Arcadia Extra Vol. 55: Tekken 6 Mook Review

The new Tekken 6 mook is so, so choice.

When Enterbrain of Japan announced the release of their latest mook (gaming strategy book) for Tekken 6, I got pretty excited. After some positive feedback from some guys who got the volume, I went off and ordered it off Amazon Japan. My last experience with mooks was with the VF5 mook, “Keep it moral!” about a year and a half ago, and it left a lot to be desired. Well, thankfully the Tekken 6 mook is far better in pretty much every way.

The mook is hefty, a big 400-page volume with a nice glossy cover. The inside pages are mostly glossy colored pages with copious amounts of screenshots and illustrations. The chapters include sections on the Game System, Characters, Move Arts and Strategy.

The most enjoyable for me of course was the Character and Move Arts sections.Each of the 39 fighters gets a couple of pages in the Characters section, with one page containing their background story (in Japanese though), full-body CG art (NICE), character models for their default Punch and Kick outfits, and one page devoted to all their customizations and costume bits illustrated and listed with costs in gold. A nice touch as well is stuff like a Win Pose Selection bit, where you can choose how your winning fighter mugs it up for the camera after a successful bout.

The Move Arts section details all the moves per character, complete with button notations and combinations, plus pics of each part of the move or combo. This is useful even for those who can’t read Kanji. Very nice and this is what makes the mook for me. Also included are the characters’ Item Moves, so you can finally see what each fighter has for his or her novelty action, from Bryan’s infamous shotgun to Julia’s pretty useless seedling plant.

The final section of the mook is in-depth strategy, and it’s in black and white on different paper. Finishing the book is a bit from the producers and dev team, with some sketches of the characters like a male Leo and a look at a Gundam-esque Lili.All in all, Arcadia Extra Vol. 55 is a really nice Tekken 6 volume, and it just screams quality from cover to cover.

Despite the fact that it’s totally in Japanese, any Tekken 6 fan with the means should go and grab a copy. It’s SO choice… the character CGs are great to finally see in full (Man, Lili is TALL!) and it’s great to finally see all the customization items as well. Certainly it’s something nice to look at and revisit again and again while we’re all waiting for the PS3 version to arrive. Here’s hoping that wait won’t be too long though…