It can be fascinating to look back at the origins of a franchise, whether it be on its eighth mainline entry or only its second. The dawn of the 3D fighting game in the early to mid-90s in itself is an interesting period, and Namco played a big part in its take-off. With Sega’s Virtua Fighter setting the stage for polygonal hand-to-hand combat in arcades and on home televisions, Namco was keen to follow suit.
Namco was eager to launch on the PlayStation console and based its arcade System 11 board on the 32-bit up-and-comer from Sony, while managing to bring in Virtua Fighter designer Seiichi Ishii to direct the Tekken project, going up against the very series he helped established at Sega. The rest, as they say, is history.
Although Tekken is synonymous with the PS1 at this point, this isn’t the home version of Namco’s breakout fighter. Instead, Hamster brings back the arcade hit with an Arcade Archives 2 update, adding in extra features and modes to revitalise a classic that most will have fond memories of playing on their PlayStations.
Owing to the fact a former key employee of Sega was on board at Namco, Tekken has a familiar feel to Virtua Fighter, but carves out its own style of combat with a relatively unique setup that assigns each arm and leg to one of the four face buttons of the controller. Players can combine left and right punches and kicks to perform multiple combinations when input in a timely fashion, and the Arcade Archives 2 release pleasingly adds individual character move lists in the menus so that there is no need to grab your phone to look for guides online.
The King of the Iron Fist tournament sees a chosen combatant of eight competing across surprisingly detailed environments from all over the world, including the Colorado Rockies, Fiji, Sichuan, and even a Japanese baseball stadium, among other relatively unusual locations for a video game. It can be tough to take down some of the CPU opponents, but with the save and load options of this release, there is a more comfortable road to victory this time, culminating in a boss fight with the face of the franchise, Heihachi.
This being the arcade version, the extra characters added to the PS1 edition don’t make their way in, and the superior soundtrack quality from the home release is naturally absent, too. Given the rather steep asking price of $16.99, this is where the separation of arcade and console versions of games for re-releases like these can cause a bit of friction. Sometimes it must be wondered if there could be a combined package of both versions, which would prevent this Arcade Archives 2 release from feeling like a raw deal. Still, Hamster does provide the common time attack, hi-score and caravan modes with online leaderboards, plus the typical bells and whistles that allow users to customise their screens and button setups.
Cubed3 Rating
There may not be enough here to get people to jump into the origins of the Tekken franchise, but it has to be said that there is still something satisfying about a fighting game that is devoid of flashy effects, super meters and ridiculous combos that require intense thumb movements and memorisation to pull off. Just know that the content most will be used to seeing in the PS1 version isn’t present here.
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Tekken (1994)
Developers: Bandai Namco, Hamster
Publishers: Bandai Namco, Hamster
Formats: Arcade, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
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