Ya know, I feel like Tekken gets misrepresented as this impossibly execution intensive monster. I know going in that everywhere I read talked about how it was this mega execution heavy game and how enormous of a commitment it was to even become competent. At one point I decided not to buy it after reading and upteenth mention of the grueling hell of frame perfect, angle and position specific, character specific, time of fucking day specific nonsense required to play. I have weak execution, for a couple of reasons that there's no need to get in to here, (I'm sure a bunch of you have heard me rant before about it) so the game was hugely intimidating to me. Add in the damn KBDC and I about threw in the towel.
But it's not.
It's really not bad at all.
Of course there is an upper echelon of play where you have to be half a concert pianist to pull it all off, but as a new player, just starting out, unless you go out of your way to find something absurd to base your game around that are a million ways to get by that don't have anything like the extreme difficulty the game seems to be so synonymous with.
I've been able to find perfectly adequate combos and common conversions for the handful of characters I've messed with, that start to fall in to place after 20-30m of practice. They aren't optimal of course but they are respectable enough in damage and carry to make them more than fine to learn with and the damage is close enough in many cases (not all of course) that you aren't going to be losing matches to inferior players who just happen to combo better than you.
Even the damn back dash cancel stuff.. there is a poverty version.. it's not an all or nothing thing where if you can't do the super fast/precise version you fail. Hell you can just hit b-b-d-b-b-d etc as fast as you can and you get a less effective version, but you are still moving faster than normal back dashing by a couple orders of magnitude.
EWGFs aren't near as bad as I've heard. They are weird, sure, and I don't play a Mishima, but after 15m of practice on D Jin I was getting 7/10. A few short sessions and I'd have them easy.
The game certainly has an insanely high execution ceiling, but the floor is a hell of a lot lower than I think a lot of people realize. If you want to hang with the pros you will absolutely have to master the really tough stuff and it's going to be a long road, but you have thousands on hours of play time before you're playing anywhere near the level where that stuff is an absolute necessity. Again, it's important and you'll have to learn it to progress into the ranks of the truly ridiculous players, but there is a huge cushion in place that let's you really enjoy the game and be successful with it, without having to kill yourself grinding execution.
Shrug. A pointless post, but I just got done arguing with a rl friend of mine who refused to pick up the game because he thinks before you can even function in it you have to have 150hrs of execution practice and during our argument I really came to understand that for a lot of people, Tekken is a very mysterious game full of strange, arcane and obscure stuff that can seem totally impenetrable for some people.
I want t7 not just to succeed, but to THRIVE and the more new blood we bring in, the better. The game is so good that you don't have to make a bunch of excuses for it like I always had to with SFV - most people if they just sit down with an open mind will be hooked. We just gotta get 'em to sit down with that open mind first.
