Tekken 8 Year in Review, and Renewed Hope in Season 2

We’re now just a month away from the one year anniversary of the release of Tekken 8, which is more than enough time at this point to make review the year that’s been and how the game and its competitive scene have panned out thus far.

Fighting games, including Tekken 8, tend to last for at least five years before a new game comes out, so a lot of the first impressions during the initial release year will shape how the game will evolve over time.

This is especially true for Tekken 8 in particular, the reasons for which I’ll be getting into in this article. It’s been an amazing 11 months thus far with extremely high highs and extraordinarily low lows for the game, so it’s interesting to think about how Tekken 8 is likely to change within the next few years.

Tekken 8 by the numbers

Let’s start with the sales numbers. Tekken 8 sold over 2 million copies worldwide in the first month after launch, presumably across all platforms. Comparing it to its predecessor paints a pretty comforting picture for Tekken fans and Bandai Namco. Tekken 7 did the same kind of numbers in twice the amount of time, so Tekken 8 was able to reach that point quite a bit sooner.

And speaking of Tekken 7, the success of that game is largely responsible for the success Tekken 8 is seeing now, so the community certainly has the previous game to thank for the continuation of the franchise. It eventually hit more than 12 million copies sold, by the way, which far outstrips anything else released in the entire series.

All in all, Tekken 8 will more than likely outsell Tekken 7 or at the very least match it in this regard. Therefore, there should be no reason for Bandai Namco to spare any expense in areas where it makes sense to invest money into, like additional characters, stages, story content, and more. It’s pretty safe to say that the franchise has, at this point in time, survived the sales drought it experienced with Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and it shows in how great the presentation and production quality of Tekken 8 is.

A Community Divided

Of course, the state of any game with a large online PvP component like Tekken 8 goes way beyond just raw sales numbers. This entry in particular focuses heavily on aggressive, explosive gameplay, with the base design elements tailored to that philosophy more than any other game in the franchise before it.

After all, Tekken has always been known in the fighting game community as a more movement and defense-focused franchise, with the 3D elements like sidestepping taking center stage in moment-to-moment gameplay. Sure, there have always been characters in the series that take on rushdown-heavy playstyles like Heihachi in Tekken 7, but in general, Tekken has forever been about patient, reactive gameplay more than all-0ut aggression.

I covered Tekken 8’s massive tonal shift in this regard in an article from several months ago, after members of the Tekken community as well as professional players like Arslan “Arslan Ash” Siddique and Bae “Knee” Jae-min went on Twitter expressing their negative opinions about the game’s design. Players from both the top level and in regular online play don’t like how the game breaks the fundamental “rules” of Tekken, such as in the case of certain moves having more lateral tracking than they should, or there being too many “canned” or “forced” 50/50 mixups from things like Heat Dash.

Seriously considering playing KoF again after watching SCS. At least you can block in that game 😭

— Twis | Arslan Ash (@ArslanAsh95) December 22, 2024

For Arslan Ash and Knee in particular, these are the two greatest Tekken players of all time, complaining about the game ostensibly being too different from what they’re used to. Indeed, they both failed to make much headway into the earliest Tekken 8 pro tournaments as they tried their best to adjust to the game’s breakneck pace, with Arslan Ash taking a few months to win his first competition at Evo and Knee breaking into the top 3 at Thaiger Uppercut 2024 much later on.

System changes and tweaks have since taken the edge off of some of these pain points, but the game largely remains a mixup-infested hellscape to those that prefer the gameplay design of old. Of course, it’s the pro players’ job to adapt accordingly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will end up enjoying the game when they’re done adjusting to it. The same goes for your everyday online warrior, who might just see that the new direction simply isn’t for them and quit as a result.

Yes, it’s true that this happens with every fighting game under the sun that receives a sequel. Street Fighter V was a prime example of this, with the unbelievable comeback potential of V-Trigger being the biggest point of contention versus Street Fighter IV. And it happened again with Street Fighter 6, this time with Drive Rush and how it makes moves more safe or able to combo in ways they couldn’t otherwise.

Hard situation. Tekken 8 is already uprooting so many legacy mechanics (chickens, parries, etc)

Given the business incentive to keep people playing, I can see why they jumped to a fast solution.

It sucks to see legacy knowledge, intuition, and skill suddenly vanish though 😢 https://t.co/rdFvnF5f2n

— PhiDX (@PhiDXGames) March 1, 2024

But Tekken is a bit of a special case. The franchise has always been about keeping legacy knowledge relevant, as there weren’t any massive system mechanics ever introduced in previous titles that changed the games as drastically as Heat does with Tekken 8. Sure, Tekken 6 introduced Rage, and Tekken 7 implemented Rage Arts and Rage Drives, but the core gameplay beyond those mechanics was still distinctly “old” Tekken.

Those days are seemingly long gone, and very obviously so on purpose. I’m sure Bandai Namco deliberately designed Tekken 8 to play the way it does in order to attract more casual players and to create a more spectacular esports viewing experience, and I know I’m definitely not alone in thinking this way. I’m not saying this is in and of itself a bad thing, of course. But as a Tekken fan of nearly 30 years, I can certainly understand why some of my fellow legacy players might not like the way things are going right now.

Renewed Hope in Season 2

Fortunately, the development team seems to have their heads screwed on right somehow, as they announced that the Season 2 balance update will include more system changes and even new moves for each character. This bodes well for the long term health of the game, though whether or not the changes will end up making things better rather than worse remains to be seen.

At least the changes from Season 1 indicate that the developers are willing to tone down the things players don’t like in favor of a more legacy-adjacent Tekken experience. There’s still a lot of work to be done in that sense, but at least they don’t seem completely tone deaf to what the playerbase wants out of a Tekken game.

Monetization: the Good and the Bad

Related to the above is the presence of paid DLC characters, which has been a mixed bag so far. Eddy and Lidia are decidedly mid to low tier characters, which is actually pleasantly surprising given how completely busted a lot of Tekken 7’s DLC characters were. Those of us who were around to see the Leroypocalypse will remember just how unstoppable he was before he was finally nerfed, and thankfully it seems that Bandai Namco have learned their lessons since then.

Heihachi, though? A total masterpiece. He is neither too strong nor too weak, and his overall weakness to sidestepping really makes the game’s 3D nature shine through. The community’s reception to his design has been very positive, and I’m hoping that the devs take it well and build additional characters with the same attention to detail present in Heihachi.

Final Fantasy XVI‘s protagonist Clive Rosfield is an odd choice, but certainly not without precedent. Noctis Lucis Caelum from Final Fantasy XV was in Tekken 7 as a DLC character, after all, so not too many players should be shocked at his inclusion here. And so far, he’s also garnered some praise from the community for his design, though he does break a few Tekken rules with moves that I think will get looked at before too long.

I’m not even going to talk too much about the battle pass, which ultimately has nothing to do with the game’s design. All I’m going to say is that it’s disappointing that they’re practically taking away old content like legacy costumes and selling it all back to us now, rather than making new and exciting things that we’ve never seen before. The game will survive without a quality battle pass, yes, but personally I’m disappointed at best and disgusted at worst that Bandai Namco is taking this route.

There was also that one week where the entire community was in uproar over the exclusion of new stage Genmaji Temple from Heihachi’s DLC purchase. The new stage prior to that one called Seaside Resort was given to all players for free, so the backlash is one hundred percent justified. Tekken 8 is a full priced AAA game, so this kind of nickel-and-dime tactic should have no place here.

An important message from the #TEKKEN8 team. pic.twitter.com/OfYbeyLBU4

— TEKKEN (@TEKKEN) October 17, 2024

Fortunately, Bandai Namco did respond to the criticism and promised they would “do things differently” in the future, so hopefully the fanbase won’t have to deal with another situation similar to this.

But all in all, the monetization of Tekken 8 post launch has been okay to good, in my opinion. The battle pass aside, DLC characters are priced fairly enough, and the latest patch finally allows players to choose DLC characters in practice mode in order to train against them and to try them out before buying. There’s no heavy-handed monetization anywhere else in the game, and it’s perfectly enjoyable as a full gaming experience without having to purchase any additional content unless you really want to try more characters.

Will Things Get Better for Tekken 8?

I believe so. Tekken 8 is already a fun game on its own, but there are things that need to be tweaked for it to reach its full potential.

The aggressive gameplay design isn’t going away completely; it’s deliberately done that way to promote more interaction between players, after all. Gone are the days of backdashing endlessly on infinite stages like at the tail end of Tekken 7’s run, and it’s way past time for regular and pro players to accept this fact and adapt to it.

But it’s pretty clear that Bandai Namco hears the community’s opinions and are applying changes to scale back the 50/50 fiesta that has been Tekken 8 Year 1. For those of you who weren’t around during Tekken’s arcade days, this is pretty much in line with how things were back then: the “vanilla” version of a new Tekken title comes out unbalanced, then gets fixed by a standalone update a year or two afterwards. Now that we’re in the age of the internet and online updates, it’s probably just a matter of time until Tekken 8 gets the polish it needs and deserves.