Tekken 8 is the Best Modern Tekken (If They Don't Blow It)

after the release of Tekken 7 Namco were in a tricky position because how do you follow up the most successful entry in your franchise it's a situation we've seen a lot of developers struggle with over the years I'm thinking of Capcom after the release of Street Fighter 4 and as we learned from the disaster that was Street Fighter 5 if the developer is not paying close attention to their game design and they are misreading the elements that are making the formula work what can end up happening is that they start overemphasizing things that they shouldn't be emphasizing and then they release a game that not only disappoints the fan base but also could potentially put the entire franchise into a tail spin because in the year 2024 these days these are high stakes releases this is not the arcade era where you can be a bit more experimental you bring out Street Fighter Alpha if that's not really working okay let's throw at Alpha 2 Alpha 2 is not really working look okay let's try Alpha 3 let's throw out third strike you know they had more wiggle room they had more stuff to play with in the arcade era but in today's modern fighting game era if you make a bad entry into a Mainline series you're going to have to lie in that bed and you're going to have to lie in that bed for a very long time just think about Street Fighter 5 how long that disaster went on how much Goodwill the franchise bled how many players it lost to other series and then that made Street Fighter 6 even more of a high stakes release where they felt so pressured they needed to add in an entire Yakuza game or whatever to try to get people to like the game and so with Tekken 8 I can absolutely understand why it has been in development for so long I could see Hara and the rest of the Tekken team being like mm- we are not touching this we are going to ride Tekken 7 into the ground we are going to sit on top of this game for as long as possible and if you think about it how long has Tekken 7 been the most current active Tekken game like nearly a decade at this point and I think a reason for that is because where do you go from Tekken 7 what do you do because when Tekken 7 came out remember the context it was coming out of a big slump from the Tekken franchise where Tekken 6 I think was pretty cool game and I think Tekken Tag 2 was also a really cool underrated game but they were just too Tekken for the the mainstream especially during the era of Street Fighter 4 the series was really dwindling and so I think what happened with Tekken 7 is that harod and the rest of the Tekken team looked at Street Fighter 4 and they're like let's do that let's do that that worked for Street Fighter let's do it for Tekken so let's streamline some of the elements of the game play so we're going to Nerf movement down a bit we're going to make the throw game easier to understand throw braks are now easier will make teching getting off the ground easier as well where you don't really have to time the text or do as much of that a lot of times you can just kind of hold back and that'll be fine so they're going in and they're really simplifying the mechanics and on top of that they're just doing things that Street Fighter 4 did like let's add rage Arts rage Arts are basically ultas from Street Fighter 4 hell let's bring in Street Fighter 4 Akuma while we're at it just to really nail this point home so let's add in 2D Street Fighter 4 style characters and so you can see how much inspiration Tekken 7 took from Street Fighter 4 in terms of making the main formula of their gameplay more accessible with the benefit of more popularity and it definitely work there's no way to deny that in player base in sales in mainstream appreciation and being paid attention to Tekken 7 was a home run in all of these metrics the problem is as Namco and the rest of the world learned from Street Fighter 4 you can only push streamlining your game so far you can only only go to that well once because if you keep pushing this style of design and you keep streamlining the game even more you end up with Street Fighter 5 where you don't have that longevity and depth and your game kind of ends up being a joke competitively and so I can see Namco really wanting to avoid that with Tekken 8 and so what do you do what do you do with this game where do you go because you can't keep making things more casual and mainstream but you have to do something different I talked about this in the tragedy of fighting games is as much as a player base may like a fighting game as much as a developer may like their own game because of the way the medium works you have to make a new game and then you have to change that game enough for it to be identifiably different otherwise people are not going to feel motivated to buy it so it's this nasty Catch 22 where you can never quite fully solve the fighting game format because even if you get really close to what you desire in terms of design of your gameplay you have to change it ultimately to keep the series going and so I think what the game plan was coming into Tekken 8 is that Namco were really giving this situation a lot of thought round one fight and so the thing about Tekken that I appreciate is that I think the developers are trying to change things about Tekken that have been a problem for a long time trying to make improvements on the actual Tekken formula itself but at the same time not totally abandoning the identity and Legacy skill of the franchise they're really trying to thread this needle as tightly as possible and I can appreciate what a tricky situation that is and when I played the alpha I was really concerned because the way the alpha was presented I think was kind of a calculated move by Namco because if you think back to the alpha now it almost feels like Namco were playing poker with their player base a bit because there were sliding cars onto the table that were a little bit of the more controversial choices and they're just kind of seeing how many guys think about this what's your reaction going to be because my reaction to the alpha was I was pretty concerned especially around the nerfed back dash movement and also it felt like heat was really overpowered I can't confirm what the heat changes might have been between the full release version and the Alpha maybe there were big changes maybe there weren't it is kind of hard to tell but I can definitely say the movement has improved a lot and it was funny the characters they decided to show in the alpha the ones that I was paying attention to King kazuya jyn all of them have really nerfed backwards movement compared to their Tekken 7even counterparts but then my main character Devil Jin he like plays just like the Tekken 7 version almost maybe it's like slightly nerfed but I mean it is damn close to his Tekken 7 equivalent and then you also have a nice juicier Sid step so you hand me Tekken 8 Devil Jin you hand me Tekken 7 Devil Jin I actually prefer Tekken 8 Devil Jin in terms of his movement because the side step is bigger and stronger and then the back dash is pretty much the same so a lot of the things that I think they were curious how people would react to they kind of put that upfront in the alphas and then changed it or revised it a bit in the full release which I appreciate but the overall point is that even though Tekken 8 still plays a lot like Tekken 7 in a lot of ways with its core fundamental combat it is trending in a direction that I think is bold and quite interesting and what that direction is and I don't know how else to say it is in a sort of virtu fighter style Direction and so can we stop and take a moment to remember just how influential virt fighter has been over Tekken not just in this game but over the franchise historically I think Tekken players have kind of forgot gotten this especially in light of the reaction to Virtual Fighter 5 ultimate that came out but a lot of the things that people associate with Tekken actually come from Virtual Fighter such as the whole character customization [Music] thing that comes from Virtual Fighter Arcade Quest ghost battles this comes from Virtual Fighter even the way Tekken now does its online matchmaking where you go in you play a best of three and you hang out in a training stage this is from Virtual Fighter that's the really funny ironic part about this is all the Tekken Bros were making fun of Virtual Fighter 5 old ultimate for its online and yet its infrastructure is copied in Tekken 8 this uh go into the training mode and uh load up matches and play best of three that is virtual Fighters online ranking it's just funny how much Tekken borrows and takes ideas from virtual fighter and the Tekken Bros have no idea and in the case of Tekken 8 I think this is more fundamental than just modes because Virtual Fighter is able to do something that Tekken has been wanting to do for a very long time which you can tell which is that one of the issues with Tekken in highle Tekken play and you can see the Tekken team trying to battle this issue a lot over the years is the Korean backdash is basically the glue that holds the fundamental combat system together they tried to get rid of that in Tekken 4 so they like okay we want to be more like virtal fighter none of this Korean backdashing crap we wanted more an aggressive upfront style of play but the problem is is that in Tekken 4 when they took the Korean back dash out they lost the overall movement style of the game because virtual fighter has like the Crouch Dash system of movement which a lot of Tekken players don't understand and Tekken doesn't have that system and so they need the back dash cancel to hold together the movement system of the game and so the Tekken team learned oh okay I guess we have to leave the Korean back dash in and so in Tekken 5 and Tekken six and Tekken Tag you have the Glorious Korean backdash and all its power and F and that's really cool and awesome but the problem they were running into and a problem a lot of people talk about is how powerful turtling and back dash cancelling is because in Tekken it is the game of mids Tekken has a lot of really safe mids and then it has rather rare weak lows and weak throws and so standing up and backdashing creates a really hard shell to try to get through whereas in virt fighter you actually do have really great backdashing cancels and movements if you want them but the reason why that style of play doesn't work in virtal fighter or dead or alive is because those games have very powerful throws and rather unsafe mid pokes so you can't do that poking sort of style that effectively it's really made to be played up close and personal where knowing your frames knowing your side steps and knowing the ranges of throws and back dashes that all takes place in a more condensed up close format whereas in Tekken because back dashing is so powerful because mids are so safe and because you have these sort of safe pokes it kind of plays a little bit more like a 2d fighter like a street fighter where you can stick out Limbs and kind of poke at each other and I think this is one reason why Tekken is so popular among 2D players and why you put virtual fighter in a 2d player's hands they throw it straight in the garbage they have no interest but you stick Tekken in their hands and it has a better crossover and part of that there's a lot of reasons but one of the main reasons is because of the way the neutral Game Works in peeken it's a little bit more Pokey sort of spacing uh sticking out limbs Street Fighter Style versus virtu fighter and DOA where you watch the rounds and they're just in at each other and moving around it's you know they're more three-dimensionally based where Tekken has more of that two-dimensional spacing that's why you can stick geese and Akuma and Tekken and it kind of works and so what that causes though is that at high level play it is very hard hard to break defense in Tekken this is why when you watch highle play it often ends up being this these little mid pokes they sort of throw at each other and they kind of chip at each other with safe lows and pokes and then hope to get a counter hit or hope to catch a stray limb but the rush down in Tekken doesn't work the same way as it does in Virtual Fighter you watch Virtual Fighter 5 some of those matches last 20 seconds and so pure overwhelming Rush down is much more viable able in that game and I think what's happened over the years is that Tekken has tried all these other scenarios and different ways to break this open and get this to work in their own system adding in armor moves adding in all this kind of crap toata is looking at all these problems in front of him where he feels like he needs to make Tekken less defensive more aggressive especially because it's more interesting to watch with a little bit more aggression but he doesn't want to go down the street fighter 5 path of just making the options go away so he doesn't want to do that and then he's looking at this sort of demand from making a sequel of okay I have to change something in the Tekken formula I just have to in a sequel that's what you have to do and then he's looking over at virt fighter and you'll notice there's been quite a bit of interaction between virtal fighter and Tekken as of late you know you had the Tekken costumes and virt Fighter 5 ultimate and I think Hara just openly said they need to make another virtu fighter maybe he's like screw it I'll just bring some virtue fighter into Tekken and I think the overall result is pretty compelling first of all one of the things you can notice is the throw changes where now throws are more powerful throws got a buff and so the second thing and this is a bit harder to prove but I think the evidence holds up is the Nerf to the mid poking game so you look back at older Tekken even Tekken 7 you know you're going to have a lot of scenarios where you're sticking out these sort of mid safe pokes you know like Devil jins demons or upward for and this is across a lot of characters not just devil genin these kind of mid-range poke moves that you do in earlier games now they heat cancel into a move in attack where if you hit them with a demon paw the game pushes you into the character at first I thought this was just Tekken 8 trying to copy Street Fighters fadc system and like oh you hit him with the mid-range then you fadc cancel into the combo I thought that was going for but really that's not what it is instead you hit them with the demon paw and it pulls you into a mixup but it's pulling you Inward and I think the pulling inward is the key cuz you have to do it and you as a player don't feel like the move is nerfed because you're getting an advantage but that Advantage isn't all that significant you know if you hit them with the Paw and come in and you know you have that little mix up there it's a bit of an advantage but I think it's really to trick you and to accepting that you're having to be pulled in and taking away that sort of mid poking option and so now all the time Tekken 8 is pulling you into range with the Enemy constantly the the game is trying to do this as much as possible while still giving you the backdash movement with most characters and the thing about it is that for many years being a Tekken player and fan before s even I kind of accepted this as the way Tekken should be played and like kind of Tekken truest form is like you back dash away and you kind of stick pokes out at each other and then you try to like electric or punish each other's pokes and the thing about it is that that style of design Works in like the old school sort of Tekken Dr era of like crazy unrestricted movement and you can actually like get around limbs place things really precisely and you have the speed and movement flexibility to do that but that style of play as much as I love it doesn't really fit with the Tekken 7 era of game design because you don't have the speed and you don't have the flexibility to really get around a lot of these pokes and get around a lot of these strings and so being like a Mishima player or being kind of like a more old school style player in the Tekken 7 era was really frustrating because a lot of these hitboxes players would stick out would have absurd amount of tracking and you didn't have enough Mobility to get around things and stuff so yes it was possible but you were sort of playing against the game's design a lot whereas in Tekken 8 by accepting that this is no longer going to be old school Tekken and instead saying okay you know what we have to sort of abandon that style a bit and get rid of these dumbass massive pokes and instead play a more Virtual Fighter close up sort of style and so I think it ends up being a better fighting system because even though it loses that similarity with the old school style of Tekken it brings in a much healthier balance inspired by virtal fighter so now when I'm playing as devil genin against people getting around like Jabs and sort of shorter pokes and like higher commitment moves stepping around them feels much more natural than it did in Tekken 7 and my experience playing ranked in Tekken 7 was really frustrating because just trying to get around people who constantly swung their limbs and if you didn't memorize all their little strings and mixup was actually really obnoxious and annoying versus in Tekken aped I've played against a bunch of people swinging online of course but now it's just so much more consistent and reliable to get around them just like in virtue fighter you know you see someone swinging in virture fighter you just pity them a bit and for that change alone Tekken 8 for me is a much more engaging fun game to play than Tekken 7 for that alone on top of everything else the game is doing so in terms of the overall core changes to the fighting system the direction it's taking the system I really like what Tekken 8 is doing it is really compelling and fun and Namco gave this a lot of thought you can tell they really thought about some of these elements much more so than probably people even realize but that being said the game isn't perfect in terms of fighting system there are some things in Tekken 8 that feel like yeah you're throwing this in as like a compromise or for the casuals and so I'll critique these a bit but then I want to talk about the modes of this game because I think this is where things get really interesting but the system that I am not a really big fan of is of course the heat system uh I'm not a big fan of these type of metered systems in 3D Fighters generally so I'm going to be predisposed not to really appreciate these types of systems anyway but my big problem with the heat system is how chaotic it feels which is both a blessing and a curse it's a blessing in a weird way because it's not totally obvious how you're supposed to use the heat system and so each player is going to kind of use the heat system in different ways and if you're a player like myself who just wants to outright ignore the heat system it is kind of funny that the game will still make me do it even unintentionally you know by forcing it into moves and things like that so I do think it is nice how it is not totally planned out and not completely obvious how it's supposed to be used and I do like how you get full meter at the beginning of the round that way it removes a lot of that whole like meter building [ __ ] that you see in other games with supers like third strike where you jump back and like build your meter and do all that kind of crap so I do like that I hate the concept of carrying meter from round to round in a 3D fighter I really don't think that belongs in 3D Fighters because you don't want these kind of like overall meta meter Management Systems coming into play so those types of things I do like you can tell once again that Namco it's like they're putting one step forward and taking one step back they're putting the meter in and the heat system in to to tell IGN and to tell all the casuals hey we've got this fancy meter and you can express yourself through the meter and you know how people eat that up and if you look at the IGN review they're just slobbering over the heat system but the problem with it is that it's also just this big dangerous X Factor when it comes to game balance and this is where I think things can get a little bit scary because right now as this game comes comes out you know I'm reviewing the launch version of the game right now I think Heat's pretty balanced it's pretty contained I haven't seen anything too insane with the heat system yet that I think is causing a lot of problems but it's this ugly entry point that as the game expands which it will because it's a modern fighting game and the roster gets bigger and bigger and they start adding in Tifa and they start adding in all these other characters this heat system could become a real mess and it has the potential to start overpowering the core gameplay play too much and you could get into this ugly arms race of balance where they bring in Tifa or Cloud Strife or some other you know guest character and they have some like bitching heat mechanics and people are really attached to them so now I'm go think okay well I guess if we're going to give Tifa a super type of cool awesome heat we better buff everyone else's heat to go along with it and you get into this ugly arms race where the heat system just keeps getting more and more powerful as the game continues which could happen and so that's the thing about the heat system that I'm really concerned about is right now it seems like with the core cast The Core characters you know they're keeping the heat system in check they're keeping it tame but it's just this ugly entry point for all kinds of stupid [ __ ] in the future that if they kind of take their eyes off the ball in terms of keeping the game balanced it could become a nightmare the balance of the game right now on launch version I cannot emphasize it is sitting on the point of a knife it is so delicately balanced they could F this up very easily and if they do I want to at least be on record saying okay I may have liked the launch version of the game a lot but I was still keeping my eye out for this kind of thing moving forward so we're just going to have to keep an eye on that as the game expands the second thing I want to critique is Rage Arts get rid of them why are there rage arts in this game it feels like this is just a hold over from Tekken 7 because they want that wow cinematic factor of oh you hit them with the rage art rage art and heat that's ridiculous it's it's too much it is way too much at first I was thinking get rid of the Heat and keep the rage Arts you know when I was playing the alpha but now having played the game more and it's more fleshed out on development I think the heat system is better than the rage system so keep the heat system maybe remove the chipping thing because what happens now is it plays exactly like Street Fighter 4 ultra where you get someone down at the end of the round and they've got rage and they've got full heat and now you have to play against them like they're carrying an atomic bomb because if you come in and just do one little thing you stick out your toe they're going to do the wake up rage art or they're going to do the rage art super armor garbage and then after that they're going to like nail you with like this heat followup and take like 70% of your health that [ __ ] is garbage I hate that I hated that in Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 8 is making that same mistake just drop the rage Arts get rid of them they're not going to obviously because they're all cinematic and they think that's super important but I think they should go and so I'd say rage and to a lesser extent heat are my biggest problems with this game's combat another thing that kind of concerns me with this game is how all the different characters have different back dash amounts and like back dash movement and like movement in backdashing is like part of a character attribute and in an interview harata did talk about how he wanted the characters to be more specific like a 2d fighter rather than in 3D Fighters where the characters are a little bit more Universal and I think that's fine but the problem is once again it opens up an Avenue of concern because let's say we get into season 2 of Tekken 8 and it turns out Devil Jin my character is like kicking ass and he's like a really good character every's complaining about him the thing I do not want to see and I'll be very pissed about if Namco looks at that and says all right let's just reduce his movement speed that's easy so instead of going in and like rebalancing moves and as obnoxious as it was in Tekken 7 to have like uh Health sweep knock down and then not knock down and then knock down again but like only at a certain range or whatever like they're always changing the heal sweep and electric that's a little bit obnoxious but not that big of a deal at the end of the day but imagine if they just Nerf my character's movement speed and all of the sudden I can't back Dash as far and I can't s side step as well that type of thing that's a deal breaker for me if they start doing like that where they start nerfing the character speeds and so what I'm hoping is that when it comes down to balancing the game Namco do not mess around with that movement speed all that much because that really changes how a character plays so I'm hoping Namco recognize that and I kind of suspect that they do but it is kind of scary that that might be a possibility moving into the future but overall when it comes to the core changes of the fighting game system my complaints about the meter stuff aside I do think Tekken 8 plays the best and feels the best of the modern Tekken era ER it doesn't feel quite right to say it's better than something like Tekken 3 Tekken Tag or Tekken 5 because those games at this point are kind of like distinctive in design from Modern Tekken but in the modern Tekken era so I'd say like Tekken 6 Tekken Tag 2 Tekken 7 so far until further notice or screw-ups on namco's part I am liking Tekken 8 the best in terms of feel and overall approach to its combat design which I never expected to think but it got my hands on the game and I was really impressed with what Namco came up with so the core combat is really solid but ironically as much as I am enjoying the core fighting system of Tekken 8 I don't think it is actually the game's strongest point I don't think it is its strongest feature I think Tekken 8 is a revolutionary game in many ways but these revolutionary features are not actually the combat system because call me a virtual fighter guy but I still think Virtual Fighter 5 has a better core combat system than Tekken 8 but there are things that Tekken 8 is doing that I think will forever alter how fighting games are made and it is like the new standard for a lot of [ __ ] fighting games just need to start doing the first thing are the visuals the graphics the aesthetic presentation I think Tekken of all the fighting game series is the best at this I can admit that as a virtu fighter player if Virtual Fighter can learn one thing from Tekken is absolutely this game's aesthetic presentation Tekken has always been the best at that and I think this is what has really kept the series relevant for as long as it has on top of being kind of 2D in the way it plays but also its aesthetic presentation is just Cutting Edge and Namco are just Gods at this they really know what they're doing and a lot of ways you look at Street Fighter 6 you look at Tekken 8 I mean it's almost a joke how much better Tekken 8 looks than Street Fighter 6 in like pretty much every way this game is not only beautiful in terms of the visuals and character designs for the most part but also the effects work is topnotch I'm a schmu player so if anyone can appreciate massive hit Sparks and explosions and like amazing overwhelming visual feedback it is me and I think Tekken 8 is just the old standard for this type of stuff it looks good and it feels good when you hit [ __ ] in this game it just feels so good when you hit those punches when you hit those kicks just the basic bare moves this is something that other fighting games need to pick up on and learn from from Tekken which is like it's not just about hitting things with like supers and uh Ultras and uppercuts and fireballs and all that [ __ ] like what makes a game a fighting game feel amazing is when like your basic hits feel good when a jab feels powerful and everything comes together so well and Namco are one of the few companies where they're able to really ride that line between making the characters look realistic but also making them look stylized that is such a hard visual look to find and they are just nailing it Tekken somehow manages to look both realistic but also stylized and Anime and cool and all that whereas you look at Street Fighter 6 it has this kind of uncanny weird look to it to where it's cartoonish but also realistic and the two elements don't fit together all that well and it doesn't look as convincing of a blend of styles and you can tell Namco were pouring piles and piles of money into the visual and to the art design of this game they get it they know that when it comes to a arcade style genre the main hook the thing that is going to pull people in is graphical presentation Beauty matters Graphics matter and I think they have really nailed it in Tekken a there are some character models that look funky as hell like the new Paul I'm not a fan of you know you get some of this here and there but overall they took what they did in Tekken 7 which I thought was impressive and they just took it to the next level in Tekken 8 and I think uh yeah that's going to be really hard to deny and it's going to be a really strong hooking point for new players for players who don't really care about the fighting system all that much and just want to smack some buttons and have it look cool Tekken 8 is going to pull them in with its visuals for sure and then on top of that you have just the overall package of features and content in Tekken 8 once again you can tell Namco really know what they're doing here and they know what to bring to the table and what works for examp example remember when Tekken 7 came out and it had all those input lag issues and uh I think people kind of forget this era of fighting games you know Street Fighter 5 Tekken 7 it was the era of the input lag cuz they were trying to make the online feel better or whatever like that and remember Tekken 7 at the end kind of had this like rollback type of stuff in there but that wasn't really fully implemented but with Tekken 8 yeah they learned their lesson input lag is really low nice and responsive then they've got great roll back net code it's not perfect but it's very very good and it's probably the best in a 3D fighter we've seen in terms of net play I've seen pings of like 150 and normally playing Tekken 7 with 150 ping it's like forget about it but with this you know it's doable you know 150 ping it's doable it's a little janky but it's doable especially if you go into the settings and change it to prioritize response definitely do that don't be lame prioritize response that's the way you play it's like fight Cade you know you can you can just have a little bit of stuttering that's fine and the funny thing was just to again point out the virt fighter influence I thought it was a really good idea but kind of funny they brought in arcade Quest and for those who do not know arcade Quest is a famous single player mode from Virtual Fighter it's like it's signature single player mode from virtu Fighter 4 and they brought it into Tekken 8 cuz you know what arcade Quest is like one of the best single player style modes to have in a fighting game so brought it into Tekken it makes sense it's just kind of funny another overlap with the virtal fighter influence though I will say I played through arcade Quest I had fun with it but it feels a little bit gimmicky at times because I beat arcade quest in like 2 hours and I don't think I ever lost a match maybe I'm just a god gamer or something but I did not lose a single match all the way through arcade Quest it's just too easy versus the arcade quest of Virtual Fighter 4 where I I've still not beaten that damn mode it just gets brutal but I think the real key feature of the arcade Quest is of course unlocking the ghost Super Battle feature and I'm not even going to bother talking about story mode you all if you care about tekken's story and all that that's good for you I don't care about that kind of thing or like Tekken ball I don't care about that I really wanted Tekken Force I'll tell you that much like a full-on Tekken Force Mode I was hoping they'd bring that back that was the bit of single player content I was really looking for fortunately we didn't get it but uh I would have much prefer that over a story mode or the the beach ball game but anyway so the key feature of the single player mode of Tekken 8 though and why I think it is revolutionary and really setting a new precedent is this ghost battle AI stuff so other Tekken games Tekken 5 Tekken 6 you know these come from virtu fighter they have ghost battle modes and those are cool but the thing about ghost battle and older Tekken and why I don't think Tekken have good single player content is because unlike dead or Al or unlike virtal Fighter the AI in Tekken cannot ever play the game no matter how high of a difficulty you put it in across all the Tekken because the AI does not know how to pre and back dash uh that is not an official movement I guess of the game so none of the AI of the earlier games that I've come across ever cream back dash you could have them ultra high difficulty they'll never cream backdash and so they basically can never never actually play the game you can still practice against the AI for Strings and things like that and like Sid stepping and just practicing side stepping on them but in terms of like actually playing against them once you start backdashing they they can't compute they can't handle that sort of movement so it makes single player and Tekken really really limited because of that Tekken 8 is the first Tekken to address this because of the ghost system we're now la la la ghosts know how to Korean backdash and you can fight against your own ghost and kind of train it and it'll start doing Korean back dash and copying your style uh fighting against your own ghost is a lot of fun and really interesting and kind of a way to see your own Tendencies and kind of learn against your own Tendencies through this mirror match type of thing I do like it and I have a lot of fun playing it the issue with the ghost though is that it kind of goes in these kind of weird Cycles where it starts off really stupid and then it starts to pick up your Tendencies like the good things you're doing and starts to copy them and then it's kind of playing pretty good and then you adapt to The Ghost and then the ghost adapts to you adapting to it and it kind of gets stupider because it's adapting to your adaptation and and so it kind of goes in these weird uh like sine waves of intelligence where it gets smart and stupid and smart and stupid and smart and stupid and unfortunately I think this holds up for now across all skill levels because one of the really cool things about the ghost system is that you can go in and the real arcade Quest mode okay so you have the like story story based one that's like baby easy never died doing it but the real arcade Quest mode is like super ghost battle that's the real mode and when you do super ghost battle you can fight against like Mishima and like verada and like these more highlevel AIS and they're really fun and quite challenging well relatively for AI you know they're challenging enough to be interesting I guess you could say that way and so those are really fun to play against but again you know they're not able to really adapt to you too much but the part that is very interesting is you can go online you can go on the online leaderboards and you can actually download the ghosts of other players and I'm assuming the ghost AI is collected from their behavior during their online matches and it is so fascinating and interesting and I think this is the most revolutionary thing about Tekken 8 because it could potentially solve a really big problem with fighting games I talked about it in My Tragedy of fighting games video which is that ultimately all fighting games will be abandoned to some degree because uh The Meta and challenge of the game is based on other players playing right so if you want to play dead or Life 4 or if you want to play Virtual Fighter 4 you know you basically have no option to play that against other skilled players uh you have to play that against the AI and if the game has like pretty solid AI you can still get some mileage out of the game even all these years later but if the game doesn't have solid AI like Street Fighter 4 it's like basically useless it's a dead packet right but this ghost battle thing because of how AI technology is advancing and because it's able to record this data from potentially millions of players hundreds of thousands of players if not this could get very interesting in terms of what AI can do for example what you can do now is you can go online and you could say oh I want to fight against this character like King you go through the leaderboard and download a buch bunch of king ghosts and then fight all these different kings that are AIS and based on the players you get the ghost from it it can be surprisingly challenging AI cuz they're starting to do like set play they're starting to do cheese cuz they are copying like real strategies that players use the only problem is is that sine wave thing I was talking about where you It ultimately isn't that challenging overall because it can't counter adapt to you but what's kind of funny is that you would think the best AI would be like the top players AI for example I went in and downloaded the ghost of Anakin he's like one of the best American players I downloaded his ghost cuz thought okay this could be this could be some real training and practice so I'm practicing against his ghost and his ghost is like kind of a joke it's like really easy to beat and it makes no sense cuz he's such a good player and then I downloaded a ghost of like kind of a mid-range player like someone like mid-ranked and his ghost was like far more challenging and tricky and I think the reason for this is because the AI can learn play Styles better than other play Styles so if you have like a really top level top player reactionary adapting style play style where you're really good at adapting to players and reading them and having more reactionary style I don't think the AI quite knows how to synthesize this information at this point and so your ghost just is really weird and random and just throws out random things and uh you know it's like a fighting you in the dark kind of so that needs to be more developed I think but the mid-range players like the you know the jobbers that you play against that kind of do their average set play over and over and they have their like little Mix-Ups that they do the AI can totally pick up on that really well and so it is kind of funny depending on how people play sometimes it is like actually playing against like an online average player because they're just going to do that same formula over and over and over and the AI knows that and we'll just copy that but the potential for this is is really interesting cuz imagine as time goes on just how much data these AI ghosts are collecting this could be something out of Ghost in the Shell where the Puppet Master is born from like teeken eight online matches and become self-aware or something we could have an AI after Gathering hundreds of thousands of hours of match information you could be fighting against a freaking monster you could be fighting against a beast of unfathomable proportions so that could be really interesting this I think is the most interesting revolutionary feature of Tekken 8 I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it either but it is something you've got to check out if you're at all interested in fighting games and at all interested in Tekken 8 uh I think the AI stuff that alone even if you never play an online match even if you just download it play it on your steam deck and just download people's ghosts and play against their ghosts I think it's pretty fun and interesting it's an amazing feature it's the best single player feature of a fighting game I've ever seen since Virtual Fighter Quest mode basically so that's really really cool and I think it's going to be a new standard that other fighting games are going to start copying and it'll be interesting what develops from there and then one other feature of Tekken 8 I want to talk about before I close out the review cuz this type of feature tends to get overlooked is the replay feature uh this was Tekken 7's best hidden feature and they really improved it and even brought it into focus better in Tekken 8 which I like to see so the Tekken 8 replay feature is one of Tekken H's strongest features overall as a game and do not sleep on it because there's so much cool stuff you can do with it first of all you can go online you can look up players you can download their matches and play their matches back you know this is possible in Street Fighter 6 as well but now the cool thing is is that when you're seeing like weird interactions uh you can actually do this thing called replay takeover this feature is in shmups by the way Tekken players Tekken players thought like Tekken came up with this this is actually a feature in shmups do toachi doj and the PS2 there's replay feature this comes from SCH but anyway so what you can do is you can take over the replay and replay this segment and see oh would this have been possible would that have been possible and that is a very powerful learning tool do not disregard it it it sounds very like Egghead and oh fight lab type of stuff but as an average player you can take advantage of this and I have already so like you're playing against a guy and he's doing the same mixup and you're not quite familiar with the mixup and so you just after the match you go in fire up the replay and then you can see oh can I step this mixup which direction can I step this move and that alone learning to step more properly that replay feature is going to be so handy for that because it is so hard to tell a lot of the time like I was playing against dragonov he's doing his running twos I'm like wonder how the stepping works I mean you know right cuz we've had some sidestep buffing so like how good is s side stepping on this running too so you can go in fire up the the replay and sidestep it and see how that worked it's a very very powerful feature um another thing that I really like is that in Tekken 7 you had those replay slots and what I like to do is I don't like to stream and play my matches at the same time cuz that's like really difficult so what I like to do is I like to actually play my matches and like focus on the matches and then I'll save the replays and then watch the replays on stream and the problem with Tekken 7 is there weren't very many replay slots so uh if I had like a really good session I would start to lose replays I wanted to watch cuz you know I lost them in my session so you have a lot more slots now uh the replays are easier to organize they're easier to work with uh there's the replay takeover feature which could be really fun if you were streaming and you're like playing back your matches and someone says oh you could step that or you could do this you be like really you could actually fire up the replay and like all right are you right chat let's see you could check to see if chat's bullshitting or not let's try to step it so it'd be a really fun feature to use while streaming as well so overall Tekken 8 I'm really impressed with this release I definitely recommend it it is one of the best fighting games I've bought in years that's not saying too much cuz they barely come out anymore but uh so far I liking it better than Tekken 7 I definitely am enjoying it better than Street Fighter 6 I plan on playing it a lot in fact it'll probably be my default game I play until we get a virtu fighter 6 hopefully so yeah tekken's just bringing everything together you could tell that they made this game with a lot of care and attention and with more insight than I was expecting you know and I got to give Namco credit for that because I was afraid what we' get is like the Street Fighter 5 equivalent of teken nerfing everything down making it all about meters and all that crap but they really did put a lot of thought into this and I think the game has a bright future ahead as long as they don't by adding in a bunch of 2D characters and Fireball BS and ultimates and airor Combos and dumb [ __ ] like that it's a good sign that it's pulling influences from virt fighter and that it's going to be a Tekken game not Street Fighter cross Tekken unofficially you know we're going to have a pure Tekken game at least as much as the heat system allows so thanks so much I hope you all enjoy this review adios everyone so thank you to the $5 patrons 100 100 excepting Panda Admiral coconut anold Alexander Fifer Anthony a arcade hell a wiper auton name Bean pit B Ben beo Dames bog hog borgi 22 Chase Palumbo Chris yovich chronic Burnout 3 clar Cliff kimy coyote Coast color boy cook sand 666 cook some 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Channel: The Electric Underground

Views: 23,721

Keywords: mark msx, electric underground, video game, video game culture, action game, 怒首領蜂, Expert, エキスパート, アーケード, レトロ, tekken 8, tekken 8 review, best tekken, best modern tekken, tekken 8 tutorial, how to play tekken, how to korean backdash, tekken series, virtua fighter 5, virtua fighter 6, dead or alive, dead or alive 7, fighting game, best fighting game, tekkn 8 analysis, korean backdash, electric, electric wind god fist, heat system, rage art, 3D fighter, soul calibur

Id: LijKGowprXY

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024