Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Namco’s forthcoming — and highly anticipated — beat-em-up, is bringing back a lot of great features that fans will love, including the ability to “tag” in a second fighter to gain an advantage, as well as various online modes. However, this week at PAX Prime, Namco Bandai, the game’s publisher, opted to show us something just a little bit different — something that’s bound to draw in a huge fighting community. Get ready for the World Tekken Federation mode.
This feature, which will go live day one with the game once it launches next week, is described best by Namco Bandai: “It’s a premium online service that delivers fans an unprecedented set of analytical tools to take their fight to the next level. With detailed player cards, instant match data uploads, battle history metrics, opponent analysis, team creation and management, and community engagement functionality, the way you fight has been massively revolutionized.”
In a nutshell, it’s an online service that pretty much tracks every statistic you’ve ever wanted tracked in a fighting game. Not just character selections or which “favorites” you’ve developed over the years, mind you, but also a number of other features, including strikes, combos, and more.
The World Tekken Federation mode actually records fights in their entirety, so you can actually relive them at any time (or share them with others) through the online plan. We had a chance to see this in action when we challenged a fellow Namco Bandai brawler to a fight over five rounds, with Bob going head on against King with a couple of female fighters in tow. The match was good, but what really took us for a loop was watching the results of said fight through replay. Though it’s not entirely interactive, it allows you to get a “study up” of sorts on your opponents, seeing whether they’re really skilled at chaining together combos, or simply going for the “cheap” moves to cut energy down to size.
Each match also tracks performance metrics, as Namco Bandai explained above. Every punch, kick and throw is tracked over the course of your progress, and if you have access to a PC or mobile device, you can actually look at analytical charts, seeing how it all comes together and what you can work on with specific characters when it comes to defeat. Again, Namco Bandai showed us a hands-off model of this system in action, and it was quite breathtaking, almost as detailed as something you’d find in Activision’s Call of Duty Elite service. Granted, it’s different for fighting over first-person shooters, though fans will certainly appreciate what’s going into it.
Along with the tracking details, World Tekken Federation also gives you the opportunity to really get together a strong fighting community. Custom teams can actually be created over the course of matches, enabling you to unlock Achievements and Trophies in your respected version of the game (be it Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3) as well as other bonuses. As part of a “clan”, you’re also able to create your own custom logo for your team. Once it’s finished up, you can show it off to the world with your selected fighters, either on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.
For instance, with the one we created, a black heart with a fighting panda plastered on top, we simply selected from a gaggle of available wallpapers and templates (which open up as you progress in the game). Once your choices are made, you can lock them in, and they stick with your team, no matter what you decide on doing, whether it’s fighting or tracking individual statistics.
As part of the community feature, World Tekken Federation also connects to leaderboards around the world, so you can track your fighting progress with other combatants throughout the world. Want to see how close you are to topping Heihachi’s skills compared with other expert players around the world? Log in and check out all the details. The game also supports Twitter updates between you and your team, so you can easily share your progress and then continue to build upon it.
And as we stated, the World Tekken Federation mode comes with a series of unlocks, through both Battle Points earned over the course of each match and in-game currency, allowing you to unlock even more goodies. Namco Bandai didn’t quite show us the extent of what all was available, but you can probably imagine it’ll be a whopping amount.
Best of all, Namco will be offering this for free, across the board. You won’t have to pay a membership fee or “Premium” charge for all this, it’ll be active and good to go from day one. And considering the game’s already sky-high critical scores, that’s good news for Tekken fans everywhere.
Be on the lookout for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 — and the online World Tekken Federation service — when it launches on September 11th. Now let’s fight!
Published: Sep 5, 2012 04:28 pm