#710 Tekken Tag Tournament (ARC) Hidden Characters (6/12): Bruce Irvin playthrough.

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AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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Published on September 11, 2017 5:14:39 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZPVBGFiwg8

Game:

Tekken Tag Tournament (1999)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 14:23

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A playthrough of the hidden character Bruce Irvin in the arcade version of Namco's Tekken Tag Tournament 1.

We're halfway through the hidden characters for this game now, which is good as Bruce makes for an interesting characters to discuss. Bruce's playthrough is the longest of these videos, for the reason that he's not less competent than the other characters (on the contrary, he's got quite a great moveset when you get used to it), but instead the fact that he really lacks the striking ability or countering ability. It's difficult to explain in a 3D fighting game, but as Rasmus said about the Jack characters they have a kind of 'stopping power' of sorts. Hard-hitting attacks which tend to knock back or ground the enemy in their tracks. Such attacks are an absolutely vital part of combat in Tekken (and, indeed, the video I've done on Jack-2 and P-Jack is one of the ones which went swimmingly), and without stopping power a character can become a real chore to utilise after a while.

Stopping power is the closest thing you get to the safety of zoning in the Tekken franchise, more or less, and with Bruce here I ended up feeling like a fish out of water in places as he's so reliant on his combos to deal damage. While his combinations are quite powerful and some contain knockdowns at the end of them, some of them when they end actually leave you vulnerable to counter-attack (even if you've been landing hits on the opponent), and it makes Bruce's fighting style feel really exposed on the whole, with a lot of attacks having priority over your own, and countering your own attacks. Mix this with arcade Tag 1's extremely obnoxious AI (which blocks and move-reads like a bitch all the time), and Bruce can be a surprisingly tedious character to utilise in this version. Hell, I was half-tempted to just give up with him at one point, but ultimately decided to see it through to the end.

We'll see Bruce one more time in Tekken 5, and like most of the hidden characters in that game his moveset gets quite altered, though not entirely changed. Bruce here does have some great moves and some great combinations, but with a lot of start-up on some of his better moves (particularly his launching b, f + 4 attack) he can be a quite frustrating character to utilise in this version of the game. I remember him being a fair bit more competent in the PS2 port, but that might just be nostalgia talking. It probably is, as I like Bruce regardless of whether I actually enjoy his moveset that much, which admittedly is how I feel about a lot of characters in this series.

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