Recommended Soundtracks: Tekken 6

Upon rereading my review for Tekken 6, which went up Thursday, I realized that I completely forgot to talk about the soundtrack. Uh, whoops! That sure would've helped amidst the sea of flaws that I decided to focus on, as necessary as it was. Tekken 6 is a great fighting game levied with some of the most asinine decisions I've ever seen for everything else on the side, with features so inane you'd think Namco Bandai was intent on sabotaging its success for the home console market.

But that's not to say everything about its package was worthy of scorn. The soundtrack, for instance, is quite fantastic, and has some of the best music I've ever heard in a Tekken game. No, wait, it actually has some of the best music in any fighting game made thus far. That's because it takes the greatest elements from every Tekken soundtrack that came before it. Yes, even the underwhelming Tekken 4. As it is, it feels like a natural evolution of Tekken 5's soundtrack.

The soundtracks to both Tekken and Tekken 2 featured New Age-style music, but Tekken 3 and its successor, Tekken Tag Tournament, expanded into techno. Meanwhile, Tekken 4 decided to go adopt some slow-paced New Age music, which wasn't for the better in the least since it was poorly composed. Tekken 5, which itself was a return to form for the series after 4's abysmal reaction with fans, decided to adopt music from both the aforementioned genres; the same can be said of its successor, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection. Tekken 6's soundtrack uses the same philosophy, and the results are even better. There's something for almost everyone's tastes here.

Take the very epic-sounding "Midtown Roars," a track composed by Ryuichi Takada, and which goes with the "Lightning Storm" stage. It's very fitting for what's an incredibly busy stage, with lightning strikes all around the place - no, not in the fighters' vicinity - and helicopters crashing and exploding. It can be pretty distracting during a good fight, but it's definitely a sight to behold. In fact, you could say that for the majority of the stages in the game:


Here you have one of the more relaxing tracks in "Edge of Spring," composed by Keiichi Okabe. This track goes with the very melancholy "Mystical Forest" stage, and is definitely the most calming in the game. The track itself is a better alternative to the music found in Tekken 4. I only wish all of that game's music was this good:


This last one here is "G ~ Blast Ver.," composed by the fantastic, and fantastically underrated, Masaru "Go" Shiina (whom you may also know from the Mr. Driller titles and Tales of Legendia. This track goes with the "Fallen Colony" stage, a stage just as, if not more, active than "Lightning Storm." Seeing as how this track is upbeat, it fits very well:


Playing Tekken 6, you really realize how integral good music is to the experience, even when you're trying to pay attention to your opponent's techniques. I may have made Street Fighter IV seem like the most flawless game ever earlier this year, but if there was one category it was lacking in, it was the music. The rival themes were good, but they're not that useful being single-player only. The music is one of the more appreciable aspects of Tekken in the fighting game genre, and we constantly need soundtracks like this to prove how necessary they are.