“The tastiest drink in the world is coffee, or nothing!” says Azucena, Tekken’s newest character, when she runs into Lili. “I’ll teach you of the majesty that is tea!” Lili shoots back. It’s a dialogue exchange that only happens when these two characters go head-to-head, and in this case, it’s appropriate. Tekken producer Michael Murray is drinking coffee and playing Azucena. I’m drinking tea and playing Lili. Michael destroys me. I don’t often play Lili, and Michael is, unsurprisingly, a very good Tekken player. But even though I lost that match, I was having an absolute blast. We were laughing, complimenting strong moments in each other’s play, sharing surprise at certain interactions, and generally having a great time.
Naturally, I switched to Azucena the next match. I’ll never give up on tea, but there’s nothing wrong with switching characters, right? Like every other character I played in Tekken 8, she was a lot of fun. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a little.
I was at Bandai Namco’s office in Irvine, California for two days last week, and much of that time was spent playing Tekken 8, talking to Michael Murray about Tekken 8, and playing Tekken 8 while talking to Michael Murray about Tekken 8. We were throwing down in an early version of the Tekken 8 Closed Beta Test that folks can get their hands on from October 20th to 23rd. That dialogue exchange between Lili and Azucena is just one of many examples of the defining quality that seems to run through Tekken 8: attention to detail.
The first place you’ll notice this is the graphics. There are a lot of beautiful fighting games these days, but the Unreal Engine 5-powered Tekken 8 might be the prettiest of them all. You’ll notice the attention to detail in everything, from the way the environments break when characters smash into them, to how some stages move from day to night between rounds. The Urban Square stage looks like you could stumble across it while wandering around Midtown Manhattan.
And then, of course, there’s the way the characters get dirty and beat up as they get hit and knocked down. After one match, Nina’s wedding dress, one of the four costumes that she (and every other character) brings to the CBT, had gotten wet and dirty as we played.
Speaking of characters, there are 19 of them in the CBT. Sixteen – Jin, Kazuya, Jun, Paul, Law, King, Lars, Xiaoyu, Jack-8, Nina, Asuka, Leeroy, Hwoarang, Lili, Bryan, and Claudio – return from the Closed Network Test. They’re joined by three new faces: Feng Wei and Raven, who return from Tekken 7 and Tekken 6, respectively, and Acuzena Milagros Ortiz Castillo, who is new for Tekken 8.
Every character in Tekken 8 feels great, and things have changed a little bit since the CNT. I played every character, but I naturally gravitated back to Leeroy, who was my main the first time around, but I also got more comfortable with Jun and Jin, played around with Asuka, and even made some strides with King.
Part of my improvement was familiarity, but part of it was also Special Style, which assigns most of a character’s moveset to one of the four face buttons. Special Style was in the CNT, but the version here feels much better. Multiple moves are now assigned to square (which performs a character’s signature moves) and circle (which is used for lows and throws) courtesy of pressing the button you want and either down, right, or left. That means a lot more moves for each character; since cross gives you access to your Power Crush and triangle gets you a launcher and a follow-up combo if you continue to press that button, you can essentially play entire matches in Special Style if you want to.
What really makes Special Style, well… special is that you can switch it on and off at will. That means veteran players can get something out of it, too. I often found myself playing normally in neutral situations, and then switching to Special Style to do combos or punish when I needed a big hit. And it worked.
After you launch your opponent with triangle, you can do three different combos: your standard combo, which is done by repeatedly pressing triangle; a combo with more wall carry, where you’ll press square, or a combo with circle, which gives you a more advantageous knockdown. And you can also add delays to the combo to make custom routes. Kazuya, for instance, can delay his triangle combo to add more Electric Wind God Fists… a combo you can do normally, too.
Of the newcomers to the CBT, I enjoyed Azucena the most, though all three of them are fun, whether you’re hitting people with Raven’s Shadow Clones or Feng’s outrageous damage. Azucena’s got a stance that allows her to evade high attacks, several powerful kicks, good strings with exciting frame trap possibilities, and very, very satisfying side steps. It doesn’t hurt that she’s sporting some of the best fits in the game. It’s that attention-to-detail thing that Tekken 8 does so well.
The Closed Beta Test also brings a new stage, Ortiz Farm, to the five we saw in the CNT, making for six total. It’s a three-level stage. Alpacas wander around the top level, but if you manage to break the floor and get to the bottom, you’ll find yourself in what looks like a temple covered in gold. Splat your enemy into the wall here, and you’ll see one of Tekken 8’s newest additions: wall launches, which do exactly what the name implies, shooting your foe into the air and allowing you to continue combos and get extra damage, adding an additional wrinkle to stage selection and how characters play in the areas where it shows up.
Ortiz Farm is the only stage with wall launches in the CBT, but every stage is gorgeous. Whether I was watching the sunset in Urban Square, admiring the Arena, or (my personal favorite) marveling at the water in Yakushima, I always noticed something new each time we played.
That goes for the gameplay, too. Everything about Tekken 8 just feels right. The way characters react when they’re hit, the sound effects when you hit a launcher, how the stages break when characters are knocked into the environment, and even the amount of pushback on a powerful move combine to make a game where everything feels the way you’d expect it to.
And then there are smaller changes that show Tekken Project is listening to player feedback. Want to map inputs to L3 and R3? Now you can. Worried that Heat Bursts and Heat Dashes could be used together to create combos that are too long? That’s been changed. Visual effects making combat hard to read? They’ve been adjusted, and players have more options if they want to make tweaks. There’s more, of course, but as someone who played the Closed Network Test until I was kicked off the servers and played the CBT until Bandai Namco literally took the machine away, I can say the changes were noticeable, and for the better.
I came away from Tekken 8’s CBT incredibly impressed, and I’m counting down the days until I can play more of it. If I had to sum everything up, though, I’d paraphrase what Leeory says when he wins a match: “Accept all, chase none.” There are a lot of impressive fighting games out there, and you can’t go wrong with any of them. Tekken 8 may be the newest kid on the block, but it isn’t chasing anyone. From what I can tell so far, it’s running at the head of the pack.
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