My Tekken Origin Story
To start off this blog, I will do a small bio of something that I'm known for (in my head at least), which is my (casual) career in Tekken.
Starting from the left: Me, and teammates Mike and Marvin after winning the Tekken 7 Arcade 3v3 Tournament in Ayala Harbor Point, letting us qualify for the nationwide tournament held at Ayala Malls, TriNoma (we got our butts kicked).
Pictured Above: Covers of Tekken 2 and Tekken 3 for the Playstation 1
As a kid growing up with a Playstation, Tekken is one of the games I used to play alot. Whether it was playing with my older brother, or just messing around with the characters and their movelists it was always something I enjoyed. Personally, It was simpler than other fighting games I've tried like street fighter, mortal kombat and such since most moves were easy to do only requiring to press buttons in sequence or adding a simple direction on the dpad of the controller. As I grew older, the playstation we had at home did too unfortunately. It went out of commission right as I was going into highschool. I would still be able to play the later installments of Tekken such as Tekken 4 and Tekken 5 via rental shops for Playstation 2's. I was still playing very casually, just messing around with the moves and the characters, playing the arcade mode mostly by myself. It wasn't until 2009-2010 when things started getting serious-ish.
Pictured above: Me winning the 2nd iDojo (Playstation 3) Tekken 6 tournament back in 2011 (I lost the first one to my friend, Aldrin.). This has to be the worst picture of myself that I've seen why does this exist oh god
It was late 2009 and I was in my 3rd year of highschool at the main campus of Columban College when Tekken 6 was released. A short walk from school was a fancy internet cafe called iDojo which aside from regular computer rentals, they also offered gaming console rentals such as Playstation 3's, Xbox 360's and Nintendo Wii. At 100 pesos per hour, it was quite a hefty price at the time but me and my friends would play together so we could all pitch in and not totally wreck our allowances in one go. I would play a lot against my one friend that knew some combos on the character Lars Alexandersson and Baek Doo San. He would beat me most times so that kind of urged me to practice and learn some combos of my own. When I had the money, I would practice on my own every once in a while at iDojo until one fateful day, when a group would approach me and asked if I wanted to play tekken with them (since they saw me practicing alone).
That was pretty much my entry to competitive tekken. They were a group of friends that got around together to play. How they played was different to how me and my friend played. They not only knew combos, but knew how to use a lot more moves and didn't simply use the same attacks over and over again. Little by little I started to learn more. I ended up using Asuka Kazama as my first main character and fought with her on my very first tekken tournament. I managed to land 2nd place, with 1st place taken by my friend Aldrin, a Ling Xiaoyu main that was part of the group of friends that got me started playing tekken.
After the first tournament, I kept playing, practicing and joining tournaments. I managed to bag my first tournament win in January of 2011 in a playspot called iPlay. It was practically beside iDojo but the prices were cheaper at 60 pesos per hour compared to the iDojo's 100 per hour.
Pictured Above starting from the left: Aldrin, Arman (pretty much the leader of the our group of friends), Me, AJ (one of the NBA 2k players), Kuya Cris (Owner of the shop, plays some tekken but mainly NBA), Kuya Pong (Kuya Cris's friend), Carl (Tekken scene veteran, taught me some Hwoarang gameplay), Glenn (Lyceum of Subic Bay student at the time, mained Feng Wei) and two more people that were part of the NBA 2K scene.
As you may have noticed by now, this is pretty much a flex post. But through the numerous tournaments I've joined whether I won them or not, It only shows the enjoyment I have thanks to Tekken not only as a game, but as a means to connect with and meet new friends. Nowadays, I've stopped joining tournaments mainly because I've gotten distracted with other games ever since I was able to get an actual gaming pc, but I still play with my friends every now and then. I still go out of my way to try and meet new people that play Tekken because it's a very fun game that only gets better as you spend your time practicing and understand the system.
For my closing remarks (wow) I'd like my readers to give Tekken a try if you have access to it, or watch some tournament games to get a feel of the hype and fun of the scene. Speaking of tournament games, I'll be leaving you a link to what's personally my proudest moment in my Tekken 'career' which was my tournament grand final held in Bataan where our two groups (Tekken Subic-Gapo) and BTT (Bataan Tekken-Team) met up for a bit of a showdown. I hope you all enjoy!
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