TEKKEN 8

Been playing this game for some time, before the update it was fun, after the after the matchmaking is just ridiculous nowadays, and everyone is spamming their minds out, it's now infuriating rather than fun.

been playing this series since 3 but didn't get into depth till 7 , always loved this series. The way I can describe this game is like being 10 years old again and bashing your action figures together mindlessly . It still requires skill & knowledge checking . It's still fun don't get me wrong this is one of the best modern fighting games in my opinion (cuz i'm not use to 3D fighters but think they are great) . Usually most fighting games from start to end they get better. Sometimes it gets good in the middle. I still have hope for this game & modern fighters to such as SF6 , GGST, & GBVSR.

It pains me to do this but I have to leave a bad review for Tekken 8, and i LOVE Tekken and Fighting games in general

My issue is a big one, the DLC is the EXACT SAME DLC FOR TEKKEN 7!!! This is not only LAZY but a RIP OFF!!!

If a character is DLC in the previous game then they should be in the base roster on the next game. DLC should be to bring back characters we haven't seen in a while or new ones. This is compounded by the DLC being an exact repeat of the DLC from Tekken 7 as well

I'm sorry but DO NOT BUY this unless it is on a massive discount sale.

Welcome to Gambling 8, where everyone’s got 50/50 moves. Guess right? Cool, you’re chilling. But guess wrong? Hope you brought snacks, ’cause you’re getting combo’d until your future grandkids feel it. of course this game is good for your mental health

Oh, man. I could write a full, genuine review, on exactly why I can't recommend this game, but honestly: you're not going to read that whole thing. You wanna know quickly why you should or shouldn't buy this, right? Well, I'll tell you, but easily-digested short answers will only lead to more questions (or assumptions) on your part. Still, it's better than nothing, so I'll ***try*** to be as concise as possible from here:

DO NOT BUY

Why?

1. The biggest and most important reason is this: they have completely betrayed everything Tekken built in the games 1-5, betraying the long-term hardcore fans at the same time.
2. If you're brand new to the game, there are other games in the genre which are less technical, faster paced, and whose devs actually listen to their communities
3. If you fall in love with this game, they will inevitably completely change what you love about it in upcoming titles
4. It has become a completely shameless cash-grab. In all Tekken titles prior to 7, you either had all characters unlocked right away (and as part of the base game's price) OR you could actually play the game to unlock "secret" characters (which was the most fun, especially when some of those characters were genuinely secret/hidden/difficult to unlock). Now you pay a full game price just to unlock one or two characters and maybe an extra level.
5. The levels in which you fight are so irrelevant that previous versions of the game literally had stages that were just infinite darkness, or an infinite plane of shallow water, featureless "grass", etc. The stages literally don't matter at all for how the game is played, but they sell you new ones as if they're important. Disgusting.

I could honestly go on, but that's enough. I could go *very deep* into the betrayals, but if you're new, you won't care, and if you're an old fan, you already know.

Suffice it to say, Tekken was one of the greatest games of all time, and starting with Tekken 6, they decided to head in the direction of laziness, exploitation, and dishonour.

All that said, they still have one of the best stories and character development of any fighting game. It's just not enough.

It's got a solid enough story mode, matchmaking is all over the place as is the graphics quality and frankly having to pay extra to play as Eddie or Heihachi rankled with me so much I have uninstalled it. Paying for new or novelty bonus characters sure but for characters that have been core to the game for years?
Nope, nope, nope.
Glad I got it on sale, if I'd paid full price I'd have been furious rather than just sad at the demise of a franchise I've been playing since it first released.

Tekken is my favorite game no mather what and still find ways to love it but this shit is disgrace to me and everyone else who loves this franchise.

NOPE! if you gave every one stances and 50/50 mixups you better give me my ultimate 50/50 machine LEI Wulong.

Fakhurmom really? you can bring any other character and people think oh cool but not this guy what the hell is going on?

game is genuinely just not worth it in it's current state, season 2 absolutely sucks cheeks and most things that the devs said they would work on *cough cough, defensive patches* were just 180'd so that everyone and their mother can just spam endless plus on block forward advancing moves. what a joke. if you want an idea of how bad it is just look it up on youtube, it's an absolute state

I see the bad reviews and I get it I really do some moves are easier to do now but I still have fun playing it. Been playing Tekken since number 2 can't help to recommend it for my love of Tekken.

If you paid or preordered the Ultimate Edition when the game came out, you're supposed to get get all the content for it!( Season 1 & 2 character and level passes) But they pulled a bait and switch and if you bought the first version of the Ultimate Edition, you're screwed out of the second version which comes with the passes!( this really needs to be illegal)
It's a straight up scam! It's a shame too because the game is good, but the publisher is stealing and cheating people out of their purchased content, forcing you to pay twice for the same product. If people complain loud enough, maybe something would be done about this.

I've been playing this game since my childhood, I was playing it when it was PlayStation 3, then I played Tekken 7 a little, but I played Tekken 6-5 when it was PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. The game flows, really. I mean, fighting games. It's a really excellent, high-quality game. The story is amazing. I'm really looking forward to the continuation of the story, especially the fighting scenes are really awesome. I hope it continues.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3411909218

Everything frcking costs money. Thanks Bandai Namco! We cant enjoy your game after buying the game ^^

Tekken used to reward users with excellent execution now the execution doesn't matter. Most of the characters just transition into a stance (with no execution whatsoever) where they can pull 50/50 strings and you have to hard read them. You guess wrong, you eat a ~100 damage combo. No doubt game looks stunning but the brain dead offence is just not enjoyable. Some rounds you just see the opponent abuse a random move and get so much plus frames that pressing a single button will give a zillion damage combo.

This game is now more of "Who can remember and execute long flow charts" then a skill game. This game is so far gone now that the only fix they can do to avoid death combos is to increase the health cap. Because they just can't balance every character which are all broken to the core.

There used to be a skill difference between a skilled player who can do hard execution strings and a newbie. Now tekken 8 is even grounds for everyone. No execution just brain dead offence. Hit 3, 2 hold forward and voila you are in stance. Mix the other player to death.

With every passing update the game is getting more and more unbalanced but yea lets focus on a new broken character instead of fixing already existing one.

This is by far the biggest disappointment I've had in gaming for a while.
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME NOR SUPPORT THIS COMPANY AND DEVELOPMENT TEAM

MAJOR ISSUES IN THE GAME CURRENTLY 2025/05/16
- Heat every round
- Rage art every round
- Armor spam every round
- High/Low crush without real risks
- Awful balance patch after awful balance patch
- 50/50 "Take the hit" scenarios, MULTIPLE TIMES, every round

I gave this season its fair shot. I gave this game its fair chance. This game is bad. Tekken has gone from *THE* premier fighting game to a poor imitation of what is was. I waited years to enjoy a Tekken with my friends. I grew up with the arcades and remember actively sucking because of how hard the game used to be. Now, I can't even block without being put in a 15 second cutscene WITH ACTUAL CUTSCENES IN IT.

I'm currently a mid blue rank after the reset, and no matter how much "old" style Tekken I try to play, it just leaves me feeling infuriated because I wasn't mashing hard enough to stop my opponent from doing the same.
It's to the point where I don't even feel good for improving at this game anymore, and many of my friends feel the same. It is an absolute shame that the game has come to this state, where people I know who've played for multiple titles say -

"What's the point? The game isn't fun anymore."

And that really sums up the experience a player will get from this game. New or old, it does not matter. How many of you have ended your gaming sessions closing the game in frustration or anger? How many times have you finished a match and instead of being impressed at the fun match you had with your opponent you're instead left going "What the heck was that bull crap?" The mere fact this game inspires that mentality in so many players, even streamers and professionals nowadays is symptomatic of these issues I've stated above.

The current response to the negativity has been to roll out monthly, lackluster patches to try and salvage the abhorrent state Tekken 8 and the Tekken franchise is in. Their "best efforts" have amounted to nothing but blatant disregard for player feedback, community relations, and the game's longtime legacy as a skill based game. In their own words, the development team added in these game systems to allow less skilled players to feel like they have a chance to win against better opponents. That is antithetical to what this game was and has been for its lifetime, and it is ultimately why I am uninstalling and reviewing this game negatively.

Game rewards offense too much that you dont need to learn other aspects of the game such as punishment, movement and blocking. It encourages players to just learn an oppressive flow chart.

The gameplay loop is not fun because every interaction is reduced to guess mid or low mix. Then plus frames and chip damage punishes blocking. Easy access to plus on block mids that leave the opponent next to you creates a very oppressive loop.

Here are things that i do not like:
*Combo damage and duration is too high.
*Heatmashes are essentially homing + mid on block into mix.
*Safe mid-mid heat engagers.
*Heat dash into full combo.
*Access to heat every round.
*Plus on block homing mids
*Homing Strings
*Guard Breaks
*Heat Bar Recovery
*Easy access to Heat mechanic
*Projectiles
*Power crush becoming safe after absorbing an attack
*Installs and debuff
*Jailing Strings (cancans etc..)
*charged attacks
*No gooner outfits
*Clive
*Cheaters

I would still recommend the game because these most of the issues in t8 can be fixed and hopefully they realize that designing the game in a way that allows a new player like me to beat a veteran player is not a good idea.

Went from 100 to 0 . What corporate greed does to a game and it only kept on getting worse.

I only started playing Tekken back in 7, and that was nearing the release for Tekken 8. By the time 8 dropped, I considered the game to be incredibly fun with its new mechanics and whatnot. Yes, the game had its flaws still, but it was still overall a really solid and fun fighting game during season 1. Season 2 comes around and playing it is like having 5 people from the development team do the Maui mudslide on your ass while 15 other employees do the San Francisco Steam train behind the paywall of characters no one wanted. This game is at its worst state. With DLC characters such as Anna who became forgettable 3 days after release, the DLC in this game are rather disappointing in itself with characters that should've just been base roster. Overall, I just hope the game continues to improve with the new balance updates and doesnt turn into a shit show

Not only is season 2 the worst competitive patch I have ever seen in a game but this dlc list is atrocious. Just making everyone pay for the same characters that were dlc from tekken 7 all over again. Lidia, Anna, and now Fahk? Marduk's next isn't he? This game is for no one right now. Not for competitive players who want to learn a coherent game, nor casual/long time intermediates that look forward to an exciting product.

Game is abysmal in its current state.

Go back and play Tekken 7.

Imagine, if you can, the exhilarating triumph of winning a horse race. Naturally, you return for another round, because why not? Victory is a habit, after all. And we all love to gamble.
But this time, an idea strikes you: bold, eccentric, and perhaps a bit insano style. Instead of a horse, you show up with an alligator. Yes, you read that right, an alligator! A creature that is about as suited for a racetrack as a brick is for a ballet.
But you are confident and as the race draw near, you take a long reflective pause to gaze into the alligator's eyes. Eyes that are completely devoided of grace and intelligence.

And It´s in this moment, it dawns on you. This creature, with all its primal elegance (or lack of), is a perfect mirror of your own existence. In a rush of conflicting emotions, rage, love, confusion, and maybe even admiration. You make the decision to destroy the alligator just as the race is about to begin. You, of course lose the race, not only because you brought an alligator to a horse race, but also because you killed it just before the race began.

It's in this moment you may catch just a tiny glimpse of how utterly nonsensical the actions of the development team appear.

This is my first ever negative review on Steam, also my least played Tekken game to date, been playing Tekken since T3 (1997), I consider Tekken my favorite media franchise.
I never like Tekken 8 even from the moment it I played it when it launched but I was really hoping that the devs were going to change the mechanics completely, also give us characters we really want for Season 2.
After seeing Fahk being announced for the next character, the game was immediately uninstalled.
What's crazy to me is that it is the 30th anniversary of the series, Tekken is one of the most influential games in general due to how it left it's mark in the industry, and Namco is pretending like the franchise doesn't exist.

Unfortunately, this once promising game, dug its own grave

Bamco after season 2's backlash decided, that of all the ways to earn back players trust, they would announce Fahkumram as the next dlc character, and a joke stage. solidifying the tombstone

Was bad but tolerable in season 1 but season 2 is the biggest pile of trash that I've ever seen.

The game directors have said from the beginning that they want new players to win more against skilled players.
Well, they achieved their vision in season 2, they managed to create a fighting game with almost no competitive integrity whatsoever.

Stay away from this game for now if you want to keep your sanity.

They literally punched their own fans in the face with the recent patch. Like tons of monetization and selling legacy characters as DLC's who have been in the game since 1994 and 1999 wasn't enough they literally butchered everything to appeal to newcomers and made the game insanely aggressive making defense useless asf. Don't bother with this game right now.

As it stands just go play something else. left this for SF6 with no regrets.

Going on thirty years now, I've been a Tekken player since the very beginning. From pumping quarters into the first five installments when they found their way to arcades, to snapping up the latest issues of Gamepro and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines that featured Tekken 3 on their covers.

I even bought a Playstation 2 at launch just to play Tekken Tag Tournament 25 odd years ago.

In a nutshell, Tekken was my life. And with each sequel's new features, my love of the Iron Fist Tournament only continued to strengthen with the passage of time. That was until Tekken 8 arrived.

Tekken 8 feels like a shadow of it's former self. The movesets of series staples have been stripped down or heavily modified to the point of feeling like entirely new characters altogether. For players who rolled their eyes at Tekken 7's armor, rage arts, and rage drive features will surely despise Tekken 8's added heat engine.

Instead of learning how to counter each character's moves with practice, Tekken 8's heat engine encompasses certain moves in a player's arsenal that triggers inescapable cutscenes; tossing players into combo opportunities where the push of a button can either pile on damage or be countered by the opponent. The winner of these cutscenes is determined randomly via Tekken's own version of rock, paper, scissors.

Outside of Tekken Ball and story modes, Tekken 8 continues the trend of offering few modes to choose from to players looking for variety. Series staples such as Team Battle, Time Attack, Survival or even Treasure Battle modes are nowhere to be found. While character and player customization have returned with clothing items that be purchased with in-game currency, Tekken 8 is also the first title in the Tekken franchise that folows today's DLC trends by implementing predatory micro-transactions in a new feature called the Tekken Shop.

To start with, many of the same items that were unlockable in Tekken 7 are now locked behind a paywall in Tekken 8. Unlocking these items requires the use of real-world currency at about $4 per costume; which is just inexcusable.

While Tekken 8's simplified 1 button mechanics are geared towards casual gamers, Tekken 8's arcade mode disregards difficulty settings entirely by forcing players to engage in ghost battles alongside the regular CPU in order to complete all eight stages. Ghost battles use pre-recorded playstyles of real-life players to simulate facing a real human opponent online. The difference between facing a standard CPU opponent and a ghost battle presents a major spike in difficulty that may discourage some players from progressing further while trying to learn the ropes of Tekken's gameplay mechanics.

Like other reviewers have stated, Tekken 8 doesn't feel like a Tekken Game. If anything, Tekken 8 feels like an entirely different game that just so happens to feature cameo appearances by characters from the Tekken universe.

This game genuinely started off fun and much less overwhelming than other Tekken titles, excellent UI, great slew of features, beautiful graphics compared to Tekken 8, core of the game remains the same, albeit with the addition of the heat system. I never played other Tekkens competitively before, so I just took what I got at face value and had great fun, though I did feel as I played more that the heat system breaks up the flow of the fight too much, that so many moves are very spammable and incredibly difficult to counter without hard reads, movement that is less emphasized as all the systems push you towards offense more and more.

As I played more I agreed that the game needs to move away from the excess offense and reward good defense more - tone down many moves, such as heat engaging power crushes. Tone down chip damage, tone down the advantages characters get in heat, buff sidesteps and reward good fundamentals with opportunities for whiff punishes and block punishes.

But that is not what the game devs did - in season 2 they have added even more BS that takes away any joy, fun or complexity from the game. Defense is not possible to play well because no human can react to so many threats with very specific answers - and if you guess wrong, you will eat a huge punish.

I main Reina, and she also got more ways to enter her stances, her already amazing offense got amped up for no reason.

This game is confused in its vision and doesn't know what it wants to do. The gamedevs respond to criticism with blocking, and telling the players they are stupid and should how to play.

I have NEVER seen such a negative response to a patch or a game, this feels like post-release Street Fighter 5... except SF5 got better over time.

Tekken 8 got worse with time. Don't buy, don't play,

This game is amazing, really a modern marvel.

They've spent over 30 years making Tekken games yet in this modern age they managed to make a fighting game this bad. Truly I love this game because its actually a modern example of a fighting game kusoge it actually is fun to play if you aren't taking it seriously. They managed to make a fighting game where if you are blocking, you are losing, not in disadvantage, STRAIGHT UP LOSING. It somehow feels like a rainbow bootleg of tekken which is really fun until you start taking it seriously.

Most people buy fighting games with the intention of mastery, getting better. If thats you, do NOT buy this game.

This has got to be THE WORST AAA fighting game of all time. There's no fixing this. It's fundamentally rotten to the core. If you plan on doing anything more than playing the story mode and doing dress up with your characters, do NOT buy this game. Do NOT go online. DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. TEKKEN 7 is on sale for TEN BUCKS. GO BUY THAT.

So unfortunate, what a great game with great potential to be the best fighting of the generation. But got flung out the window by people who don't know what they were doing.

I cant believe i uninstallled a tekken game. I was born playing tekken basically, my entire family plays tekken including aunts, sisters, and moms but this recent patch is a spit in the face to legacy fans. Tekken down to its core has been ripped out and gutted. Defense is rarely an option now. Press more buttons = win. Use character with better buttons to press and suddenly a tekken 7 green rank is climbing to Fujin for fun. I have ran into blue ranks who don't understand the concept of waiting your turn, side steps, throw breaks, plus frames, punishes, hell I've seen tekken kings display the same level of skill... essentially none. Im actually about to redownload tekken 7 so I can at least have a glimpse into what tekken is supposed to be. The devs looked at every response from the community and blatantly ignored us. Not a single soul wanted any of these changes. WHO THOUGHT GETTING DAMAGED FOR BREAKING A GRAB WAS A GOOD IDEA?!?!? Im a king main and that was just a pitiful idea. King has been butchered for what he has always been. He's always been an expression character to knowledge check and show the variation of play styles within his kit. Now he is a 50/50 spam machine with tracking throws. There is no personality within the king players because you can't have one anymore without being miles better than the other or if you're ready to lose every game. The moment a defense update is properly implemented, I'll be back. But until then the game is unplayable.

let me play s1 with my friends please, season 2 should come with a refund, i did not spend money to play this current game.

Season 1 was okay. Season 2 is unplayable due to a lack of balance, There is no way to defend against braindead spam from broken characters, I cant even play normally in unranked anymore

Probably your market analysis showed that casual players—those not particularly good at the game—tend to spend more on cosmetics.
I am part of that targeted group. So hear me out: you wanted to make players like me happy by increasing the win rate with this patch.
You succeeded with the latter, but happy I am not. I genuinely didn’t mind losing to better players—I was learning from it.
And of course, I was happy when I won matches, because there are always players worse than you, whom you can outplay.
And even if it was slow, I made progress in getting better.

Now I can’t tell anymore if my opponent is good or not. I don’t learn from my losses anymore.
Wins don’t feel deserved. It just doesn’t hit the same.
The whole thing feels more like watching an action movie where someone gets beaten up badly.
You’ve made it into an elaborate fighting animation where the player is hardly involved.
I can’t recall another game that was broken by active development like this—with a single patch.

I waited quite a while after the Season 2 patch and the following emergency patch before writing this review,
because I tend to give devs a chance to fix things.
But your band-aid solution to this poorly received patch—increasing health—only made those meaningless matchups last longer.
On top of that, with the massively increased waiting time to find a match—because way too many players have left—this game no longer fits into my gaming time.
It’s not what I bought it for anymore: a game I could quickly fire up to have some fast matches in between.
Now I quite literally spend more time waiting than I intended to spend playing in the first place.

I don’t buy overpriced cosmetics in games I don’t enjoy—especially not just because it’s easier to win now.
Your market analysis is flawed.

Maybe your market analysis also concluded that gamers grow old—and that’s when they tend to have the money to buy your stuff.
And that’s also when their reaction time suffers a bit.
So you made reaction time meaningless.
Even a hummingbird can only guess now. That’s fair—make everybody feel equally bad. Great move.
No more dopamine from skilled gameplay.
Let everyone just learn the strings and hope they can make use of their turn—if they guessed correctly.
And that’s about it now. A turn-based game.
Internalize your combos and win about 50/50 of your matches. (Pun intended.)

Again, your market analysis is flawed.
While it’s true that reaction time suffers with older gamers, gaming time suffers even more.
And as mentioned above, you now mainly spend it waiting.

And then it hit me like a homing attack—what the master plan with this patch really is.
Because you can’t possibly be that out of touch.
This patch was never aimed at the player base, right?
You designed the fights for bots—or “ghosts,” as you call them.
You even introduced that feature in the lobby.

And if the player base inevitably drops to the point where it’s all crickets and tumbleweeds,
you’ll just make us fight ghosts pretending to be actual players.
Who could even tell, with the way you’ve designed the matches to play out?

At least your market analysis got that part right:
Not many will stick around for whatever this is now...

I really enjoyed Season 1 of Tekken 8, but Season 2 has made the game almost unplayable. The changes on this season have made the game even more unbalanced than it was before. I understand that the devs are trying to fix this with small updates, but in its current state, the game feels frustrating and difficult to enjoy. Difficult to recommend this game now, but who knows, probably everything will be fixed before Season 3.

Very bad patch, people nowadays don't play defense anymore and forget about the fundamentals of blocking and punishing. Season 2 relies on button mash/pressuring without any room for counter play. Such a brain dead gameplay.

This was indeed not the defence patch. I uninstalled and started playing other games 'till this is fixed. You guys should too

the Devs are taking the piss and have turned a game which once had a unique identity into a big mess of offensive 50/50s pressure and guessing with braindead gameplay that is not the game i enjoy to play

Bamco smoking some of that good stuff thinking season 2 was good to release the way it was. It's impressively bad. Small changes in the emergency patch that just released barely scratches the surface. One tiny step in the right direction after that disastrous update. They need about 1000 more of these steps to fix the game. No way in hell I can recommend this game in it's current state and I really don't know if they'll fix it. Feels really bad to see my favorite fighting game franchise fall off the cliff of the earth.

All these negative reviews are 100% warranted.

If you enjoy ultra casual party fighting games play this, otherwise stay away from it.

Genuinely the worst Tekken entry and the constant misinformation from developers about defensive options that don't work in the game is what will continue to make this game suffer. Needs far less aggressive options and FAR more defensive options. The developers legitimately lied to us in the latest season 2 patch saying they were adding more defensive options only to actually neuter them and give EVERY character new aggressive options and broken changes to the point where the entire roster felt unfair to fight and the game turned into a mind-numbing 50/50 gamble each round.

I have played this game up until the latest patch. The game is good in itself with great graphics and characters but they made the wrong decisions.

Old balance team got benched, but in the current state until whatever large balance patch that comes after may make the game playable. I do not recommend at this time.

This game fucking sucks. I have no idea which idiot went and approve S2. Whoever the fuck it is I hope you lose your job. It was bearable on S1 but now its just a dogshit game. I paid full mega deluxe whatever the fuck for a Tekken Game, not this dogshit, bug filled, guess for your life while the combo last 10 minutes fucking nonsense.

This is not a review of the game, I'm going to mention the nonsense with the season 2 patch and other frustrations about the game in general which are just my opinions. If you want to know about the game, my thoughts are as follows:
The story is fun and over the top, I genuinely enjoyed it.
The heat system is cool and flashy but over time gets frustrating to deal with and I will explain my thoughts on it further down.
Base character roster is decent in size.
Graphics are good.
Now my issues with the season 2 patch. The devs said they were focusing on defence this season, what a joke. the defensive options they gave us was allowing you to buffer in a sidestep just before a round starts and making side stepping "easier" in certain situations. That's about it as far I saw from playing and hear people mentioning. Now the big question is why are they not utilising the heat system for defensive options as well? Street fighter and mortal kombat and probably other fighters that have a resource meter can utilise it for defensive options but in Tekken 8 that's just not a thing? The heat system is ONLY used for offense. That's just lazy because all the big fighting games do learn from each other and borrow ideas and implement them in their own way into their respective games so how did the devs miss including such an important part of their new heat system? It makes no sense.
They put a battle pass in the game (which used quite a bit of re-used assets from tekken 7 and eye color changes?? why cant there be a slider for that?) because street fighter 6 has one too? i understand that its all cosmetic and you dont need any of that stuff but people have asked for years for more cosmetic options like tekken 6 and tag 2 had, to buy with in game currency and now they just selling that for real money on top off paying for dlc characters and their stages SEPERATELY??This game is getting too greedy. Whenever a new dlc character comes out they tend be a bit overpowered in certain aspects and over a few patches get balanced out, its becoming a noticeable trend in tekken 8 and I'm very against that. So if you want to experience the story mode, wait for a dirt cheap special, if you want to play the game online and really dig into that aspect of the game, I would recommend you look at another fighting game instead of this game.

Edit: They are applying band aid level fixes as a start to the season 2 changes and have plans for more changes (hopefully substantial ones) as the current season continues. Depending if they actually manage to get the game into a better state I may update this "review" however the negatives I have about the game other than the season 2 nonsense (season pass prices, separate characters & stages and battle pass in a full price game) those don't seem likely to be changed.

I had given up hope that the game would get better a long time ago but this most recent patch is just ridiculous. I cant even justify keeping it installed anymore. Bandai if you are reading this please fire Michael Murray bc he is running this franchise into the ground

tekken 8 season 2 is possibly the worst patch in a muiltiplayer game period.

developers went out of their way to use season 1 to essentially beta test the game with the public, gather feedback, and deliberately ignore all that feedback.

forced 50/50 mixups from range 5, overtuned homing mids that dumb down offense, removed nuance on the ground game (okizeme), homing throws so you better guess right, removing unique weaknesses that give characters depth, boring stance transitions, and the most hilarious bug in anna williams stealing/donating movesets. not to mention much more. 1500 changes for this.

revert the patch and start again from the drawing board. season 1 was not great either, but how they managed to make it even worse is beyond me.

tekken is easily one of the greatest fighting game franchises out. people are opting to go back to older titles because of how disastrous tekken 8 season 2 is. fix the game.

Tekken 8 Season 2 will go down in video game history as one of the worst video game updates ever bought to not only a fighting game, but any game at all within the last 5 years or so.

Oh, you're blocking? Take this chip damage.
Oh, you're sidestepping? Take this homing attack
Oh, you blocked another attack? Lemme hit you with this move that gives me plus frames because I have a stance that puts you in a 50/50 guess situation. You guess wrong, you die
Oh, you're backing up and creating space? Take this projectile move that still deals chip damage on block
Oh, you're breaking my throws? Take chip damage for guessing correctly anyway, idiot
Oh, is Tekken 8 your first ever fighting game? Don't worry, we've made this game so easy that you'll be able to fight and even beat some Tekken players (and maybe Professionals too) that have been playing Tekken for the last 15 years
Oh, you're cheating now? Don't worry, you won't get banned. The devs don't seem to care and won't ban you despite the hundreds of reports made to your account
Oh, you wanna share your thoughts on social media about how you feel about this game? Well it better be a positive post or the devs will block you!

I honestly hope that this patch is immortalized, turned into a book and put in a museum for everyone to read about. I hope that game studios and even universities around the world study this patch in the future on how NOT to develop your game. Let this be the shining example of what it looks like to dumb down a game so much for casual players, so much so that not only do you push away professional players and those that have been playing this game franchise for decades at this point, but even the casual players that you wanted to cater to in the first place; there are currently 4000 people playing this game right now as this review is being written, and you have no one to thank but yourselves, Bandai Namco.

Season 1 was interesting to play, but was hoping that Season 2 would get Tekken 8 back to a more defensive style of play.
Unfortunately, season 2 further pushed offensively with 50/50 game play. Will be taking a break from Tekken till the Dev Team gets Tekken 8 back on track.

Arrogant game devs, cheaters, unbalanced, combos that go on for 20 seconds, heavily monetized, story written by aliens, no Gon...etc

I uh, just wow. This game feels genuinely awful to play now. Good job guys. I hope I can play this game again at some point. I was having a ton of fun with season 1, warts and all. This however is just terrible. Online has never felt so miserable.
Sidestepping feels better but whats the point? Everyone got crazy tracking moves and 50/50s so you're better off playing it as a 2d fighter. Just spam powercrush, throw your broken tracking move, rely on chip, never stop pressing buttons. Its not fun, it limits player expression, and worst of all ITS BORING.