James Chen Struggles With Tekken 7.
(Above: James Chen melts down after loss...clearly not having fun)
If you are in the FGC you already know about this, but for the people out of the loop heres the quick breakdown. James Chen a popular commentator for Street Fighter has been going through a rough patch playing Tekken 7. He put up some tweets about how its super hard and that its crushing his soul. On a recent stream (above) you can tell that the frustration of learning this game is really getting to him. Now disclaimer, I’m really bad a Tekken 7 and maybe my opinion isn’t valid, but hear me out and maybe some of it will make sense.
First off its clear that he isn’t having a fun time with the game. Even after winning the round hes tilted because of the input lag on PS4. Now I get it, input lag sucks, but generally people can adapt to it when they play enough games...or just play the PC/XBONE version :p More importantly externalizing your problems doesn’t help you become a better player. In a way he overcame it by winning the round so its odd to be mad on a round win.
Second, since hes tilted he totally botches the punish on the whiffed Rage Drive which could’ve been punished with a hop kick or hell he had Rage Art and that would’ve done it most likely. Instead he goes for a low and then gets beat by a low that he didn’t block because of, you guessed it input lag. At this point I was wondering if Chen is in Capcom’s pocket trying to make Tekken look bad. I mean I’m a bad player and even I saw that punish opportunity. Now I know thats not the case, but it was just so odd to see that happen.
Now that the tape has been broken down I do have some advice to give. Stop taking advice from chat and just play the game. Now I get some people in the chat are probably pros trying to help him out, but it gets overwhelming when you have hundreds of people saying hundreds of different things to do in that situation. Sometimes you just have to play the game and try things out yourself to see what works. I mean they say hands on training works the best right? This will probably lead to a lot of losses, but if you can take something from those losses then you might be able to prevent the next one.
This one is probably the most important one, but have some fun! Video games are ment to be fun and not cause serious anger...unless you are playing League of Legends :p I take a ton of losses in Tekken, but I still have fun with the game. Thats why I’ve logged like 80 hours since it came out in June and somehow Chen has to find a way to have some fun with it. I mean the other option is to quit, but hes kinda forced himself into a corner where quitting will look really bad for him.
I really do hope that Chen figures a way to have some fun with Tekken. Right now he just sounds like the internet perception of Tekken saying things like “its super hard” or “input lag killed me!” Yeah its hard, but learning to do anything is hard. You just have to keep going at it and if you have some fun with it, it might give you the power to keep going and who knows those losses might turn into wins.