This is a post clarifying the choice to use Official Tekken Strategy Guides as sources. In this instance the Brady Games 2004 Tekken 5 Official Strategy Guide but also others which I will be looking at. A list of the Stategy Guides that will be referred to are included at the end of this blog.
Strategy Guides are created by a separate company, but are liscenced and in this sense endorsed by Namco to produce those guides, hence why they use the title 'Official Strategy Guide'. They are permitted to use Namco and Tekken logos and to present the information as truthful. In early strategy guides, such as the Brady Games 1995 Tekken (1) Official Strategy Guide, disclaimers were published explaining that the guides were created through research and that the company was not liable for instances of their advice not working. This refers primarily to the strategy element of the game, however, as the guides feature extensive advice on how to play each character and which make good match-ups. This does, however, mean that some of the content within the guides should likely be taken with a pinch of salt, as the guide isn't coming directly from Namco. That said, especially in the instance of character profiles, the Strategy Guides faithfully recreate information likely from other manuals or directly from other Namco sources. For example, a number of profiles in the Brady Games 2004 Tekken 5 Official Strategy Guide (Asuka, Anna, Christie, Feng, Heihachi, Kazuya, Lee) already match with Tekken 5 profiles we have on the wiki, some word for word. Many of these are credited on the wiki as 'Official Versions' and come to us via the now closed Tekken Zaibatsu website. They thus seem to be a reliable source of information, and I will add them directly to each character's profile.
Where information in a Strategy Guide is not clearly endorsed by Namco (e.g. lore not in a character profile format), I will instead place it in trivia as a possible fact.
Official Strategy Guides
Versions of all of these are available to download via Retro Games Strategy Guides on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/Tekken3PrimasOfficialStrategyGuide1998
- Brady Games 2004 Tekken 5 Official Strategy Guide
- Brady Games 1995 Tekken (1) Official Strategy Guide
- Tekken 2 Official Strategy Guide Dimension Publishing (1996)
- Tekken 3 Prima's Official Strategy Guide (1998)
- Tekken 4 Prima's Official Strategy Guide (2002)