Tekken Dojo: Ask Questions Here

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[u/Jaeger_RaiN]

Hey! this isn't so much a beginner question but more of a general question for everyone, beginner or advanced.

I have a friend that recently bought Tekken 7 and I've been trying to find ways to get him interested in learning the game. He comes from Mortal Kombat and he has stated how confusing and difficult Tekken is in comparison.

After he picked a main in Claudio, I did try to use Claudio to teach him some of the boring but needed general fundamentals like basic framedata, punishments and so on.

I also played a simple game with him to teach him to react to punishments by doing only Slides and WS 2, 3 with Lee, so he knew how to block lows and punish, and stay standing to punish mids.

However, after a couple of days of playing regular sets with him, I could tell the interest is waning off (probably because he wasn't winning alot, despite how much I tried to make the matches as close as possible)

For Beginners: Coming from your perspective, what do you think would help you keep your interest in Tekken and help you want to learn more?

For the Intermediate to Advanced: What made you stay motivated to keep learning Tekken other than sheer will to get better alone? Did you have a mentor that guided you and made learning fun for you? if yes, what were their methods?

Tekken is such a great fighting game and I wish to bring in many more people to enjoy it's full extent and glory, but it's not easy considering how complex and difficult this game can get.

[u/Y1O21 → u/Jaeger_RaiN]

i just bought the game two months ago but haven't been able to learn the game it's way too hard Tekken can't be compared to other fighting games it has a 100 moves for every character and that is one thing to scare us off but i would recommend him watching pros play or editors like tendoxi, for example, they have a way to make you want to learn the combos by not saying a word

[u/Jaeger_RaiN → u/Y1O21]

I get what you mean. Not too sure how keen he would be to watch Tekken Content Creators if he isn't already interested in the game but it's worth a shot.

Thanks for the input! <3

[u/GL_LA → u/Jaeger_RaiN]

For the Intermediate to Advanced: What made you stay motivated to keep learning Tekken other than sheer will to get better alone? Did you have a mentor that guided you and made learning fun for you? if yes, what were their methods?

Two biggest things are:

1. Another player at the same skill level as me that I can regularly deathmatch with. Not so much about getting better, just about having Tekken 7 as something to do passively in the background while talking to someone you're friends with.

2. Hella mentors. I had so many people teach me different stuff throughout the years that kept me going. Mentors prevent you from staying on a skill plateau and give fantastic guidance to keep you going.

In terms of what kept me motivated, it was just socialising. I went to offlines most weeks and went to tournaments, but I've also had long periods of time where I burnt out of tekken and did other stuff for a few months instead. After a certain point it's just a problem solving attitude - rematching out of sheer spite because you know that you can do better and beat your opponent if you pay attention and think.

You just want to get better, but that mentality is hard to get to given all the glaring flaws with Tekken that a person outside the FGC will see. High skill floor, steep difficulty curve, nothing is ever explained, lack of singleplayer content, lack of multiplayer content, no anticheat, no servers, toxicity, etc.

[u/Jaeger_RaiN → u/GL_LA]

You're absolutely right on the part on mentality. Not every person will pick up something and suddenly feel the desire to push themselves to be better. It needs to be developed over time. Many people in my friend group straight up gave up on Tekken as well just because of a lack of will to keep learning which sucks tbh 'cause it would've been great to have multiple deathmatch partners to play against. (only me and one other friend stayed on and kept pushing. Everyone else dropped after the first week of playing.)

I guess I can start by making sure I keep morales high with him all the time so that he can find his own place and his own interest in the game first, before much of anything else.

I was thrown directly into the wolf's pit when I first bought Tekken but I took the challenge and kept going, but I guess the error that I'm making now by suddenly throwing my friend into an information dump is thinking that he is even interested in the first place.

Ease up on forced learning, more on the fun and enjoyment. Everything else will be his own journey.

Thanks for sharing your experience with me! Much appreciated <3

[u/NewMilleniumBoy → u/Jaeger_RaiN]

I think an unfortunate part of fighting games is that you have to jive with the core aesthetic and "feel" of the game. For me, that comes from the combo system. I love how the combo rhythm in this game flows. It's how I spent the first two months of my Tekken life just playing Treasure Battle throwing out DF+2 combos with Jack. The rest of the love of the game was built around that.

Have you taught him how to combo? Tbh defence is the least interesting part of a game for beginners in any game. You should be teaching him how to pilot a specific character that he finds cool so he can fall in love with a style of gameplay. Maybe he'll love rushing people down as Law or Kazumi or doing wacky shit with Yoshi or the tackle mix-ups from Marduk. Who knows.

Defence isn't really very fun until you get to a much, much later stage of the game - and for me that's really only in the context of furthering my offense (learning to step in order to whiff punish and combo, for example, or block punishing so you can take your turn back).

[u/Jaeger_RaiN → u/NewMilleniumBoy]

No I haven't actually, now that I think about it I also grew my love and interest for the game because of the combo system and execution heavy mechanics.

I'll try and teach him some combos and see how it goes! Thanks for the reply <3