The world is full of sequels. Movies, novels, albums, going back to popular ideas to draw out their audiences again. In games, the incentives to make sequels are even greater given the increased opportunities and lower costs to re-use the mechanics and characters you have already spent time constructing. Dizzy could find himself in new locations with new puzzles and a new story, and the work of making Dizzy himself would essentially already be done.
Games also offer a different kind of sequel than the narrative continuation. It’s one which has more in common with tech upgrade cycles, the new phone which does all of the same things as your old phone but is new and shiny and incrementally better. Super Chart Island is going to have so many of them further along the line, but FIFA Soccer 96 is one of the few so far. In sports games, moving to depicting the real thing a year later can give a strong reason to keep buying the latest version on a yearly cycle even if it doesn’t change a lot else.
Tekken 2 didn’t even take a year after Tekken to arrive in Japanese arcades, following the original’s December 1994 release in August 1995. It is not based on real sport and real people, so it can’t just reflect an Iron Fist tournament of 1995. It does offer some narrative continuation for those into it, but it’s not the focus. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would be told they should play through Tekken first before moving onto the sequel to get the story in the right order. The Tekken 2 arcade machine could come in and take the spot where a Tekken one used to be. This is not a continuation but a replacement.
As such, almost everything that Creaky Gamer said about Tekken applies again. It’s the same fluid and impressive three-dimensional fighter with the same enjoyably ridiculous plots, now just a little bit technically smoother and less jagged. There are also new game modes and more moves, with more of the typical complex combos of fighting games. There are more characters, including Jun Kazama who brings the number of women in the starting lineup to three out of ten and takes us properly away from the token woman role of Body Blows et al. The android character Jack gets an upgrade to Jack-2, which is a brilliant bit of a sequel con which more yearly updates should take on. You have to get the new FIFA, they’ve upgraded Eric Cantona to Eric Cantona-97!
Is that enough? As someone who played, but didn’t obsess over, Tekken, I am exactly the wrong audience here. In a narrative sequel that would make me a natural part of the target audience, but the tech upgrade sequel sweeps in instead for the audiences on either side. First are those who didn’t play Tekken, but could be persuaded to go for a snazzy 3D fighting game (and considering how many more PlayStations had been sold in the intervening year it makes sense for there to be many of those). For them there would be little point in buying the original when an almost identical but improved replacement was around.
Second are the ones who a subset of games are going to move more and more towards as this story goes on. The ones who played and loved Tekken, and wanted to carry on playing Tekken, to the extent of being willing to pay the same amount again to keep up with the latest version of Tekken with a few tweaks. I know the feeling of slipping into a yearly update, of retaining mastery and overlaying it on something new. I could get a bit of the feeling with Tekken 2, even. I could keep hold of what I’d learned, of the value of throws, of the way that fights could be a slow chipping away or a rapid slashing, and make use of all of it even as I was clearly not playing the same game any more. The place has been redecorated and has a new extension, but it still feels like coming home.
