To quote an excellent Tekken player who happens to be a friend I train with: in Tekken, “the simple act of moving backwards properly requires practice.” Fighting games are notoriously complicated, and that can intimidate new players or keep them away entirely. Even if you’re an oldhead, learning a new game takes time. But Tekken 8 looks like it’s trying to flatten that curve by providing some of the best teaching tools in the genre. So, listen up, people: class is in session.
In Tekken 8, picking up a character and having a good time is as simple as picking your character and turning on Special Style. But say you want to explore everything that character has to offer. What then? Well, you’ll want to head to training mode. And that’s where you’ll notice the first major change in Tekken 8. Previous Tekkens, including the excellent Tekken 7, only listed a character’s entire movelist – which could total more than a hundred moves – in a single, numbered list. Not so in Tekken 8. Like SoulCalibur before it, Tekken 8 has that same movelist that Tekken fans are used to, but it also has a separate tab for “Main Techniques” – your character’s go-to moves, from pokes, pressure strings, combo starters, and launchers. Better yet, it’ll tell you what they’re good for and if they’re a combo starter, they’ll give you a sample combo to do (with an accompanying demo you can access at any time).
This isn’t new, but Tekken 8’s combo trials are particularly good at walking you through your character of choice’s combo routing. By the time you’ve finished them, you should have an idea of how your character’s moves fit together — and how to construct your own combos.
And this is where the new stuff comes in. One of the coolest new features in Tekken 8 is the ability to remember and reproduce a status. Say you’re practicing a combo, but you want to try out some different routings or just practice a part that’s giving you trouble. As any fighting game player will tell you, it can be a drag to have to set up the situation you want over and over again instead of just being able to start there. With this feature, you can just perform the situation once, have the game remember the status of the characters at that moment, and reset it whenever you want. Want to practice those pesky side wall combos without having to manually reset your positioning each time? Now you can. Looking to practice your low parry follow-ups from the moment the low parry hits? You can do that, too. It’s an incredibly cool and convenient feature, and something I hope will become a genre staple after it appears in Tekken 8.
All of those things will teach you how to play your character, but what if you want to learn a matchup? Say… how to fight Kazuya, or how to punish the moves of a specific character? Tekken 8’s teaching tools have you covered there, too. The excellent punishment training added as a free update in Tekken 7 returns as a feature in Tekken 8, allowing you to practice blocking and punishing a character’s common strings. It’s a great place to start for newcomers or folks just looking to learn more about a matchup, though a fuller understanding of more optimal punishes will require you to learn how to duck and properly low parry.
You can also set the training dummy to try to punish you after blocking or being hit by your attacks. You can record scenarios manually, but you can also select from a list of attacks, allowing you to quickly practice things like frame traps, using low attacks to beat Power Crushes, and side-stepping. And, naturally, Tekken 8 will let you see frame data in-game at launch.
The real coup de grace, though, is My Replay and Tips. Replays are a standard feature in fighting games, but Tekken 8 is taking things a step further. Load up any replay in My Replay and Tips, and you’ll get real-time feedback telling you how you can improve. Land a hit but don’t convert it into a decent combo? My Replay and Tips will show you a better route and let you practice it. Missing your opportunities to punish an unsafe move? My Replay and Tips will recommend a punish for you and let you practice it. Didn’t know you could duck that string? My Replay and Tips will tell you. Having trouble teching a throw? My Replay and Tips will show you the proper command. Tekken 8 producer Michael Murray described it as being like “you have like a friend who's really good at fighting games sitting right next to you, that watches you play and say hey, you should do this instead of that.” That means more time in the game, and less time looking up stuff on YouTube or a wiki.
But here’s the best part: you can take control of your character in My Replay and Tips at any moment, for ten seconds at a time, and practice all of the stuff you’ve learned in real time. Taking over a replay has been done before, but providing real-time feedback and then letting you immediately implement it is a literal game-changer.
Mix all this together, and Tekken 8 is shaping up to have some of the best teaching tools in fighting games. It’s still going to take time and dedication — it is Tekken, after all — but it’s looking like we’ll have everything we need to learn how to get better in-game when it launches. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been so excited for the first day of school.