Bandai Namco has always had a more free-form system when it comes to character customisation in their fighting games. While most games only focus on making preset costumes, you never see other fighting games aside from Injustice 2 that allows mixing and matching gear. Tekken 7 continues the trend set by previous Bandai Namco fighting games with the option to make your own custom costume with a large amount of options to choose from.
If Injustice 2’s gear tend to make you look more badass as you progress, Tekken 7 takes their customisation options in a more light-hearted manner. While there are a few character-specific options, a lot of them are available generally across the roster. Some sounds reasonable like glasses that go from normal aviators to goofy ones with anime eyes. Then there’s the generic hairstyles which can make any character unrecognisable. Then there’s the ludicrous things you can bring as accessories, including functioning guns, water guns, guns that shoots fish, a fish held as a knife, various knives, a shovel, turtle shells, a large pizza and even a shower head that makes your character always wet.
And some of them have special moves. You can shoot the guns, but thankfully it’s mostly a gimmick with slow startups making really impractical should you bring it online in a ranked match.
The downside of this system is that at the end of the day, you still have a finite number of good looking unique costumes for each character- a lot of the options are shared with all the characters so it’s easy to just make very generic looking fighters. On the other hand, you can get creative and use these generic options to do something cool, like dressing them up as characters from other games.
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The customisation options are mostly found by random chance through the Treasure Battle mode. In this mode you get to battle various AI all decked with their own customisation. The goal is to keep a big streak going, as consecutive wins nets you more in-game currency (fight money) and also ups the chances to get rare treasure boxes- opened automatically after each fight to reveal new customisation options. Some rare items can only be found when you have a good streak going. Sometimes the matches have certain modifiers- like double damage or turbo speed- but there’s not that many of them to be really notable.
Unfortunately, Treasure Battle Mode is the only mode aside from the underwhelming arcade mode and the Mishima Saga story mode to do in single player. Since it’s just one fight after another, it can get tedious and boring over time. You will also get matched up with harder AI as you climb the ranks, which makes getting a winning streak harder. After some time it’s best to switch characters, each have their own separate ranks.
Tekken 7’s customisation options is still bonkers as ever, but getting all of them can take tedious work. Thankfully the solid gameplay will hook you to keep on grinding anyway. The Treasure Battle mode could be better and the game sorely lacks variety when it comes to offline content, but if you love the idea of dressing as, say, an Overwatch hero and beating people down over and over because the gameplay feels so good then that is enough to compensate for the faults.
Stay tuned as we get ready to give the full review of Tekken 7 soon.