As someone completely new to series, Tekken 8 was pretty daunting to walk into. Move lists that could have over a hundred attacks can leave you wondering where to start with your character. The paddlings I received online showed me that I wasn’t quite on the right track just by picking a character and winging it, that’s for sure. While the game does have tools to make it easy to hop in and start slapping folks around and its single player modes have tons of fun in store no matter what your skill level, it’s the satisfying journey of finding a character and delving into their incredible depths that really makes this game shine bright.
After picking up fighting games a few years ago, I’ve always had an interest in the series, but those expansive move lists always left me worrying. Yes, I know that when you have dozens upon dozens of moves, they can’t all be useful and you’re more supposed to just incorporate them as you slowly learn a character. Still, how do you play someone like King or Jin right out of the gate? What are the good tools? What are my pokes? What moves are good at catching the opponent when they miss? It’s a lot to put together.
If you’re not super sure and you don’t want to put in a ton of work to start having fun, Tekken 8 offers Special Style. This allows you to mash buttons to do some cool combos with each character. So, if you don’t want to commit a ton of time but want to start smacking friends, activate this mode by pressing L1 and you’ll be doing wacky attacks in no time. The really neat part about this mechanic is that you can turn it on or off at will. So, if you like some of the combos but still want to learn how to play your character with a bit more purpose, you can quickly flick them on if you need them and turn them back off when you’re done. It gives you a lot of flexibility in how you incorporate them into your play.
You can also just tank your way through some of your opponent’s strikes using Heat. When you activate Heat, you do a Heat Burst where you can absorb a hit and then smash your opponent right back. While in this mode, your character is stronger (but only until the bar runs out), you do chip damage with your strikes, and you gain access to unique moves (many of which are pretty impressive to see). You can also end Heat using a powerful Heat Smash, which stomps foes for a lot of damage if it hits.
Similarly, when you’re at low health in Tekken 8, you enter a Rage state. Here, your attacks do more damage, and you can also activate a Rage Art with R2 that just hammers your foe (while also protecting you like Heat does when you activate it). These are some of the most impressive attacks in the game, and honestly, being able to do these by simply pressing R2 at the right time is just great. You just have to focus on your timing without worrying about how to actually input the button presses.
While learning your character, you have a few single player modes that you can play on the lower difficulties (or if you just feel like beating people up with a character’s sweet moveset). Story mode, The Dark Awakens, lets you play on one of several difficulties, and also gives you infinite chances to play many single-round matches, so it’s a decent mode to mess around with. Plus, the story is fun (although a bit complex to understand if you’re new to the series even WITH the in-game explanations).
Story Mode largely focuses on Jin with some dabbling with other characters, which is fine if you like Jin but less interesting if you don’t. If you want more character experience, there are Character Episodes that have a handful of matches and a brief story for all of the characters in the game. You can also tweak the difficulty here to breeze through the array of fun side stories. It’s a great way to experience each character to see who you like, and you get a good amount of Fight Money (which you can use to buy customization items for characters and avatars, among other things).
Tekken 8 also offers Arcade Quest, a playful mode where you work your way through arcades across the country, fighting a variety of CPU players of varying skill levels. This mode is where many of the beginner’s tutorials lie, so you’ll want to pick up this mode and play through it if you aren’t sure how the game works. The light challenge, ability to pick whichever character you want to play, and then have some of the more basic concepts explained to you make it a great starting point once you want to start getting more serious about learning a character.
Having so many single player modes that can cater to lower-skill levels is nice, but what about when you want to start getting better? The game features a Practice Mode where you can look at move lists, how many frames each move takes to go out, your frame advantage for follow-up strikes, as well as properties and damage. You can play around with your attacks and use the frame information to string together some combos of your own, or you can check the same for moves executed by your opponents to look for gaps. Adding combo challenges and samples to the mix give you the usual fighting game tools to tinker with your character until you figure them out.
While I could flip through the move list and have the game demonstrate each strike, I still wasn’t sure where to start to take my characters seriously in Tekken 8. Luckily, many of the characters work fairly similarly to their iterations in the past, so if you have experience in the older titles, it will carry over. If you don’t, much of the knowledge out there on the older games can still give you some guidance. I found that looking outside of the game was a big help at first. While you have tools to learn within the game, connecting with the community is an excellent place to get started, too.
But say all of that doesn’t help you much, and you just start getting blown up online. The game features replays for your matches, which you can watch to check for your mistakes so you can plan to avoid them next time. If you’re just getting started, you might not have a good idea how to counter things. This title offers tips to help you figure out what to do, though. If you’re getting smacked, you can press R2 to bring up a tip about a better way of punishing something the opponent whiffed with, or a hint as to a better combo route. If you’re getting walloped the tips probably won’t have much to say, but it’s really cool to get some hints during a replay about what you can try next time.
Except, to hell with waiting for next time. Tekken 8 lets you take over your character during a replay to try your new idea live. You basically take control of your character (or the opponent, if you like) so you can play around with things that might stop you from getting stomped next time. There are so many matches that I lost because I couldn’t figure out what to do with one thing my foe was doing. Here, I can hope into a replay, stop when the opponent is going to use that ability, and start trying things to stop it. This is an amazing tool for dealing with specific problems against characters and opponents, and I love how quickly it lets you fix gaps in your game plan.