Everyone whom knows me knows that I love Tekken. While I've been anticipating the release of Tekken 6 for a couple of years now (and having a go at the new Bloodline Rebellion game every chance I can get), the soon to be released game has some interesting developments. One such has come from the game's director, Katsuhiro Harada, whom is quoted as saying from a Namco Bandai event that unlocking characters is oudated, thanks to online play. And as such, Tekken 6 will feature all 40 characters unlocked right from the get go. You can read more here

It's an interesting statement by Harada, at least to me. I'm one of the few people that actually doesn't mind unlocking characters in fighting games, mainly because for the most part, it's pretty easy to do.Yet apparently people are sick of it. I remember around the time of the release of Street Fighter IV, people were complaining that they had to unlock characters. In fact, people are still complaning - Gamespot AU's Randolph Ramsay just updated his Twitter mentioning that "Sometime today I have to unlock all the characters for the 360 version of SFIV again. As Shakespeare once said, life's a b****." Hell, the upcoming re-release of Marvel vs Capcom 2 has all its characters unlocked from the get-go.

I never quite understood why people were complaning. After all, three of the better (and more easily abusable) characters were already unlocked from the get go (Ken, Blanka and Sagat), and really, none of the more popular characters (such as Ryu or Chun-Li) were unlockable anyway - it was only the newer characters added to the home console version of the game.

A lot of why I don't mind unlocking characters in fighting games is that for the most part, it's both easy to do, and can get you using each character. For the 'easy unlocks', let's use Namco's Tekken and Soul Calibur series as examples. The method of unlocking characters in Tekken and in some of the Soul Calibur games is two-fold - either beat arcade/story mode a certain amount of times, or take part in a certain number of fights. In theory, you could unlock all the characters by just playing as the one character over and over again, but some of the unlocks required a bit more work. For instance, Tekken 5 had the character Devil Jin, whom was only unlockable by completing the otherwise unmemorable "Devil Within" mini-game or play around 500 or so fights. Because I've never beaten Devil Within (it's terrible), and I play more multiplayer than anything else, it's easier that way for me to get all the characters.

The example also applies to Soul Calibur III. Back when I had a copy of the game, there was a well known glitch where if you deleted or moved data from your memory card, your save game became corrupt. I was lucky enough that it didn't completely destroy all my progress, but one of the modes in the game - the new and hyped up mode "Chronicles of the Sword" was completely unavailable to me, thanks to the corruption. This was the only way to unlock certain characters and creation parts. As well as that, unlocking the sub-boss of the game was ridiculous - thanks to you being forced to go down a specific path for each character and not losing a fight. Not easy when the game is completely broken. Though thanks to playing a large number of fights, I managed to get most of the unlocks - save for the stuff you need to play Chronicles of the Sword.

So what of the other example - using each character? Here, the two examples I want to use are Virtua Fighter 5 and Street Fighter IV. VF5's sole unlockable character, Dural, could only be unlocked by beating arcade mode with each character. Considering that each character played differently from one another, it was recommended you spent some time in the training modes to understand how to play each character. Though the benefit you got from the game was that you technically never needed to beat the last fight against Dural. Either beating her or losing against her earns you a completition for that character, so it made playing through the game somewhat decent.

As for Street Fighter, it was only required to get the last unlockable character - final boss Seth. Unlike VF, SF4 features several characters that play practically the same (six in fact - Ryu, Sakura, Ken, Dan, Akuma and Gouken), so it's easy in that regard. Granted, you had to deal with a stupidly cheap boss in the form of Seth, but there were ways around it...by setting the game to 1 round, 30 second timer and on the easiest difficulty setting. Granted, people might think that this is annoying because they're forced to use characters they're not familiar with (or can't abuse like crazy), but really - it's better overall that you have an idea how to play as each character. Makes you a better player and all.

Despite this, there can be some fighters where unlocking characters is a pain. Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a prime example. Here, half of the 56 playable characters (well, technically 55) were made playable, with the rest unlocked via a mode known as Secret Factor. By playing the game, you'd earn points that were spent to go towards unlocking stuff - stages, characters, colours, artwork etc. But the problem was that it took bloody ages to do, and some of the more familiar and better characters in the game (such as Sentinel, Storm, Magneto, Akuma, Ken and more) were locked. Furthermore, each of the unlockables came in a 'tiering' system, and before you could move onto the next 'tier', you had to spend a certain number of points, which meant you had to buy stuff you otherwise wouldn't normally get (like a stage). So you could imagine how grateful I was to Capcom that the upcoming re-release includes all the characters already unlocked.

As for the online play making fighters outdated...I can see Harada's point. After all, it wouldn't be quite fair for someone to take on another player whom has the best character in the game unlocked. Super Smash Bros Brawl did it like this also - where online, all the characters were already unlocked. SF4 handled it in an interesting way, where if you had all the unlocked characters and your opponent didn't, they could use all your unlocked characters; which I guess is fair.

It's an interesting statement, and something that I'd love to discuss more on this weeks Level 3 podcast...should we do one. Though I'm interested in your take - should fighting games already come with all its characters pre-unlocked? If you've got an answer to this question, leave a comment. I'm interested in your responses.

Later.