Tekken 5 Devil Within Mode Thoughts and Partial Review

This was a weird game for me to be playing. I got a weird and random urge to play Tekken again and with the recent Tekken Bloodline anime pretty much being stuck on hold indefintely, I decided to play more of the Tekken game I recall liking the most, I played Tekken 7 and just found to be alright.

With all that said, I played T5 at first for the Devil Within mode since I tend to like fighting games better when they resemble beat em ups, like for example Granblue Fantasy Versus' RPG mode or a spin off example being Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks. If anything, I'm surprised Namco even put in a mode like this at all since if you wanted to play full on beat em ups or melee brawler at the time, God of War and Devil May Cry 3 among the myraids of other games at the time were probably better options on the PS2. At the same time, say if you were a kid, or someone who could only afford one game and couldn't get other games on the PS2 at the time, this mode is a rather fascinating addition that didn't really need to be included but they did anyway, so it's worth giving a look. It's why I played the game at all. A beat em up game where you play as Jin Kazama? Sign me up.

First impressions are weird, punch is mapped to square, kick and secondary attack is mapped to cross, and you can't chain combos together despite this being based on the timeplate of a fighting where one of the things that is effective is chaining combos. You get special moves sort of like older God of War's L1 face button attacks and like older GOW, you can't chain into these or dodge of these attacks either. Holding R1 locks on to enemies and circle allows you to dodge but pressing circle alone is just a jump. You can also transform into Devil Jin by holding L1 and triangle. All though the mode never outright tells you much of this and you might need to look up a guide online to do this. An image of what all the button inputs are going to do isn't going to be enough.

To add to all this, there is also platforming and puzzles, the platforming is kind of "okay" but not great since Jin's double jump and ledge grab isn't entirely consistent, you might need to press the jump multiple times to have Jin grab something. The puzzles are okay and it's nice that Namco tries to break up the pace from the beat em up combat kind of like a traditional action game with adventuring elements even if many of the puzzles revolve around, "go to room, bust up generator or platform up certain areas to bust up generator". To the game's credit by Stage 3, things start getting more elaborate, all though the more elobarate it got the more I lost interest. The part in Stage 3 where it resembled the 00s Ninja Gaiden game's "Crypt" level was when I slowly losing interest. The level required you to find a door that look the same as many other doors nearby while dealing with super precise platforming.

The game also brings in new enemies too which surprising to me but I was starting to get bored due to the following reasons:

Bosses are also cheap, can stuck lock you and pummel you to death, and the lock on zooms into the enemy too much to get a good reading to dodge out of the way.

When Stage 4 happened, I gave up on the game, the platform challenges were getting too numerous and the controls were not good enough to be a full on platformer and enemies were starting to hit harder too and puzzles were getting more obtuse, I could've solved them but I was just losing interest. These platforming controls are not good enough for the game to rely on having insta kill death pits for added challenge.

Then I started to play Tekken 5 for the actual game itself, the fighting game, and I started to enjoy the game more, I beat the arcade or "story mode" as Kazuya and Jin(also because the Mishima family are the characters Tekken's canon revolves around primarily), and the CPU is hard difficult even on easy but due to this, I might've understood some aspects of the game and even the fighting game genre as a whole better. I was starting to block, trying to time my grabs, resorting to going low, trying to mix up low and high strikes, doing running attacks and so on. I'm by no means an "expert" but I may have learned the genre better in some ways due to Tekken 5's CPU being so anti noob friendly.

So overall, I do like Tekken 5, but not for the reasons I thought I would, it's a good game in a genre I mainly play casually. I thought I was going to really dig Devil Within but instead I liked T5 for the thing you bought the game for, who would've thought.