Tekken 8 Emergency Patch: Devs Break Silence With Small Preview

It’s been just over two weeks since Tekken 8 Season 2 dropped, along with its gargantuan balance patch that basically buffed everyone in the cast to high heaven. And as I mentioned in my opinion article about the whole mess, not for the better.

But anyway, Tekken 8 developer and publisher Bandai Namco just announced today that the upcoming emergency patch, which they revealed a few days after Season 2’s release, will drop on Thursday, April 17th. They did so through a post on their official X account just before midnight Eastern Time, along with some other additional details regarding further gameplay and balance changes.

I Didn’t Hear No Bell

Chief among these changes is a universal increase to maximum health values, though the devs did not mention any specific exact value in this regard. Tekken doesn’t have variable health unlike other fighting games like Street Fighter 6, so each character will still end up with the same amount of health relative to everyone else after this change goes through.

An emergency patch will be deployed to address the issues occurring in #TEKKEN8 (v2.00.01).

■ Date and time:
Thursday, April 17, around 11AM JST

Please check the following URL for Patch Contents (v2.00.02): https://t.co/TL4GnsO6ZZ

— TEKKEN (@TEKKEN) April 15, 2025

According to Bandai Namco, this change will be implemented in Season 2 in order to “address the overall inflation of attack strength and combo damage”. In other words, more health means combos mean less over the course of a single round, which theoretically should result in more comeback opportunities even after a high damage combo.

Another important change comes in the form of a set of adjustments to low risk, high reward moves that create too much of an advantage for the attacker. In the announcement, the devs worded this as “balance adjustments to high-performance moves that can repeatedly create advantageous situations and lead to one-sided gameplay” — which to me sounds like they’ll be nerfing plus-on-block mids across the board.

If this second change is true, then there may be some hope for this game yet after all. I mentioned in my Season 2 balance article that the whole patch added way too many moves with practically zero counterplay, and that many of those moves were indeed mids that give frame advantage on block. Reducing the advantage from these moves opens more options for the defending player to get around pressure, such as sidestepping and challenging with fast pokes.

Poking: A Lost Art

But speaking of poking, the health change is very concerning in this regard. Pokes are supposed to be fast, low-risk moves that allow players to chip away at the opponent’s health little by little, as well as start their own offense by forcing the opponent to commit to higher risk defensive options like crouching or using power crush moves. But with more health overall, pokes will mean even less than they do now, which further incentivizes aggressive gameplay and simply swinging for the fences in every interaction.

This is just more proof that the devs are completely out of touch when it comes to what the community really wants out of Tekken 8. We asked for the game to return to a more traditional direction focused on poking, movement, and defense, and instead we’re getting band-aid solutions that don’t actually fix any of the game’s most egregious issues.

Yes, there are some steps in the right direction, but I’ve said this already: I don’t trust Bandai Namco anymore.

Season 2 needs to be completely reverted and thrown into the garbage bin, but of course they’re never going to do that now. That would be tantamount to admitting their mistakes, and at this point it’s way too late for that. Besides, Michael Murray and Katsuhiro Harada have already shown plenty of times that they’re more interested in antagonizing their own userbase on X rather than be humble and actually accept their faults.

Not Yet Forgiven

Now, I will give them this: they actually apologized through their announcement. To quote the devs, they “sincerely apologize for the results [of the Season 2 balance patch], which differ from our previously communicated policy”. At the very least, they’ve said sorry — but it’s going to take a lot more than that to get back the goodwill that they garnered with the success of Tekken 7.

They already have our hard-earned money. Tekken 8 is not a $30 game, nor is it a free-to-play live service title. For the community to trust these guys again, we need to see them actually go in the direction that we want — not just the direction which they think is good for the game, which is already obviously misguided to begin with.

I personally do not think this backlash is at all unjustified.
I recognize that it is a natural occurrence and we have no choice but to respond by continuing to update. https://t.co/h9DATYkSQz

— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 15, 2025

Pro players and content creators alike are already committing themselves to taking long breaks from Tekken 8. There’s even an entire boycott website that lists players willing to stay away from ranked until the game is fixed, and it’s currently got a whopping 6,300 players on it. The game is actually dying as a result of the balance patch, and for a game that has been hovering around the 6-7 thousand mark over the last several months when it comes to concurrent players, this is bad, bad news for everyone involved.

If Bandai Namco want to earn more revenue from microtransactions with Tekken 8, the first thing they need to do is admit they’re wrong, right freaking now. And immediately after that, they need to sit down and overhaul the game comprehensively — in the direction that the community wants. If they continue to bleed players over the next few months because they stubbornly refuse to accept their errors as a team, there will be no one left to buy stuff in the Tekken Shop.

Once they do all that, then we can talk.