Tekken 2
1995 · Fighting · Arcade
About Tekken 2
Tekken 2 (1995) is Namco's 3D fighting sequel with 25 fighters, a boxing kangaroo among them, whose PlayStation version introduced the series' Survival, Team Battle and Practice modes and sold 5.7 million copies.
Tekken 2 in Depth
The fighting system keeps Tekken's four buttons, one for each limb, 2D backgrounds and a playing field with no edges. New are attack reversals for some characters, back throws, chain throws and a sidestep for Kazuya and Heihachi, while Yoshimitsu gets a spinning sidestep that costs him health. Tackles do damage when made from a long run. Beating arcade mode with one of the ten starting characters unlocks that character's sub-boss.
There are 25 playable fighters, 17 returning and eight new. Characters who were clones in the first game became distinct, though they still share many moves, and Devil Kazuya, a palette swap in the first game's home version, is now a separate final boss. The newcomers include Jun Kazama, an animal-rights activist sent to arrest Kazuya; the Hong Kong police officer Lei Wulong; the taekwondo fighter Baek Doo San; the amnesiac kickboxer Bruce Irvin; and two genetically altered boxers, the kangaroo Roger and the dinosaur Alex. The story picks up two years after the first tournament: Kazuya, consumed by the Devil within him, runs the Mishima Zaibatsu, and Heihachi, who survived being thrown off a cliff, enters Kazuya's new tournament for revenge. The PlayStation version added CGI endings for every character.
Making Tekken 2
Development took about seven months before the arcade release in August 1995, with an updated Ver. B in October. It became Japan's most successful arcade game in Game Machine's 15 September 1995 issue and the country's highest-grossing arcade game of 1996, and sold about 40,000 arcade units worldwide. Yoshie Takayanagi and Yoshie Arakawa composed most of the music.
The 1996 PlayStation version sold over 1.2 million copies in Japan that year, making it the year's best-selling game there, and nearly a million in North America within four months; it reached 5.7 million worldwide. It holds a 93% GameRankings average. EGM's Crispin Boyer called it "the best 3-D fighting game you can find for any system", and critics singled out its practice mode as a feature that would become standard. Tekken 3 followed in 1997.
Tekken 2 Trivia
- Roger the kangaroo began as a team member's spare-time project, which colleagues pushed to put in the game.
- Roger, Alex and the devil were added partly to break with the realism of Virtua Fighter.
- Each character has roughly 800 polygons and took three days to a week to model.
- The PlayStation has roughly half the memory used by the arcade game's data, so much of the conversion went into rewriting code to fit.
- Footballer David James blamed his passion for the game for a decline in his performance.
Sources & further reading
- Tekken 2 — Wikipedia
