Review: Tekken 8 has everything to be the Best Fighting Game of the Year

Produced for the new generation, Bandai Namco opted for Unreal Engine 5 to develop Tekken 8, and it was a great decision. During the campaign, we come across different scenarios, and they are all very well detailed, with emphasis on the water, in addition to the characters themselves.

The dubbing and sound effects are also pleasing, in addition to the great music, it is worth highlighting that during the plot several characters of different nationalities are presented, and they maintain their mother tongue and accent to preserve the culture and immersion in the story. Logically, you can follow the subtitles in whatever language you prefer, but the characters from Japan will speak Japanese, and so on.

These features are not just in the scenes, the battles also received all the details and are extremely attractive. Combos and special attacks are visually pleasing and impactful.

For most of the campaign, we control the protagonist Jin on his journey to defeat Kazuya.

Tekken 8's story is a double-edged sword: amazing to play, but some events happen so quickly that they become difficult to follow. Part of the script focuses on the theme of overcoming difficulties and sounds saturated, falling into the sameness that we find in anime and other works of the genre.

Story Mode can be finished in one afternoon. It took me about three hours to finish, which left me with that feeling of "it could have been more" if some points weren't so rushed.

Still, “The Dark Awakens” is pleasing, we meet several fighters who offer different styles, in addition to having a fast pace and a good number of battles compared to the campaign time. Most of the cutscenes have incredible visuals and also offer epic fights to the audience.

Character episodes bring a story focused on each competitor, allowing you to learn more about their personality, past and motivations, in addition to their fighting style.

There are five fights for each episode, which takes place during The King of Iron Fist Tournament. Seven to ten minutes is the time needed to finish a story, a good amount of time for a single-character plot and guarantees greater benefit from the game's lore.

The best addition to the franchise was the Arcade Quest mode. Here, we can experience another Tekken story, creating our own avatar that will compete in the arcades playing Tekken 8.

Your objective will be to beat some characters from each arcade, and gain reputation until you reach the long-awaited “Tekken World Tour” to defeat your rival:

To achieve this, you need to compete in smaller tournaments and visit more arcades:

Max will help you on this journey, being your friend and mentor during the storyline. When arriving at a new arcade, you need to have new skills, and Max will provide a tutorial to guide you.

After everything is completed, it is still possible to repeat the battles with your avatar, accessing the map. It is worth mentioning that each scenario has a unique look and presents more opponents.

Before approaching the online mode, it is important to mention the difficulty of the AIs in Tekken 8. For me, the bots are at an ideal level, the easy mode can still challenge an inattentive beginner and the medium mode requires a certain experience in fighting games. I finished my campaign on both difficulties.

The online mode is well done, despite having to wait around two minutes to find a match, I had no problems with the server or connection. But there was a clear level disparity between players.

My profile contained 2,000 “Tekken Prowess” after finishing a match against the CPU to detect my level. And in the first multiplayer battle, I was paired with a player with 61 thousand prowess, logically, I lost the best of 5 by three to zero.

On the second attempt, a player with 19 thousand appeared, and I was defeated again.

Finally, I gave up on the ranked queues and tried to go to the casual queue to find a fighter of my skill level, and I was surprised to fight with a player who had 118 thousand prowess once again, I was defeated without winning at least one fight.

In short, the Online mode is technically well done and does not bring lag or delay to players, but it has an unbalanced matchmaking which ruins the experience for beginners or more casual players.

There is also a “Tekken Fight Lounge” lobby, which increases interaction between players, you will control your Arcade avatar here.

While online mode matchmaking is unfriendly to beginners, Special Style is the newcomer's companion.

It is possible to enable it during a match by pressing “LB”, this feature shows some small combos and information about moves to support the beginner. See in the left corner:

Another interesting factor is the replay, when accessing this tab, go to “My Replays & Tips”, then simply select the desired match and click on “Play Replay”.

At certain moments during the battle preview, the game will pause and provide important tips for that moment in the game. Despite already being present in the franchise's predecessor title, what's new is that, in Tekken 8, you can take control of the fighter on the left or right and try to execute that tip.

The Arcade Quest also provides some tutorials whenever we advance in the story. It is worth noting that the tips will become increasingly advanced, and make a lot of difference to players.

The info about the PC used was already mentioned at the start, given this context, I had no difficulties regarding performance. Based on my hardware, the game recommended me low quality, even so I set it to medium and in live stream.

Because of this, I thought I would face more problems, needing to end my broadcast or lower the graphics to low, but it wasn't necessary. I had a drop to 30 or 40 FPS at times, nothing too worrying, especially considering that I played at a higher quality than recommended, and it lasted just a few milliseconds.

During my evaluation, there were no bugs or crashes, demonstrating the care taken in the quality of the final product in this regard.

Customizing your fighters in Tekken 8 can be more fun than you think. There are many factors that can be changed, including the addition of accessories. This allows you to create unique personalities, or try to replicate characters from your favorite universes, not limited to simple skins already made by the developers.

I even managed to change Lili's look to make a cosplay of “Yumeko”, from the Kakegurui anime.

You can even work on ten different models for each fighter.

See how many changes are available just for one small accessory:

The best part of this customization is that Tekken 8 doesn't have microtransactions so far, which is excellent given the context of current games. The game's “paid” cosmetics only require the battle coins that we get quickly when playing, without the need to insert real money.

Pros

Cons

SCORE: 9.5

Tekken 8 is very enjoyable! Despite a shorter story than expected, the addition of the Arcade Quest mode, as well as others such as Arcade Battle, Tekken Ball and Ghost Battle bring a wide range of options to the single player

The online mode, although not very friendly for beginners, is well done and motivates the most competitive players. Tekken 8 also provides several resources to strengthen your skill, from the tutorial and Special Style to replay.

Not to mention that these modes become even more attractive with graphics that do justice to the new generation, turning the Tekken 8 story into a cinematic experience.

Therefore, Tekken 8 gets a 9.5 score, the title motivates you to master a character with these modes and tips in single player, and then move on to ranked.

I recommend it to all fans of fighting games, I feel that it is ahead of its competitors, it's been a while since I had so much fun in a game of this genre.