Jin's High Roundhouse Kick

Hello again.

    It is no surprise that i am obsessed with Tekken. As i am writing this actually, i am listening to Celebration On Seine. There is a lot to love about Tekken's design and it's fascinating to uncover the treasure trove of 30 years of design that this series hauls around. Today, i will talk about a few random Tekken-related thoughts and anecdotes i'd like to share.

    To start us off, i would like to talk about Kazama Jin, specifically in Tekken 7. Jin is my character of choice, my love, my babygirl and i have spent countless hours slowly integrating his entire moveset into the way i play (which is 78 moves btw), with each move being a certain tool to combat a very specific situation. That is by no means surprising to a game designer, as making a player use a cascade of tools means that tools should not share uses, because in that case players will simply opt to use the one they like the most and ignore the rest. One move in particular that goes against this concept however is Jin's High Right Roundhouse, which i will now start calling magic 4. When i began playing, i would pepper the enemy with an unending wave of magic 4s. It would work everywhere and anywhere, whether i wanted to whiff punish, block punish, keep the enemy out, establish my offense, the only thing the magic 4 couldn't do for me is parry and do my taxes (although i did often toss it out instead of blocking to beat out my enemy and also it would work on the agents sent to collect the taxes). Later on, i learned more specialized moves that could do a specific thing better than magic 4 and slowly but surely it was relegated to situational uses or tossed out once in a while to catch an unsuspecting enemy off-guard. 

    Usually i would consider this a failure for the move, since it has been eclipsed by other moves and since there are just better moves to cover every situation magic 4 can be used in, the move itself is redundant. Adding redundancies like magic 4 to the movelist does nothing but bloat an already immensely bloated movelist even further and if it were up to me, i would remove any moves that achieve similar goals with each other in a character's toolkit. Something however that clicked with me (while showering) was something that the redundancy of magic 4 achieves not for the character Jin Kazama but for the game itself. I was thinking about the way Tekken teaches players to play, not through any tutorials but through the movelists themselves. 

    Something curious that magic 4 achieves for a new player, and this happened to me too, is that since it's a passpartout, the player slowly begins to learn about new situations to use the move in, a move that is really easy to do, safe and gives a sizeable reward for hitting it. For example, it sucked when people blocked it, so i began waiting for them to press first so i could retaliate with the magic 4, which on counterhit launched them for a combo, making me recognize the significance of whiff punishment. For another example, sometimes i would get intimidated by a player's aggression, causing me to try to keep them away by tossing out magic 4s in the open, teaching me about keepout. If they timed their approach however, they could still get it, causing me to develop fluctuations in my timing and to create inconsistencies in range using my movement, making my keepout game even stronger. All of these without having to think about a hundred different moves; just the magic 4! And when i became proficient in these situations, i was free to graduate from using the magic 4 only and to explore and play around Jin's other tools. 

    I do not know if this is done on purpose or not and if it is, it is a masterclass in game design. Through the pure utilization of a single move i was introduced to different concepts in the game due to its applications in everywhere and when i was comfortable with those situations, i was able to up my game by learning the specialized tools. Jin's magic 4 is a wonderful little pair of training wheels built into his kit and even after i have become proficient in most of Jin's tools, it still has a place in his moveset by excelling in very specific situations.