Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Solid"

Its roughly been 3 weeks since Tekken 6 was brought to consoles. By now, if you haven't had your share of the King of Iron Fist Tournament 6, you're missing out on a very high quality fighting game. If you don't own either consoles, but have a PSP and love fighters, you'll probably want to pick this up. Lets get to the pros and cons for this game:

Pros
- Robust Character Selection ( 40 in all )
- A faithful port of the bigger versions
- Looks beautiful on a hand held system
- If you love technical fighting games, this is up there in technicality
- Customization for characters still rocks
- Adhoc play and Ghost downloads still prove to be a success.

Cons
- Pulling off stuff might be a little harder on a PSP
- No scenario mode
- No extra games like Tekken Bowl
- Story Battles are awfully fast, like the console versions
- If you want faster loading times, you have to install at least 380 Megs of Data to your Memory stick
- Other than fighting, there's really not much you can do here

The Review

When word got out that Tekken 6 was being ported to the PSP, few believe that Namco could really up their skills with even higher quality game than Tekken Dark Resurrection. Dark Resurrection at the time in 2006 push the PSP's hardware to it's limits and the result was a fantastic fighting game that pleased many audiences. 3 Years later, and Namco has done another successful job porting a solid fighter, although there a lot of the console idea couldn't make it to the PSP. Scenario Mode is a perfect example. Usually you have to complete this mode in order to unlock Lars and Alisa's ending, but now this is substituted by the Story Battle, in which both characters have their own storyline to go through.

Speaking of Lars and Alisa, they are two newest characters out of the 6. The others include Zafina, Leo, Miguel, and Bob. All 6 of these characters with the other 34 available make for a very interesting challenge to learn. As it pertains to the fighting system, all these characters seem to balance quite well, and there really isn't an overpowered character ( unless you put the boss character Azazel in the picture. ) The favorites, Kazuya, Jin, Julia, Steve Fox, Marshall Law and others make their return to the ring, each with their own storyline.

The fighting system in Tekken 6 hasn't changed much, but their are two new additions to it. One addition is the bound or bounce system. Juggles are an important aspect in Tekken, and this system's priorities are now you can continue combos when an opponent bounces of the ground, provided you use a finish part of a combo with a move that has that bounce priority. You can then continue the combo to deal more damage. The second new upgrade is the rage system. When your opponent falls below 15-20% of their life, their health bars will flash red. This means you have enter rage mode, which increases your attack power and gives you hopes in making a comeback.

Most of the modes available all are related to the fighting arena. Arcade is a faithful port of the arcade version of Tekken 6, in which you go through various stages to make it to the last battle with Azazel. Story Battle is a shortened mode in which you play each character to learn their stories. The Challenge battle is survival mode, time attack, and gold rush, but there's no team battle this time around. Network allows you to play adhoc and download ghosts from friends and the internet. Unfortunately there's still no online for Tekken 6. Your profile mode allows you to customize your character. There's a lot here that can be purchased, but this mode has a few minor setbacks. The console versions allow you to switch certain things out, like gloves or have any arm accessories. This is no longer here, it's all upper body and lower body material, but it still a very fun thing to use when you want to create your own character.

Getting to the gameplay itself, if you're familiar with Tekken, you'll definitely feel right at home. The matches play very well, and the game runs a full 60 FPS. However, they have cut out the replay portion of the matches after KOs ( Why they did this is uncertain. ) Regardless, the fighting mechanics are still top notch even for a portable game.

So the verdict here is that Tekken 6 proves to be a successful baby port of its big brothers. While not nearly as robust as the console version, this game is still worth a purchase on the PSP, be it UMD or digital download on the PSN Store. There's a lot here you can improve on if you don't have the console versions, and even if you do, this version still is successful in every way.