Played a whole lot of Tekken 7 today. Here is what I have to say.
#1: Most Important: I have said this before that no one should make a decision about not liking a game or hating on it before actually playing it. The moment Tekken 7 was announced, a lot of people had already made the decision to not buy. Overtime, others from here have similarly made that decision for varying reasons.
I can tell you one thing. It's that Tekken 7 is FUN. It's very fun. And if you've already made the decision to ignore this franchise, then it's going to be your loss, no one else's. Especially as a Tekken fan, it's not a game to be missed out on. Once you play it and see it all in action in front of your eyes, it's hard to hate on it.
#2: Visuals: Game is truly stunning to look at. As ZTS mentioned, every few minutes there were new people coming to spectate matches and seemed impressed from what I could tell. Game is definitely a looker. But with that said, there are definitely some issues that they need to resolve. Katrina's hair, for example, clips like crazy. Some of the character models could definitely use some improvements. Stages are largely flawless though.
#3: Hit effects: Already apparent from YouTube videos but no game comes even close to Tekken 7 with hit effects. So many sparks and the closeup of the camera during certain attacks helps to add to the awesomeness. It's amazing to see the whole screen light up with all these particles.
#4: Sound: I don't know if it was the speakers of the arcade cabinets but the sounds generated from hits were really amazing to hear. If you thought attacks sounded meaty in YouTube videos, wait till you hear it in person. But if it was just the magic of the arcade cabinet speakers, then I'm definitely getting a sound bar just for this game. It's all so satisfying to hear. I don't even want to talk about background music. The hit sounds are the real music to your ears.
#5: Lag: There were definitely some noticeable instances of offline in-game lag. Hoping they fix this by console launch.
#6: Characters: For new characters, I mainly focused on Katarina and Claudio since they interest me most. Sorry Chloe, Gigas, Josie, Kazumi, and Shaheen. Playing all of them at once would have been too much for me. Katarina and Claudio are both extremely fun to play with and very easy to pick up. I would definitely recommend either one of them to people new to Tekken. Katarinas knee and Claudio's running punch are even more vicious-looking in person and so satisfying to land. For returning characters, I picked Lili, Dragunov, Ling, and Yoshi. Also fun.
#7: Mechanics/Controls: As some of you might know already, I'm not at all experienced with stick so I wasn't able to make proper movement, messed up a lot of commands, and dropped a lot of combos.
Sidestep/sidewalk/backdash: Cant say much since i was jumping half the time while trying to sidestep. :lol
Ragearts: These can produce some really hype moments both when they land and when they don't. For example, there was a moment when Dragunov did his rage art and I pressed 3+4 with Lili. Lili jumped over the attack and did her head step kick winning me the round.
Power Crush: These can also produce really hype moments (again both when they land and when they fail). There was a point when one Dragunov did a three hit string that led to a KO while a power crush was going on. Didn't even give the power crush a chance to finish. lol.
#8: Features: Slowdown is one of the best things to happen to fighting games. Really great for those ending clutch moments.
#9: Players: There were around 7 people there when I first got there but people later dispersed and more came and went. Only person I recognized was nycfab because he was my very first opponent in Apex pools. Haha. He was mostly playing Steve. I guess that's his replacement character for Miguel. He's a nice guy. The other players there were nice too.
Once you actually play the game, you just forget about all the negatives. It's really truly a fun Tekken game and shouldn't be missed by any Tekken fan and, more broadly, by any fighting game fan. I really loved what I played.
The greatest moment was when there was a whole family of like 7 people standing behind me cheering on their family member who was most just mashing buttons with law and doing cool stuff. I let him get 2 rounds. Each time he won, his family roared and cheered. It was great.
Despite my terrible play on stick, I was still able to maintain some composure at least.
Law is also very good in this game from what i saw. Here and at evo. Shaheen seems also like on of the top characters i think. But i am just a beginner there are probably people who can give a more expert judgement then me.
