Final major Tekken 8 Season 2 balance patch released, game still cooked

Bandai Namco Entertainment just released the last major Tekken 8 Season 2 update, known as Patch 2.03.01, to the live version of the game. The full patch notes were published on Tekken website earlier today, heralding the return of Tekken 7 original fighter Fahkumram as the latest DLC character.

I say that this will be the last major update for Season 2, but there will be smaller balance adjustments in store for the rest of the season. It’s only the last major update insofar as the Tekken World Tour (TWT) is concerned, which began in May this year and will end whenever the Tekken World Tour Finals this year will be held.

The problem is that if this is truly the last balance patch with this kind of scale and scope, Tekken 8 is actually just cooked until the TWT season is over. The patch itself is frankly a complete nothingburger, with some of the most problematic moves and their respective properties still in the game.

A bit of credit

Before I tear into the developers, I’d like to give them some credit here: they actually seem to have listened to a bit of community feedback with Patch 2.03.01. The full balance changelog contains nothing but nerfs except for Devil Jin, which is exactly the direction the game needs to keep going in.

It’s nice to see that they’ve realized that the balance is currently in a state where the power creep is absolutely out of control, and that nerfs without much in the way of compensatory buffs are the way to go right now. Of course it’s fine to look at the weakest characters in Season 2 and give them some love, like they did with Devil Jin and Devil Jin alone — but for the most part, the game needs scaling back, not forward.

And now, I take it all back

That’s where my praises for the balance team begin and end. The rest of the update is nowhere near enough to fix the game’s awful balancing, with ridiculously strong characters like King and Hwoarang being notably absent from the changelog.

What was supposed to be a significant step towards actual results in this regard has turned out to be just a few slaps on the wrist for certain characters here and there, and nothing that actually make the game less aggravating and more dynamic.

they need to balance the game to make the game better, not be afraid to balance it because of the TWT season. 1% of the tekken community competes in tournaments.

if u keep track of competitive players' thoughts, most also want a balanced game, not one-side offense convoluted BS

— Kane (@HelloMrBrahms) July 7, 2025

I mean really, changing Rage Arts to be -18 on block instead of -15 universally (with the exception of Asuka’s charged Rage Art) is great and all, but there really needed to be at least three times as many pages for the individual character nerfs than there ended up being. For example, Final Fantasy XVI protagonist Clive Rosfield is still getting away with murder somehow, with only four nerfs to his name in this patch.

There’s still far too many characters present in the SSS tier in Season 2, and at this point, I’ve lost all trust in the balance team. There is no denying it now: they are consciously, deliberately, and maliciously doing the exact opposite of what the Tekken community wants. I don’t care if I sound like a conspiracy theorist because that ship has already sailed, but it’s now blatantly obvious that they’re doing all this to keep Tekken 8 “casual friendly”, and therefore generate as much revenue as possible — at the cost of quality gameplay.

A laughable effort

The thing is, Season 2’s design does not help casual players at all. Conflating “aggressive gameplay“, as the design philosophy of Tekken 8 has been from the very beginning, with forced mixup situations is not going to attract casual fans — let alone retain them.

I’ve said this before: the lack of intuitive counterplay to the extremely rushdown-oriented style of Tekken 8 will only serve to frustrate new players to no end. If Bandai Namco really want to get new players to play this game, and in turn spend money on the battle pass and DLC characters, they are sorely misguided on how to do so.

And no, this is not just the whinging of a loud minority in the community, where it’s just a bunch of noisy mid-ranked players blaming their lack of online success on what they perceive to be their characters’ shortcomings. Even highly-seasoned pros like Bae “Knee” Jae-min and Arslan “Arslan Ash” Siddique are complaining about where Tekken 8 is headed. Actually, they’ve been complaining since Season 1, so it’s even worse now.

8 was challenging in some aspects with a new team for battle & tuning, but we have returned the team structure to the members of the past.
In addition, the director, Nakatsu, who we all know and love, is now able to check and approve all tuning in detail (he was short on time as… https://t.co/8nZpwmXPx6

— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) May 8, 2025

Now that the final Season 2 patch is out, it’s now clearer than ever that the balance team is just incompetent. I’m done mincing words: they all deserve to be sacked and replaced with people who actually have the community’s best interests at heart. Except, oh wait, they’ve actually already done that, at least according to series producer Katsuhiro Harada.

If that’s actually true, which I can’t even say for certain given how they’ve practically lied to all of us over the last few months, it’s just utterly laughable. They fired everyone in the previous balance team and swapped in the so-called “A-team”, only to come up with this in the end? What was even the point, then?

Fool me once…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still going to play because I just can’t get enough of Tekken like that. I also want to keep up with the state of the game’s balancing firsthand, because I want to know what I’m talking about when I say things about the poor job that Harada and company are doing right now. But even though I’ll be sticking around, I don’t think I can keep getting my hopes up about Tekken 8 for much longer.

With the way things are going, it’ll be a long, long time before the game is in a better place than it is currently — let alone be as enjoyable as the still flawed Season 1 was. Whatever it is that Harada, Michael Murray, or Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda say now, it’s just going to feel like more lies on top of what they’ve already lied about.

As a lifetime Tekken fan, the situation is just depressing. The game being a live service title that needs to attract new players long term isn’t even an excuse, because Street Fighter 6 does that while still keeping good balance and design across the board. It’s no coincidence that Street Fighter 6 is popping off in terms of concurrent users right now.

He’s back and meaner than ever

Notice how I haven’t even talked about Fahkumram and how he might affect the game? It’s only been about half a day, but I’m already seeing clips of him having absurd combo damage. Absolutely nothing new considering how Season 2 turned combo damage up to 11 (only to nerf it later on with the addition of more health to every character), but knowing how Fahkumram terrorized Tekken 7 back when he was first introduced, I know he’s got some disjointed range and stance transition shenanigans in Tekken 8 as well. Just look at this nonsense:

The DLC privilege is real, but when it comes to Season 2, basically everyone in the cast is already at DLC character levels of power. And right now, I think it could be too late to do anything about it. There’s no way that the developers will admit their mistakes fully and actually revert or remove the many, many broken things that they added to the game, especially not after making new animations from scratch for some of the new moves.

The best they can do is adjust frame data, move properties, tracking, damage, range, and oh god there’s just way too much for them to handle. It’s sad to say, but Tekken 8 could very well die before it manages to reach its full potential — the potential which I believed in at the end of Season 1.

Turns out I was but a fool to think this game was going places.