The new king of portable fighting: Tekken: Dark Resurrection is here!
Obviously, the Tekken series has always been known to have amazing graphics. Dark Resurrection does not break that tradition. The character models are well rendered and detailed, making this the PSP’s best looking title on the market. The environments are also well done, providing arenas expanding from a lush field of flowers to a barren wasteland that is the final stage. The PSP version of Tekken is not without its share of problems, though. While the frame rate is smooth and steady, it drags down a bit during the cutscenes. The PSP’s refresh rate also makes way to the ghosting effect found in PSP games as well as the usual jaggies on the characters. Little things aside though, it is extremely impressive that Dark Resurrection can manage to put the beautiful graphics that the series is known for onto a small screen---at 60 fps no less!
The audio in Dark Resurrection, though, isn’t as great as the graphics, but it’s still fantastic. The soundtrack has a wide variety of tunes. One stage, you may be hearing an earthly chorus accompanied by the smooth melody of a violin, while in another one, you will hear fast and furious techno music booming through your PSP’s speakers. The V/O is serviceable at best, though. While characters like Jin and Kazuya still sound like they should, characters like Anna Williams and Steve might be a little over the top when it comes to voices, like all of the other Tekken games. Overall, though, the audio does its job by making visceral sound effects and a beautiful and fiery score.
The real draw of the Tekken series has always been its in-depth fighting and Dark Resurrection not only manages to surpass its minor flaws, but it’s also the best game in the series, thanks to its new modes and characters and its portability. Remember the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? That applies to Dark Resurrection. Casual fans may not know this, but the hardcore fans know that Dark Resurrection is actually a port of both the console version of Tekken 5 and its arcade counterpart, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection. As for not fixing anything, that applies to the controls. Simply put, the control scheme is absolutely fantastic in the way they designed it. The triangle and square buttons control your hands and the circle and X buttons to control your feet. For gamers used to other fighting games like Street Fighter, this may be a little bit confusing. But it is so intuitive, that all of the complaints that it’s too complex from DOA fans might as well just die out. There are also a great number of modes to try out. Sure, you have your standard quick, story, arcade, and versus modes that have always been hallmarks of the Tekken franchise, but you also have a requisite single-player ranking system, the blast-to-the-past Tekken Bowl mode from Tekken 3, an excellent ghost swap mode, and the awesome Tekken Dojo, where you fight other AI opponents to get your rank up. By themselves, they don’t do much to the game, but when combined with each other, they make the already great game even better.
If I were to say that there were any problems, there would probably be two of them. The first one is that the controls are a little bit complex. It’s not the game or the configuration; it’s the system itself. Simply put, the PSP doesn’t have the fluidity of controls on the D-Pad that you would find on the PS2. But you get used to it after a while. The second problem is that there is no infrastructure versus mode. Sure, you can trade ghosts over the internet and the ad-hoc mode that comes with it is very smooth, but it would have been much more satisfying to play a match of Tekken with someone from Japan, just to see how they would fight. But really, those are very little problems compared to the overall product.
Nowadays, we have been getting either good but direct-to-PSP ports or great original games that are completely marred by technical issues. With Tekken: Dark Resurrection, we get not only an excellent fighting game that feels more like it was made for the PSP than a console, but also beautiful graphics that prove that you don’t need to make extreme compromises to a great game. It’s a near-perfect game that deserves to be in anyone’s collection.