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“ The gameplay very much comes down to players at close quarters jostling for position, testing out defences, anticipating moves and exploiting openings.

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That lifespan has ensured that the home iteration will be the most polished, balanced version to date; the result of thousands upon thousands of hours of real world playtesting, of numerous tweaks and changes.The refined core gameplay will also be complemented by additional content and a host of modes designed to sidestep the backlash that Street Fighter 5 endured last year, when it hit home systems as a wonderfully playable, but entirely bare bones package. (Speaking of which, Vince Ingenito recently wrote an opinion piece about the health of the game.)Tekken 7 aims to cover all bases, then, but what excites me most about it is its potential to attract an audience that goes well beyond what we’ve traditionally seen from fighting games. That’s not to say that fighting games don’t have significant – and dedicated – audiences, of course. They’ve long had a firm footing as competitive spectacles, but Tekken 7 is very much engineered to make the barrier for enjoyment as low as possible, and that will pay off when it goes beyond the arcades and into homes around the world, as that’s the point at which its potential audience explodes.Before we go any further, though, let’s examine the idea of a barrier to entry for games, and why it could be beneficial to lower that for certain titles. Think about some of the biggest competitive titles of the modern era: games like Dota 2 or League of Legends. Games like StarCraft or its sequel. The level of knowledge required to really understand what’s going on is actually pretty high. I remember the first time I watched a StarCraft tournament, and – despite the best efforts of the shoutcasters – the nuances of the gameplay were completely lost on me. I didn’t know the match-ups, I didn’t know the build orders and I wasn’t able to fully appreciate exactly how much the players were achieving with their ridiculous APMs That’s on me, of course. A game like StarCraft has that kind of knowledge and skill ceiling for a reason, and the people that live and breathe it will obviously understand it on a whole other level, which is hugely satisfying in its own right. It’s definitely a barrier, however. (But not an insurmountable one, as the popularity of the StarCraft series in South Korea has shown.)This has also resulted in many of these games being siloed off into their own hardcore communities. A game like League of Legends might be massive, but it’s kind of off in its own world, and you can easily be a dedicated gamer without ever engaging with it. For better or for worse, League of Legends is unlikely to ever cross-over to a broad, mainstream audience.Within that idea, some fighting games are more naturally readable than others. Tekken, for instance, is quite grounded. The fighters aren’t vaulting off walls and leaping three screens high, and they’re (aside from the odd exception) largely squaring off in hand to hand combat, as opposed to throwing projectiles and the like. This means that the gameplay very much comes down to players at close quarters jostling for position, testing out defences, anticipating moves and exploiting openings. Every fighting game comes down to this too, of course, but in Tekken those dynamics are very clear.The Tekken series’ fighting system also has a real rock/paper/scissors flavour, as attacks are either low, middle or high; each of which can be individually blocked or countered. It makes intuitive sense, and it’s also cool watching a player duck under a high attack then exploit the opening, or anticipate a particular combo string by flawlessly blocking a sequence of attacks at the correct heights. The system means that even if you don’t know all the moves at each player’s fingertips, you definitely get a good sense for the battle.Tekken 7 has a number of other elements layered in to ensure it’s entertaining to watch. Spectacular comebacks are made more likely thanks to Rage mode - introduced in Tekken 6 - which kicks in automatically when a fighter drops below a certain health level. In that state he or she starts glowing red and does more damage for the remainder of the round. Rage mode can also be parlayed into a Rage Drive – an extra powerful move that has priority over many of the opponent’s attacks, and Rage Arts – easily executed, flashy special moves that momentarily slow the game down when they’re triggered – will it connect? won’t it connect? – and can do enormous damage.All of these player states and moves are easy to identify, and because one player’s health is low, the stakes to hit or whiff are huge, increasing the drama. There are other slow-motion sequences too. They’re only occasional, but trigger during climactic moments that could go either way. The outcome is set at the outset, but both players – and the audience – hold their collective breath to find out what happens.These elements all help suck the viewer in, and once they’re interested, then they can start learning the nitty gritty - the fighting styles and specific moves, counters and combos of each character, the pro players and casters, and all the terminology that’s used, from basic concepts like poke, parry, launch, juggle, whiff, punish, convert, spacing and – love this one - wall splat, through to crush moves, mix-ups, move cancels and the idea of having frame advantage.It’s a good place for the game to be, and has certainly reignited my interest. I’m probably the initial target audience, after all – someone who played the Tekken series extensively in the early days, but hasn’t engaged with it much for a while. And for me, it’s been fun playing the series again, but what I’ve most enjoyed is diving into the competitive scene and watching a bunch of tournaments.Whether a game like Tekken can really break through to the mainstream, however, I’m not sure. The team has made some excellent design decisions to give it a good shot, and the inclusion of a robust-sounding tournament mode in the home version is important, but beyond that it will come down to how well Bandai Namco supports it and fosters the competitive scene, and any number of other X factors. I can’t help but feel, for instance, that the breakout eSports will either have big personalities or they’ll tap into regional loyalties (i.e. the Overwatch approach).No matter, even if Tekken 7 doesn’t explode into the mainstream, it’s still going to offer up one hell of a fine slice of competitive play.

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office. Please be nice if you tweet at him