Tekken Tag Tournament includes all the characters of the series. At the beginning, 20 characters are available. Jin and Jun, King, Brian Fury, Ann Williams, Hwoarang, Yoshimitsu, Ganryu and many others will be immediately accessible. And that's not all. Every time you complete the game, you can free one of the 14 hidden characters. Some of these hidden characters will not give you access to only one but to two different fighters that share the same set of moves: it is the case of Kuma and Panda, Mokujin and Tetsujin, Roger and Alex and Devil and Angel. With nearly 40 playable fighters, TTT is the fighting game with the greatest number of characters. And this is not unimportant. The adversary of Tekken, Dead Or Alive 2: Hardcore has only 12 playable characters, while Street Fighter, surely inferior to both other titles, has 26 different fighters.
It's also worth mentioning that Tekken has also the most fascinating and well designed characters; each character bursts with a strong personality. Dead Or Alive 2 features characters that will probably make Playboy fans happy, but that look absolutely ridiculous.
No need to say that Tekken features a number of moves that's unreachable by any other fighting game. As it happened in the preceding episodes, the developers decided to leave all the old characters moves while adding some new ones for each character. In this way, the experts of Tekken will be able from the very beginning to play in high-level fights, without having to restart again. On the other hand, the new players, with a huge number of moves (40, more or less), will meet their match. After you will have practiced a good number of these special techniques, you will be surprised by the beauty of the fights, which can reach a level of great complexity in Tekken.

Someone could blame this fourth episode for it introduces no new characters. In reality, as in past installments, the tournament ends with a never before seen villain. This time, the ultimate evil is the beautiful Unknown, a woman possessed by the soul of a wolf and able to regenerate her own energy. But obviously, a character is not enough. Tekken Tag Tournament is a title that does not want to innovate: it pretends to be a sort of encyclopaedia of the series. And Tekken Tag Tournament is just this: a summary of the preceding episodes that will allow nostalgic ones to have in only one disc all their favorite characters in a new enhanced version and new players to have in their hands the best chapter of the series.

New to the series is the possibility to use two different characters during the same battle that you can switch by pressing a special button. The change is not exactly immediate, and you will have to pay attention in choosing the right moment to let your companion enter the fight. The game modes, both in multiplayer and single player, are various: in addition to the classic ones, there are also many secret hidden modes that become available after you have completed the game a precise number of times.

However, the true novelty is the Tekken Bowl mode. After you have unlocked Ogre, you will be able to play bowling using your favorite characters in a nice, little, addictive mini-game. If you are good enough, you will succeed in hitting the public attending the match. Special suits, hidden movies and a jukebox in Tekken Bowl mode are some of the other extras you can unlock in Tekken Tag Tournament.

Dead Or Alive 2: Hardcore offers a more fast-paced gameplay, but less deep than Tekken's. In DOA2 the basic buttons are only three and the number of moves is limited. Tekken, however, is a more rigid game in comparison with Dead Or Alive 2. In fact, arenas are not interactive like in Tecmo's game, and while in Dead Or Alive 2 you can break objects and doors and freely move in the arena with the analog joysticks, in Tekken Tag Tournament you have only the possibility to move around your opponent using side steps.

Anyhow, Tekken Tag Tournament, with its 40 characters and with the endless possibilities offered by the various moves, is the fighting game that guarantees the best fighting experience. The occasional player will perhaps prefer Dead Or Alive 2: Hardcore because of its easy controls, but Tekken is a different story. TTT maybe is guilty of a scarce desire to innovate - like most PlayStation 2 launch titles - but it currently represents the perfection of the genre.