I’ve played Tekken: Dark Resurrection for over 20 hours now. Well, 20.08 hours to be exact. I know this because the game keeps tracks of things like that. The game’s records also show my win/loss record is 543W/411L and my rank playing as Sergei Dragunov (who I’ve played 87.5% of the time) is Legend.
I’m especially proud of that high ranking because I’ve been playing on the Hard difficulty setting for the past week. The AI foes are, as you might expect, more capable and my tougher battles are usually against nimble opponents like Marshall Law, Lei Wulong, Baek Doo San etc. Fights are often very close affairs; I’m capable of beating my opponents to within an inch of their life but then they’ll go into a frenzy and unleash a vicious multiple-hit combo.
I rely heavily on simple one-hit moves and my basic tactic, which has proven surprisingly effective, is to wait for my opponent to move towards me, take a whack and then resume waiting in a guarding stance for another counterhit opportunity.
Using those simple tactics, I won Survival mode (albeit on the Medium difficulty setting) and used the one million gold I earned to unlock all the character movies I had not seen. Having seen them all, I have to say Hworang‘s is the coolest while the endings for Panda and Kuma have to be seen to be believed.
Houses of pain
I then moved on to Tekken Dojo mode which involves competing against representations of other players’ fighting styles called ghosts. The ghost concept astonished me at first. What kind of voodoo magic would have to be involved in order to synthesize a player’s fighting style so accurately it can predict that player’s reaction to an opponent’s move? It turns out ghosts aren’t accurate representations of players’ fighting styles so I didn’t bother creating a ghost of my own.
In Dojo mode, you join a dojo to compete in leagues and knockout tournaments in order to become champion. This unlocks the next dojo with higher-ranked opponents. You begin with the Earth Dojo, which has opponents ranked from Beginner to 3rd kyu, move on to the Water Dojo (5th kyu to 3rd dan), the Fire Dojo (1st dan to Shihan), the Wind Dojo (6st dan to Champion) and the Void Dojo (Master to Legend). Once you earn the top spot in the Void Dojo, you’re awarded 3,000,000g and unlock the Heaven Dojo.
I haven’t beaten the last one yet and I don’t expect to do so very soon since it’s got opponents ranked from Sage to Tekken Lord. I was ranked Fujin earlier but had to suffer the ignominy of being demoted after receiving several thrashings.
Ghosts in the machine
You’ll also unlock the Yurin Dojo early on and this will be filled with player ghosts you’ve downloaded from the Net or transferred from another player. The easiest way to do this is to use the PSP’s WiFi connection in either AdHoc or Infrastructure mode.
If you don’t have a WiFi connection, you can still get ghosts on your machine but you’ll have to do it manually. First, download a Ghost Pack (a compilation of player ghosts either from fansites or the official site) to your PC before transferring it to your PSP’s memory stick. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I ought to do with the files at this point. There are listed folder locations for US, Japan and Europe versions of the game but not the Region 3 (a.k.a Asian) version that I own.
I could experiment but at this point, I think I need a break from being thrashed by the AI.
Time to unwrap Field Commander.
