[chowells]

But if you've played another fighting game before, Tekken feels clunky as hell. If you don't know all of your character's common strings, you quickly find yourself in situations where you're just stuck in move recovery for ages. There isn't a common design pattern of making every stopping point in the string feel natural.

I think that in contrast to Soul Calibur, this happens because the attacks are so fast. Watching for every string to stop at every move makes block punishing too hard in Tekken, if everything in the string was around the same level of frame disadvantage on block. Soul Calibur, by contrast, has most moves enough slower that you can identify the string ending in time to block punish when possible. But as a side effect, attacks in Soul Calibur can recover when they look like they recover. (For the most part. There are always weird exceptions.) So as a result, even when you don't know the game, attacks feel far less clunky than Tekken.

Combine that with Tekken's really bad movement (until you learn the mechanics that exploit the way input is handled), massive move lists, and very little input portability between characters, and you get a really frustrating experience that's mostly unique to starting to play Tekken.

[SliceOfWaifu]

This is exactly what I meant.