Tekken 8 - Review
My first experience with the Tekken series was back on the PlayStation, the original model, at a friends house with Tekken 3 and Tekken Ball. Since then, I have what can best be called a fair weather relationship, as with most fighting games, I enjoy them upon release, but there is never much to them beyond fighting online, which I am very bad at. So why is it that Tekken 8 appeals so much to me, that I couldn’t help but want to play more.
Tekken 8 offers up three main modes, a Story mode, the Arcade Quest mode and of course, multiplayer and while we will get to that later, for now let’s start with the Story mode. As it has been a few years since the last game released and the story has been in the telling since the 1994 original Tekken, the game does prompt if you want to watch a recap video of the story so far. Basically it’s a battle between father and son, amongst The King of the Iron Fist tournament and each game would result in someone taking the crown and deposing the previous winner. However this time Heihachi Mishima is missing and presumed dead, so his son Kazuya Mishima is free to enact the plan he envisions, to basically push humanity away from being weak. There is a lot of story that the game delivers, and I won’t spoil any of it here, but I will say that at times it feels more tv soap in its approach than character driven drama, but it has a few surprises and twists that will keep you engaged. Of course, the story plays out with you fighting your way through events, sometimes in the form of actual matches, sometimes its to test how you are recovering. While the game mostly has you playing as Jin Kazama, there are times when you get to pick up and play as another character.
While there are times when the game will force you to lose a round, in order to push things forward, if you lose a match otherwise, you just have to restart and try again. Depending on your skill level and the difficulty that you select, the story can take a long time to complete, but it took me around 9 hours. If there was one thing with the story that I didn’t like, it was that there were some characters that felt like they were shoehorned in and some of them appear and vanish just as quickly.
Once you have completed the main story, all of the characters side story missions will be unlocked, while the content within is mostly the same, the setup and ending are unique. Completing any of these will provide items that you can use to customise your profile and you will earn cash to modify characters that you can play as online and in other modes. The second major mode is the Arcade Quest, which is basically a career mode but for a Tekken esports player. Before you jump in, you will need to create a character for yourself and while they are not as realistic as the main fighters, there are a lot of options to choose from. When I got to play the game months ago at the Bandai Namco offices, I made myself look like Megamind, but for the review I did a more traditional looking character. Once the character is made you then begin your rise through the ranks, by picking fights with people in various locations. As you play against characters in the world, you earn points which lets you rank up. There are tournaments to enter, new characters to meet and even items to unlock, there is a lot going on. One aspect that I didn’t realise until a ways in, but swapping out the character you were fighting as, resets your progress. You can of course swap back to your previous character and the progress goes back to what it was, but it wasn’t something the game explained.
The final major aspect of the game is the multiplayer, both the offline and online varieties. Offline you can have local matches either with a friend or against the CPU or you can take part in some Tekken Ball. Online is of course where you go to play games with folks from around the world. Due to the limited time that the servers were up during the review period, I can’t talk about the overall success of how they will be on release day, but I can say that I had no issue. Now successes in online fights is another thing, but the actual smoothness of play, there was nothing to report on. Given the amount of players was much smaller than normal, it did take a few moments longer to find a fight than I might have liked, but that shouldn’t be an issue once everyone is online.
The amount of options for the game is honestly staggering, Tekken Ball coming back is a great addition, though something about it today doesn’t register as much with me like it did back in the 90s. The arcade mode lets you take on a series of consecutive battles, to see how long you last and of course, there is a gallery. There is a nice character customisation system, which is how I ended up with an almost completely gold Yoshimitsu. The one aspect that I didn’t spend a lot of time in, purely due to a lack of time, was the Ghost Battle, where the game learns how you play and creates a digital counterpart for you to fight. If you spam nothing but punch, the game will start to counter that attack, causing you to change things up. You can also watch replays of your fights and the game will report on what you did and offer up tips on how you could have avoided an attack or such. The gallery offers up something that I thought I never knew I needed, a music player of all the Tekken soundtracks.
That makes a nice segue into the games presentation, which runs so smooth that I never noticed any hiccups in the performance. The game loads everything almost instantly at all times, the rare times that it does not achieve that, the extra time is counted in seconds and if you use a single hand, you would have fingers left over. The time between selecting a character for a fight, then a map and then getting into the fight is so smooth, you would think the game knew the options you were going to pick ahead of time. Speaking of characters, they almost all look incredible, with he newer additions feeling like they were always there. Azucena and Victor both look great and while they clearly come from different backgrounds, seeing them standing next to Jin or King is great. The stages are just as wonderful as the characters, with some literally packed with screaming crowds and one stage is out of this world. It is not all rainbow and sunshine though, as I did see a lot of clipping of fighters when they were in corners or against walls. Sometimes it was nothing more than some cloth, or an accessory, but I did spot a few times were arms were going through characters and it looked weird.
The games audial side is a little more mixed for me, the games music is amazing and really helped me get into the atmosphere of each fight. During the story mode, it feels like it’s a proper movie when the music kicks in, which was nice. The character voices sound great with so many returning actors bringing their characters to life once again. Beau Billingslea was a voice actor I knew very well as Jet from Cowboy Bebop, so hearing his voice come out of Leroy Smith was equal parts awesome and confusing, though maybe more the first. Where things fall apart here though is in the limited amount of lines that the characters say after a fight. Before a fight the lines are quite different, depending on who you are fighting, I had one fight where I was Asuka Kazama and she was fighting Panda, her line was asking about who let animals in. The problem is the line at the end was a line I heard plenty of times already. I had the same with Reina and Yoshimitsu, with only a handful of lines each, they repeat far to often and you can’t skip them.
Tekken 8 is a fantastic fighting game, the fact that it welcomes a more aggressive playstyle is perfect for someone like me, who doesn’t care about frames or timing of attacks. The story mode is wonderful, though it does have some moments of soap, which undercuts some of the tension. There are countless modes to enjoy, both online and off, with Arcade Quest being a fun career type session for an esports Tekken player. The game having a few tools for showing you how to get better and even learning from you, is interesting and I can’t wait to see how they evolve over time. Does Tekken 8 do enough to bring in non-Tekken fans, I think so. Each match I took part in, even the ones I lost, felt great. I never thought that I was being punished if I lost and the game was always quick to let me get back in to another fight. Tekken 8 is an incredible game, it is fast, fluid but most importantly fun and I found myself looking for just one more fight.
The Score
9.5
Review code provided by Bandai Namco
The Pros
The amount of modes and options is quite intense and will keep players engaged for a long time
Character customisation is quite deep, which might help make you stand out when battling online
The Cons
The story mode is good, but feels a little TV soap at times, which under cuts some tension
The limited amount of lines post a fight are too small, which leads to them being repeated far to often
