Tekken 7 Story Preview – The King is Back, Baby!
Some of you might have caught me in my sick King cosplay last week, all decked up in my leopard mask, as I made my way to Bandai Namco’s offices to play the first eight chapters of Tekken 7’s story mode. And, boy, am I completely sold on it. Check out our previous gameplay preview too!
Tekken 7 aims to be a far more cinematic and personal experience than other games in the series, focusing on a news reporter who is searching for Heihachi. Of course, he isn’t the only one looking for one of the series’ biggest antagonists and his sons as they wage war across the globe.
The news reporter narrates the games events as well as explaining his own story, and I’m not sure who he is yet. Is he an existing character? Who knows? All I know is that he has a deeply personal stake in the games events, and that the Tekken universe is the most volatile that it’s ever been. If you were wondering, like I was then yes, Akuma is actually a part of the story — and a big one at that!
Having completed the eight chapters available to me, and failing to find out how many chapters there are in the overall story, within roughly 90 minutes, I can only guess that it’ll last a good handful of hours more as the story seemed to be setting itself up still at that point. I mostly played as Heihachi and when I wasn’t, I was playing as someone who had close ties to him.
Heihachi has always been central to Tekken but with everyone believing he was dead, and with his return, the world has been thrown into chaos as one of the strongest humans alive is left unaccounted for. Flashbacks take us back to previous games too with past battles being fought, and many familiar faces returning.
We’ve spoken about Tekken 7’s gameplay before and so I won’t go into depth on it now, but there are some additions to the battles in story mode that I’d like to talk about. Whilst the game itself boasts in-depth mechanics that’ll please any hardcore fighting game aficionado, the story mode is much more accessible so that anybody can enjoy the story. Special moves can be triggered via L1 and a corresponding face button, with “Rage Arts” being performed with a quick click of the R1 button.
This certainly makes it easier to proceed although I still had some difficulty — I assume I played on normal and I wasn’t able to change it, and sadly I had to retry a handful of battles. Shame on me, but a handful of those Jack models in a row pinned me down and gave me a savage beating!
Another addition is the use of guns. When equipping a gun in battle, in this case Lars, you can only shoot and roll — this is great for minor foes (like when waves of soldiers or Jack models with low health attack you one after another), which is what I used it on, but I imagine in a proper battle it would be easy to get past and you have to manually unequip it to fight normally. Despite the abundance of action on-screen, Tekken 7 manages to be operate smoothly and its CGI cutscenes are gorgeous. You can see that Bandai Namco have really put the time into the series’ latest instalment, as it’s looking better than ever with its grandest scope yet.
With the King of the Iron Fist tournament once again underway, Tekken 7 aims to be one of the most diverse, deep and enjoyable fighters on PS4, Xbox One and PC. It releases on the 2nd June worldwide on each of the previously listed platforms, and you can bet that we’ll be sharing our thoughts on the full release!
Our preview of the gameplay is right here too as a video:
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