Tekken 7 Location Test at Japan This Weekend

Tekken 7 has a location test going on now till the end of the weekend over at Japan. The latest installment in Namco Bandai's long running franchise has a very early build at some Japanese arcades with the game running at 50% graphical quality. Even with that much on Unreal Engine 4, early off-screen footage below indicates that the game already is looking pretty good despite framerate issues, which is why it is a very build. There is a lot more hit sparks now remsicient of the new Killer Instinct, slow down when you KO an opponent and time freeze effects for certain moves.

In terms of gameplay, Tekken 7 does have some new mechanics such as armored moves that are supposedly similar to focus attacks from the Street Fighter IV series. Unlike SFIV, you still take the damage from the armored move compared to having the chance to gain it back. Lastly, there are finally supers in Tekken in the form of rage arts. Rage mode instead of a damage boost (that's supposedly gone but not confirmed yet) gives characters access to a super move that deals major damage. These additions are so far worth it for Tekken 7 and we'll see how these get changed and balanced of over the course of the game's development.
The characters playable in this location test are newcomers Katarina and Cluadio along with returning characters Kazuya, Heihachi, Paul, Bryan, Law, Asuka, Lili, Xiaoyu, Hwoarang, Dragunov, Lars, King, Steve Fox, Leo, and Feng. That is a decent amount of characters confirmed for the game, but in this build most of the assets of the returning cast in terms of character portraits and other stuff are from Tekken Revolution. The bound mechanic that made it's debut in Tekken 6 is also similar to Revolution currently for Tekken 7, so bread and butter combos are going to be visually similar to the T5/Dark Resurrection days and that's fine with me personally.

Direct feed streams of this Tekken 7 location test will be on Nico Nico for those waiting for that. Once again, keep in mind that is a very early build of the game and things will likely change by the time the final game is out. No release window has been set for Tekken 7 yet, but my guess is Fall 2015 for arcades and then sometime in 2016 for consoles and PC.