Tekken 5 is graphically the most advanced Tekken title yet. As if to help drive the point home, they have taken the liberty of including nearly straight arcade ports of Tekkens 1-3 on the disc with Tekken 5. This, by the way, means that if you scoop up Tekken 5 and a copy of Tekken 4, you’ll pretty much have the collection.

The sounds effects are well done, and the environment has a nice interactive feel to it. Knocking an opponent into the wall is likely to knock a part of the wall off, although this is in certain specific areas in each arena. Knocking an opponent into the ground can break concrete as well, but this is a temporary effect that is “fixed” the next time it occurs. In other words, if you break the ground in one spot and then break the ground a few feet away, the first area will magically be “healed.” As a programmer, I appreciate the difficulty involved in making a truly destructible environment, but having a single ground effect that is reused every time the effect re-occurs can be a bit distracting when the occurrences are close to each other.

One interesting aspect of Tekken 5 is the inclusion of a third-person adventure game called Tekken: Devil Within, which puts you in the shoes of Jin Kazama, infiltrating the Mishima compound. The story is not necessarily riveting, but the gameplay is fun. I found my wife and I both wound up playing this for over an hour on our (respective) first time to play the game. Part of the draw is the novelty, but it’s fun. It gets repetitious at times, but its only real drawback is the apparent inability to save your progress.

When you get past that, you have the regular Tekken modes, including Story Battle, Arcade, Time Attack, Vs. (Two-player mode), Team Battle, Survival, and Practice modes.

But wait, that’s not all! If you order now, you also get the entire classic Tekken collection as well in the Arcade History Mode! Call Now. Operators are standing by... I mean, well... Included with Tekken 5, you get the classic Arcade Collection (on the same disc), containing Tekken, Tekken 2, and Tekken 3. These seem to be nearly straight ports from the arcade. Not only can you play the game, there’s a test mode you can go into and you can run many of the tests that the arcade unit had, such as the polygon test, the controller test, etc. Only the tests that really wouldn’t make sense are disabled, such as the coin slot test. (Your PS2 really shouldn’t have a coin slot on it anyway.) Additionally, the Arcade History mode includes Starblade, the 3D sci-fi shoot-em-up game that is featured during the initial loading of Tekken 5.

Now, you’re going to want to set up a character profile for yourself pretty early on. That way you can start earning “fight money” toward buying costume upgrades and accessories for your characters early. These can cost quite a bit. I suggest having some friends over and everyone taking turns (on the same profile) in the Arcade mode, racking up as many points as possible so that you can unlock some cool costumes and accessories. This isn’t the kind of feature that makes or breaks a game, but it’s a fun extra.

The difficulty of a task depends entirely on one’s goal. In other words, if you are trying to play on the hardest level against the A.I., you may find it very difficult to win. However, you can set the difficulty to Medium or Easy to make winning less difficult. Also, you can play a two-player game against a friend with comparable skills. Finally, you can play in the Practice mode until your skills are good enough for the above options, if necessary.

The only aspect of Tekken 5 that I found aggravating was the fact that the ground breakage was regenerated every time a new section was damaged. This can be a bit distracting. However, the damage done to the sides of the arenas seems to be a bit more permanent. The trick is to only use as much resources as needed to create the visual effect you’re looking for. This is quite common in game development. However, the effect is very “showy” and often stays centered in the screen when a second ground-shattering blow occurs. This is when it becomes visible; it’s blatant enough that you can notice it while you’re still concentrating on playing the game. That’s the only reason I’m mentioning it.

Other than that little rant, Tekken 5 is an excellent game with lots of extras. From five completely separate games to some cool character customization, you’ll find hours and hours of fun to be had.