanted. You can still try to get a win pose you want, but the time frame is much tighter, and I miss the actual replays themselves as well.
The game has this cool feature that offers a jukebox where you can customize what music you listen to in the game. You can use tracks from past games, and that’s really great. I tend to turn the music off because I concentrate better with none at all in Practice, and then just don’t bother turn it back on a lot of time but when I do have it on, I don’t like some of the Tekken 7 tracks, so I’m glad I had this feature to set them to other ones.
Moving on, I really, really love that technology has come to a point where we can all so easily share things, especially on PS4. I can show off my customizations and clip some random funny thing that happened. I’ve even used it to analyze what I might be missing in practice through like a frame-by-frame replay.
Quick remark on customizations. Before Patch 1.03, you could get some really dark black colors on your people and then after the update, many of them turn to a lighter gray that I know myself and others did not like at all. That it was so hard, it was hard to see sometimes, like in actual matches, but I find it hard to believe that it couldn’t be better handled.
Anyway, back to sharing. I can see if my PS4 friends liked the things I shared on Twitter. Another perk of technology sharing is being able to watch so much top-level Tekken play so easily, thanks to YouTube and Twitch.
So, all in all, I found some things to enjoy this game, and I do intend to keep playing. Um, but I do kind of feel, that with the long wait, um, and even with my, what I felt, tempered expectations, of kind of saying, I didn’t like Tekken 6, I didn’t like these things, I know that these things can happen again, and trying to ready myself for what it could be, I’m still disappointed that so many things changed and not for the better. And I do hope that eventually, if this series continues, um, we can go back to a better place, similar to what we had before instead of feeling like the series is slowly stripping away some of the, a lot of the things that we took for granted um, in enjoying what Namco, not gave us, but you know, they put forth for us to buy. And so, you know, hopefully things will get better. Well, let me re-phrase that because I am not an optimistic or hopeful person when it comes to Tekken. Um, it’ll be nice if that ever happens. I’ll say that. I do not expect it to happen and it is, I do hope, that things do not keep getting worse. At the very least, I can say that.
So anyway, thanks for listening and/or watching my video. Bye-bye.
