Alright, I'm going to post some impressions after having played the game for quite a few hours for the past couple of days including a great session with friends last night.
Bare in mind though, that I'm no hardcore competetive player, but I have been a fan since the PSX days.
I shared the same sentiments with a couple of people posting in here when I first got the game. Outside of the bitter bunch that use ridiculously awkward hyperboles to express their dissapointments of course. The aliasing really bothered me and I didn't care much for Scenario Campaign mode.
I think it's a really great game now though. This might be the best Tekken yet. It doesn't break any new grounds whatsoever, but it does offer the excellent gameplay from T5 but even smoother while offering a huge selection of great characters and features.
I also think the game looks great. I was a little bothered by the aliasing, some of the low res shadows and ground/background textures, but after playing for a while the whole thing just seems to come together. I barely notice the aliasing anymore, but find myself rather appreciating the excellent lighting, models and animations. Ironically Soul Calibur 4 had the same effect on me. I also switched the motion blur back on as it adds way more than the slightly more anti-aliasing. It's not as brilliant looking as a next-gen Tekken game I hoped would look like, but it's easily the best looking fighter currently out there.
Rage does add a slighty different tactic to the game. It creates extra tension to finish off your opponent quickly because the damage increase is quite significant. Not too sure if I think it's an improvement though. It also causes matches that go down evenly ending rather abruptly, but oh well.
Azazel isn't too bad. If you know your character well, you will defeat him quickly. If you don't, you might however find yourself dying over and over. It's a rather silly design flaw in fighters. All the fights up to the boss are way too easy, yet the difficulty increase on the final boss is way too steep.
Really digging the new characters and even more all the new moves the old ones got. Alissa kinda pissed me off though. One of my friends "discovered" her last night and she is really annoying to play against. Can't tell half the time if her silly slaps are low or middle hits.
Scenario Campain is actually more fun than I thought. I still cannot fathom why they would choose such a camera and targeting system, but hey. I'm impressed how they actually managed to get every character and their complete(?) moveset in there. After playing for a while I actually find it plays more than the actually Tekken game I thought it would at first. There's also a whole lot of levels/chapters. I consider this mode more of extra to the main game, but it adds more gameplay than I expected. Still dissapointed though they didn't go for a static camera. One more like in DMC/GOW games or perhaps even better 2.5D like in the Lego Starwars/batman games. At least that would've give the option to throw in local co-op. Having local co-op would've made it so much better.
I haven't tried online yet. So I'll get back to you guys on that after having tested it properly. I just hope Namco is planning on giving this game lots of support for its online component.
So yeah, enjoying this game immensly. It's still Tekken and it's good.
If you're a Tekken fan I would say this is a must buy.
If you're a fighting game fan, but never tried Tekken I would very much recommend this.
If you're looking for some sort of epic singleplayer experience, your money is probably better spent elsewhere. Scenario Campain is more of an extra, but even outside that you would still find many hours of gameplay in the main game versus the cpu.
If you're looking for a great online comptetive scene you might want to hold out for now. We will have to see how that turns out.
