Tekken 8 has a problem which I’ve taken to calling “talks outta both sides of its mouth disease.” From where I’m standing, the history of the game has looked something like this:

• Season 1 had some contentious new systems but reasonably clear design goals, and many strong players felt the game’s various issues could eventually be ironed out as it settled on a more concrete balance direction
• Season 2 promised an expansion of system-wide defensive capacity to balance out the game’s powerful offensive tools. It technically delivered on that promise, but did so at the same time as it gave everyone plus on block homing mids and other offensive tools that effectively invalidated the new defensive options
• Season 3 advertised itself as going “back to basics,” reassessing its approach to the game’s design principles in an effort to create a version of Tekken 8 that kept its systems for rewarding aggressive play while reigning in the more excessive elements of its system and character balance. It did this a little bit, but also directed most of its changes towards explicitly making offensive pressure easier to establish across the cast.

In short, the last couple years of Tekken 8 have, to me, looked something like this:

I’ve found the state of Tekken 8 to be really disappointing. I’m less concerned about it now because Virtua Fighter is back from the dead, and Dead or Alive is not too far behind it,¹ but I always thought that Tekken 8 should be awesome. The reason it’s not - in my opinion, anyway - is because while the whole idea of rewarding aggressive play is not bad or even fundamentally at odds with what makes Tekken interesting, the way Tekken 8 executes that idea speaks to a set of design principles that are, frankly, boring and kind of lazy. It also seems to me that these design principles are baked so deeply into the game that incremental changes will never be enough to properly “fix” any of its issues. You’d need to build a whole new game.

I have a few ideas for how that could work.

Why is Tekken 8?

More than anything else, Tekken 8 is largely seen as kind of a betrayal of everything that makes the Tekken series unique and special as a fighting game. Historically, the games have, at the highest levels of play, privileged a kind of low-commitment playstyle (referred to by the community as “Small Tekken”) that appears to the untrained eye as “defensive” play. This was especially the case in the previous game, Tekken 7, for reasons which we’ll discuss momentarily. Whether or not this is true is kind of immaterial to the really important factor here, which is whether or not Bandai Namco thinks it’s true - and they clearly do. In many ways, Tekken 8 is a response not just to Tekken 7, but to the popular image of competitive Tekken overall: that Tekken is a “defensive” game, and is a game which is both really technical and difficult to jump into.

This is how we get Tekken 8’s unique mechanics: grey life, chip damage and the all-important Heat system. As mentioned above, these systems were contentious largely because the devs didn’t really have a clear idea of how to make the systems mesh with the way competitive Tekken players like to play the game; the Heat system has a tendency to create situations where highly rewarding mixups are basically unavoidable, and the existence of chip damage and guard breaks makes blocking feel needlessly punishing in a game where, for the most part, the only defensive option you have access to is blocking.
Seasons 2 and 3 pushed in this direction even further, clearly to the game’s detriment. The release of Season 2 is widely regarded as one of the worst major balance patches ever released for a fighting game, because while it made some relevant and meaningful changes to defensive movement, it also added a bunch of new attacks that bypass nearly all of the game’s defensive options and force completely binary mixups, while also homogenising character designs by giving almost everyone either a way to transition into stance for guaranteed mixups or a special resource which they can spend on powerful offensive options. Season 2 gradually alleviated some of its excesses with successive patches, but repeated “steps in the right direction” frustrated players who wanted something more substantial. Season 3 was supposed to be that something, but it instead focused much of its energy towards plugging holes in character gameplans in order to make it easier for characters to establish offensive pressure - something which many players felt characters did not have trouble doing in the first place.

My perspective

For as long as Tekken 8 has been around, I’ve always felt that the design team just doesn’t understand the game that they’ve made - or, at the very least, that their approach to the game’s design completely fails to leverage the most interesting things available to them. I’ll try to explain what I mean here.

As I mentioned above, Tekken has, for most of its competitive history, centred around the “small Tekken” playstyle. Rather than try to explain what that is, I think it’d be more constructive to provide a visual example:

This is a really old set of Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection between Korean players JDCR and Qudans, two of the most legendary figures in the Tekken scene. Something you’ll immediately notice about this set is how often there are periods of time where both players just move around each other rather than committing to any pokes. There’s a lot that goes into these sorts of game states in Tekken, but one of the key things to understand is that both players are simultaneously using movement offensively (to threaten attacks) and defensively (to move around those implied threats).

Defensive movement is almost always available in T5DR. Sidestep is extremely reliable as a defensive option, and most of the time, when players get hit, it’s because the aggressor had a read on the opponent’s timing and managed to catch a poke or sidestep or something else. This is more or less the role of defense in Tekken - the ability to use movement (both sidestep and backdash) to get around strong offensive tools means that there’s always a second layer of timing that plays into every poke and mixup. Tekken 8, comparatively speaking, lacks this availability of defensive movement, because the Heat system, as well as the design of individual moves, largely pushes defenders into situations where their defensive movement options are effectively turned off, and blocking is all that’s left. This is where I feel Tekken 8 is sorely under-utilising its own mechanics - as the game has progressed, it’s become increasingly clear that the developers seem to think the only way to score damage on someone in Tekken is to trick them into getting hit by a mid. We can even see this going back to Tekken 7, which brought in a large number of attacks that had both a safe high extension and an unsafe mid extension, and it’s of course very visible in Tekken 8’s momentary push towards stance transitions that generate mid/low mixups - this is, apparently, the only thing that the devs can envision for their system. To them, “aggressive play” means “running mixups,” and thus we have a system explicitly designed to facilitate and reward “aggressive play” that frequently looks like forcing defenders into holding the mixup because that’s all they have access to.

I think this sucks, if for no other reason than that it strikes me as deeply unimaginative - aggression can and should mean so much more than just making your opponent guess for half their life. Like, think about it: the one truly universal aspect of the Heat system is that it causes all of your attacks to deal chip damage while it’s active, and that system exists in a game where the only attacks that don’t leave recoverable life as part of their damage is single pokes on standing opponents. This should marry perfectly with how Tekken has historically been played! This is a system which inherently places pressure on defenders to not only move around an aggressor’s offense, but also actively find situations to establish their own offense that would be explicitly rewarded by the very same system! This is what I’m getting at when I talk about Tekken 8 under-utilising its own mechanics: the Heat and grey life systems create a huge amount of interesting design space for Tekken as a “defensively-oriented game,” but that potential is being squandered because the designers seemingly lack the imagination to actually utilise the design space that they’ve created. Tekken 8 should be awesome, but instead it’s… well, Tekken 8.

Building a new Tekken 8

When Tekken was still interested in maintaining a strong presence in arcades, the series got into the habit of releasing major revisions of mainline games between Tekken 5 and Tekken 7:

• Tekken 5 became Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection
• Tekken 6 became Tekken 6 Bloodline Rebellion
• Tekken 7 became Tekken 7 Fated Retribution

This is the approach I think we should take to Tekken 8. We can’t reform the game as it currently exists, so our only option is to build a new game that reassesses the basic ideas of Tekken 8. We’ll call it…

TEKKEN 8 RADIANT REVOLUTION

Our goals for T8RR, as it were, are to change how the game uses Tekken 8’s unique mechanics in order to make them fit with classic Tekken gameplay, and encourage aggressive play without doing so at the expense of movement and defense.

Defining our new design principles

Before we talk about what we’re doing, we should talk about how and why we’re doing this at all. As I mentioned above, Tekken 8’s design principles are, charitably, uninspired - the game’s vision for “aggressive play” seems to only focus on running binary mixups and pressing big scary buttons that people can’t do anything about rather than understanding how people actually conducted offense in Tekken. But again, this focus on aggression exists because Tekken historically is a “defensive” game, and Tekken 7 was the closest to actually being defensively oriented. So Tekken 8 is aggressive because Tekken 7 was defensive - but why is that?
The thing about Tekken 7’s focus on defensive play at the top end is that it exists largely as a result of offense being incredibly risky. This largely stems from two primary factors: one being the prevalence of counter hit launchers, meaning that you could die for pressing at the wrong time; the other being low parry leading to full combos, meaning a fuzzy option select for low pokes could also kill you. Tekken 8 has addressed these issues, but also seems to have bent the stick too far in the other direction.

Of course, there are advantages to more explicitly encouraging aggressive play in Tekken. Not only does it help to some extent with onboarding, since offense in fighting games is easier to learn and implement than defense, but also because, when approached sensibly, it can help to diversify the way that characters play in Tekken. I’ve mentioned the “Small Tekken” playstyle a couple of times, and this is the primary way that people play Tekken at higher levels because for the most part, the strength of Tekken’s defensive options created the divide between “Small Tekken” and “Big Tekken” (using riskier but more rewarding attacks). I think the goal of the Heat system in Tekken 8 is to introduce a kind of offensive momentum that the series has never really had before, which is an admirable thing to try and achieve - so long as you don’t completely undermine the importance of “Small Tekken”, because that is really where the magic of high level Tekken happens.

So what we want is twofold, I think: we want a Tekken game where aggressive play is encouraged, but not at the expense of defense; and we want a Tekken game that allows for offensive momentum such that players can use “Small Tekken” in order to earn the right to play “Big Tekken” every now and then. I won’t be proposing character changes - that’s way beyond the scope of what I’m capable of talking about here - but I have some ideas for how we can rework Tekken 8’s core systems to create our hypothetical T8RR - a game which I think would be much healthier and more interesting. The broad intentions are:

• Change movement and attack tracking in order to maintain the core of classic Tekken gameplay
• Shorten combos to increase game pace
• Re-examine the role of chip damage and grey life
• Rework Heat into something players have to earn with good decision making

Broader system changes

• Increase distance travelled on backdashes
  Powerful movement is non-negotiable. I’ve always mantained that T8’s systems only make sense with strong movement. Thankfully, sidestep is already in a really good spot - the change to allow sidestep down from crouch is genuinely massive - so all that’s needed is to make backdashes better. There are no infinite stages in T8 so I really don’t see this being a problem.

• Revise homing properties and tracking on attacks and strings
  Again, can’t and won’t go into more granular character-specific details, but it’s important to mention this when talking about changes to defensive movement because the effectiveness of sidestep in particular has basically nothing to do with the sidestep itself and everything to do with how much moves are allowed to track towards the opponent during their startup. This will also help to incentivise using movement aggressively, since forward dashes naturally put you on-axis.

• Remove all “install” or “stack-building” mechanics from characters except for Claudio’s Starburst
  More seriously, this became something that T8 relied on as a cheap and lazy way of making characters more “complex” by giving them a character-specific resource management consideration, and I ultimately think this does nothing to actually make the game more interesting. Less seriously, the install mechanic is Claudio’s thing, dude. Let him have this.

• Remove Strong Aerial Tailspin
  There’s no two ways around it - this mechanic sucks ass, and it only got worse once it became a semi-universal part of combo theory. The game already has Tornado and various ways to use Heat as a combo extender, and all this mechanic does is make combos longer and more complicated for no real benefit.

• Remove ability for attacks to deal chip damage outside of Heat mode
  This is a really central aspect of the Heat rework, which I’ll cover below. The idea is to make block pressure generate Heat, and then make chip damage a Heat-exclusive threat.

The Heat rework

Heat Gauge

• Heat gauge starts at 50% at round 1; Heat will carry over between rounds
• Heat will be generated by landing attacks - attacks will build slightly more Heat on block than on hit
• After Heat ends, the gauge can be built back up

Since the idea for this system is to use Heat as a way of encouraging players to both play aggressively and use smart defense to create opportunities for offense, making Heat a resource which must be earned before it can be activated seems like a pretty sensible way to create the intended dynamic.

Heat Engagers

• Heat Engagers will build a flat 10% Heat on hit, but only when used outside of juggle combos
• If landing a Heat Engager would result in 100% Heat, then the Heat Engager will automatically activate Heat

With the Heat gauge working differently, Heat Engagers will work differently as well. These changes should maintain the general use of Heat Engagers, but gives them extra utility as whiff punishers as opposed to regular attacks being used primarily to build Heat with block pressure.

Heat Burst

• Heat Burst will no longer have an attack attached to its activation

This serves as an effective nerf to Heat Burst in the sense that you don’t get to both heat up and have a safe armoured attack. The Heat attack options will only be available while heated up and will more explicitly tie in with the Heat system overall.

Heat Mode

• Heat Mode will provide a 10% on-hit damage bonus; all attacks with 15+ base damage will deal chip damage on block
• Old Heat Burst attack will be repurposed as “Heat Blow”, available only during Heat Mode
• Both Heat Dash and Heat Blow will cost 50% of the Heat timer as well as all current grey life
• Heat will tick down over time, even while the opponent is in hitstun or blockstun, but the tick rate will be reduced whenever an attack makes contact
• Heat will tick down faster whenever a character in Heat mode blocks or is hit by an attack
• All methods of gaining Heat while in Heat mode will be removed

This is a pretty big slew of changes, but it’s all in service of reinforcing Heat as a mechanic whose primary threat comes from poking and offensive pressure as opposed to powerful mixups. Making Heat Blow separate from Heat Burst means that it still gets to serve all of its usual purposes without also giving you the benefit of activating Heat, and the addition of the grey life cost to both Heat Blow and Heat Dash adds an extra layer of decision making to the mechanics that should help incentivise using the more passive benefits of Heat as opposed to the more active and immediate benefits of the Heat Dash or the Heat Blow’s ability to establish offense or extend combos.
The changes to the Heat timer tick rate serve to reduce situations where Heat seems to last forever while also further encouraging players to push offense, and I would imagine not being able to gain Heat while in Heat mode is farly self-explanatory.

Rage

• Rage will no longer provide a damage bonus, instead providing a 5% bonus to Heat gain on all attacks
• Rage Arts will require both Rage and 100% Heat to perform: during Heat mode, Rage Art will end Heat and deal damage scaling down with remaining Heat time; outside Heat mode, Rage Art will cost 100% Heat and will always deal its minimum damage

This is my attempt at tying Rage directly into the Heat system, which I think makes the whole game feel a little more cohesive and also makes Rage a bit more thoughtful while still letting people mash out reversal Rage Art because I know how much y’all love doing that shit.

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So that’s how I’d do it. I think this is a much more complete usage of Tekken 8’s unique mechanics that doesn’t detract from the things that people love about Tekken overall. I think none of this is in the realm of official possibility, but maybe some industrious modders could use this as a design document. I wouldn’t mind.

In the meantime, I think if you like Tekken 8, you should keep playing it no matter what anyone says. If you feel like you’ve been let down by Tekken 8, then there are older games waiting for you as long as you’re willing to put in the legwork to get them going. The last time this happened, a whole bunch of people started playing Tekken Tag Tournament 2 online via RPCS3, and I’d like to see that happen again. If you’re willing to go even more classic, hop on Arkadyzja - it’s got Tekken 3 and the arcade version of Tekken Tag Tournament playable online with rollback netcode! Like, the real kind! If you’re interested in branching out to other 3D games, I can highly recommend Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, and while it won’t have the online functionality we should all expect in $CURRENT_YEAR, the upcoming Dead or Alive 6 Last Round will almost certainly be worth your time if you’re willing to get it going locally.

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