Since the launch of the Playstation Portable, Namco has pretty much established themselves as the technical kings of the platform. From Ridge Racers to Katamari Damacy, they've shown that they could not only create outstanding graphics and sound on the system but even allow players to record their saves without dealing with the generic PSP OS save screen. The Tekken franchise is also long known for being a graphical showcase series on Sony systems, so when Tekken Dark Resurrection was announced for the PSP, many wondered if they could really pull it off. After all Tekken 5 is one of the more impressive looking fighters for the PS2 console, can the PSP really handle a port of the enhanced arcade upgrade to Tekken 5?

With the game finally released in Japan and Asia, it is clear now that such doubts should never have existed, for Namco has once again proven that their internal developers are still a sizable step beyond any other developer on the platform. From the minute the game boots up, you are greeted by an impressive CG introduction specially created for the PSP version. The quality is excellent and incredibly sharp, devoid of any compression artifacts. Of course while Tekken is known for their impressive CG movies in the home versions, it is still at the core a fighting game, so it's good that Namco didn't slack on any gameplay area in this edition either.

This portable edition of Tekken has pretty much anything you would expect from a portable edition, and probably much more. Before you can actually start playing the game, it invites you to create a player profile. You simply enter your name and the game will handle the rest. Player profiles are extremely handy for serious fighting game fans because they track important statistics like wins and losses with characters, rankings over various modes, and so on. For Tekken in particular the profile also tracks the amount of gold you have accumulated, as well as your purchases in the form of unlocked movies and the character customizations, which I will get into later. The game also uses an auto save system, which unless you disable, will ensure that you will never see a save screen in the game ever. This is actually really neat because the game feels totally seamless, which is a big part of the experience.

So the game has high production values and has excellent interface design and execution, what about the game engine itself you might wonder. Have no fears, because this is probably the best 3D engine that has ever graced the PSP. While the characters models do have less polygons, the resolution of the system itself combined with the excellent animation of the characters themselves make the actual difference very minor. For character introductions and cutscenes between battles, the engine runs at 30 frames per second, but when it really matters in the actual gameplay the game runs at an amazing 60 frames per second with no slowdown at all. The animations and backgrounds are pretty much identical, with the music and voices are all intact.