If, like me you've been gaming since PS1,
you'll know of, and probably have played, Tekken 3.
Tekken 3 was the third iteration of the
immensely popular arcade-style, fighting game franchise,
considered by many to not only be the best of the series,
but one of the greatest games of that era.
Of course, today what I want to analyse is the music from Tekken 3,
which was - and still is - epic!
The team behind Tekken 3's soundtrack,
a group of five Japanese video game composers,
had a daunting task.
Each character in Tekken 3 has a distinct visual identity,
and background story.
From Eddie Gordo, the capoeira-fighting Brazilian,
and Lei Wulong, an homage to Hong Kong police dramas,
to Gon, a tiny but powerful orange dinosaur.
When you played the game, the character you were fighting against
dictated the backdrop and the music of that fight.
Every match was fun to play,
thanks to exciting fighting styles, moves and combinations
unique to each character.
But imagine,
what playing this game would be like without good music
or... any music at all?
Weird and maybe even boring.
But with it, hour upon hour of gaming bliss.
As I mentioned, the composers had a daunting task.
Not only did they have to create original and dynamic
pieces of music for each individual character
and cutscene,
but they also had to make sure
that it stayed coherent, stylistically, as a whole.
For their inspiration,
they turned to BIG BEAT
an electronic music genre pioneered in England
which broke out into the mainstream music market
in the 1990s
thanks to acts such as the Chemical Brothers
and the Prodigy.
Built over a foundation of explosive, looped drum beats
Big Beat music made heavy use of synthesisers,
as well as traditional rock instrumentation,
such as the electric guitar.
With its fast tempos and
ability to incorporate elements from different genres,
such as Rock, Soul, Hip Hop,
and even indigenous musics from various parts of the world,
Big Beat was the perfect fit for
a fighting game with diverse characters
like Tekken 3.
In this analysis,
I'm going to be breaking down the tracks to
several characters within the game,
and how these pieces of music were able to
serve as an additional characterising tool
apart from visual design.
In particular,
the use of timbre and instrumentation.
For anyone who doesn't know,
timbre in music refers to the
quality of a particular sound.
It's how we can tell the difference
between a voice or a piano
singing or playing the same note.
Timbre is often exploited
in Classical music and opera
to denote different characters.
A perfect example is
is Sergei Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf',
a symphonic work composed for children,
in which each character is played by a different instrument
in a congruous way.
The bird, for example,
is played by a flute.
and Peter's grumpy grandfather,
by the low bassoon.
and it makes sense doesn't it?
Of course, timbre is not the only trick in the book
to aid in musical characterisation.
There's harmony, rhythm and melody, as well.
But it's a very powerful one,
and the most immediate to our sense of hearing.
With that out of the way,
Let's turn to the analysis of Tekken 3's music.
I'm going to start with Mokujin's theme
because it's probably the most obvious,
yet deceptively simple one.
Mokujin is a wooden practice dummy
that, contrary to other characters in the game,
doesn't have his own fighting style,
like judo or karate.
Instead, he mimics the fighting style of another
character in that current tournament,
changing style after each round.
The opening to this theme is a repeated
four-bar phrase
shared between a synthesised bass
and some kind of wooden instrument.
It's clearly been manipulated electronically,
but this wooden sound,
that loops throughout the entire piece as an ostinato,
seems to be a combination of
xylophone and wooden block samples.
And it serves as the perfect base
for this particular piece.
What do I mean by base?
Well, as I mentioned earlier,
Mokujin copies the fighting styles of
different characters within the game.
The composers ingeniously interwove
different fragments from other characters' themes
into Mokujin's theme.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples.
Gun Jack is a Russian fighting robot
with a human heart.
Starting with crashing cymbals,
this track makes use of a loud, abrasive
rock drum kit,
that adds a metallic timbre to the piece.
Later, a distorted vocal loop,
which is the only time anything resembling
a human voice appears on all of the Tekken 3 tracks,
joins the texture.
Then, a distorted electric guitar sample loops,
sounding a bit like an electronic heartbeat;
symbolising the juxtaposition between
man and machine that Gun Jack represents.
In the middle break,
before the music comes back with reverb
and increased intensity,
we hear a kind of ripping rhythmic sample
which makes me think that the sound designers
behind the Transformer movies
might have played Tekken 3 back in the day.
What an effective way to acoustically
and musically communicate heavy machinery.
I live in Hong Kong so I have to represent
for Forrest Law, a character based
on the immortal Bruce Lee.
This one is a bit more subtle than the last two,
but sometimes music works in more mysterious ways.
The synthesisers here sound like something
without being that something in an overt way -
and by doing this, the music pulls out associations
from your subconscious without
running the danger of being cliché.
By the way, this was my brother's favourite character
because he would do this backflip kick over, over and over again
until I died every. single. time.
So, it drove me crazy!
In Forrest Law's theme,
one of the synthesisers used is reminiscent
of Chinese gongs.
And then, the counter melody,
played by synthesised strings,
stylistically speaking, reminds me of those
1960s and 70s action film melodies,
also often played by uninterrupted strings.
For example,
check out John Barry's theme to Bruce Lee's film
'The Game of Death'
Last, but not least, is the final boss of the game.
Now, you'd think that with the final boss the music
would totally match, be scary and intense,
but in fact it does the opposite.
Ogre's theme is so calm and sparse,
compared with the other characters' themes
that this counterintuitive choice
actually freaks you out more
because you think, "I'm about to get my ass kicked."
Heavily distorted guitar riffs rip through this piece
revealing the monster beneath the surface.
And once you beat him, he literally becomes a monster
because instead of winning the game,
ogre comes back for one more match,
as TRUE OGRE.
In the music, this is marked by
an increase in reverb and there's more development
in the electric guitar riffs.
However, it's still pretty smooth and chilled out overall,
which is in total contrast with what
you're seeing on the screen,
which is a huge, fire-breathing humanoid dragon monster person.
Only at the very end
do we have an increase in intensity,
which might have marked the point when your character died.
If you didn't die, you'd get to see that character's end scene,
Each one elaborated on a different part of that
character's backstory, and on the plot of the game in general.
In a time before YouTube, you really had to play
the whole game to see the final scene for that character
Unless, of course, you unlocked cinema mode -
which, of course, my brother and I did.
I'm sure many people have, like me, really, really fond
memories of this game -
Almost 20 years later,
the music really stands test of time.
Even if the graphics and the gameplay have not.
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