My opinion has shifted on Tekken 8 since it made a splash back in January. What started as a global event and a celebration of Tekken and the FGC as a whole has turned into perhaps the most tilting, dishonest fighting games ever created. I’m not writing this all pissed-off after a lackluster night on ranked. I’ve stopped playing for a few days and I feel no reason to go back.

Tekken 8 is miserable.

The first obvious issue is the heat system. It’s horrible. With a press of a button you get an attack that is fully tracking, plus on block, fast, armored, and launches if opponent is airborne. Once in heat, many characters get insanely powerful moves that do everything. Launch, plus on block, infinite range, you name it. Not only are these moves incredibly unbalanced and braindead, but they rip much on the integrity of Tekken straight out. Tekken has always been a knowledge check type of fighting game. There has always been bullshit moves that you need to lab. However, that’s not the case with these heat attacks. There’s absolutely nothing you can do. There shouldn’t be moves in fighting games with no counter play. They feel cheap to go up against and they feel dirty to use. It’s so disingenuous and braindead.

Heat is not the only problem however. Everything is just so over-tuned. Defense is a guessing game. It seams like every attack clips you if you try to sidestep, even with plus frames.
So many strings jail on block so you can’t duck and punish. Neutral is gutted by insanely powerful WR moves that are nearly homing and grant plus 7 if not more. Low parry was nerfed significantly making defense much worse. Many of the best characters in the game have heat smashes that fully track and grant plus frames, leaving you a sitting duck in neutral.

Defense has been gutted. Neutral has been gutted. Offense has been simplified with braindead moves. Pluggers are still a problem. Rank boosters quit after one lose. Feng still isn’t nerfed. Dragunov is still doing 70% on one launch. Devil Jin still has his heat smash. Xiayou still has a mid-mid-mid string that’s plus and a non-launch punishable unseeable snake edge. Counter-hit and homing throws are still a problem.

With all these factors, I find myself wondering: “is this even better than Tekken 7?” I hold out hope that with some balance patches and some key nerfs that Tekken 8 can still be the greatest Tekken. But as of now? It’s probably the worst Tekken of my lifetime.

This title has managed to hook people again like Tekken3 hooked it at the time.

The problem with this is that now they have added microtransactions, and from what it seems they want to add a Battle pass to it.

Aside from that, having AMD is a problem since one of the maps crashes on its own unless you lower the graphics until it looks like you're playing the first Tekken on a CRT monitor.

$2000 for PC and the Deluxe version of the game to have the possibility of crashing several times and ending up banned. I can't play until they fix that specific problem since they are also banning people who used mods, and the only mod I have is to lower the graphics of that specific map.

If you plan to buy some Tekken and you don't care about all this, buy Tekken 8. However, if you like modding games and don't want to support the abusive practice of microtransactions and the destruction of an entire community, don't waste your money.

Unicorn Overlord is the mirror dimension 13 Sentinels. 13 Sentinels had an engaging and compelling story and solid cast but lacked any gameplay intrigue; Unicorn Overlord has a satisfying gameplay loop, but it's paired with a bland story and horridly trite characters. The whole cast feels like ChatGPT excrement, there're so many characters and they're just mindlessly shat out at every turn. Some positives? The gameplay is great, slowly conquering the world, expanding your roster with new units to experiment with, it was all very engaging... for a while. The first 20 hours of this game are engrossing, it's quite easy to ignore the game's shortcomings during this period. Then we run into another big problem, this game is 50 hours long... once you've played 20 hours, you've seen it all. The game will still throw new unit types and level gimmicks at you, but they're not nearly enough to keep the loop satisfying in the mid to late game. Unfortunately, once the gameplay grows tired, there's absolutely nothing of value left here.

70€ single player game + denuvo + mtx + atrocious perfomance + crashes

I've waited 12 years for this. I'm tired, boss. I'm tired of people defending all this shit.

Also, if you don't see how these mtx and the performance issues are two facets of the same issues, you're hopeless. They are both born of the same greed. They cut corners in optimisation and testing, resulting in the crap performance issues, due to the same greed that makes them milk idiots for mtx.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

I cannot lie, I'm genuinely very disappointed in this game, especially with a company as consistently strong an output as Vanillaware it pains me that this game really only has those good ass Vanillaware visuals going for it.

In terms of gameplay, the game has a lot of elements that I would generally enjoy on paper, the formations and the way tactics form together should be so much better than it actually is, there's just so many variables to the point that it largely becomes a numbers game since character building, for the purposes of beating the game (played on the second highest difficulty) is really easy and it's not super hard to make even an unoptimal formation just work through sheer force of will, which really harms the strategy layer. Also the real time Ogre Battle style strategy has a lot of problems on its own. The worst being a lot of quality of life issues, such as not being able to see how your formations will do out of deployment, and the battle forecast changing at the drop of a hat. There's so many variables to battles that you can send a battalion over to an enemy where it says it'll be a sure win, and despite seemingly no other circumstances changing it suddenly switches to a stalemate of a battle which is incredibly frustrating for planning purposes, on top of the fact that if you make mistakes there's no backing out. In many ways I can't help but compare this game to the neighbouring turn based tactics genre, where at least I can make an assessment of which move I can take that would be the most optimal, Unicorn Overlord forces you to throw shit out and if it doesn't work then tough shit, which leads to an incredibly unsatisfying tactical experience. Also there's way too many liberation missions, which I know is for controlling the level curve, but even then the level curve is fucking wacked out by the endgame, there's like a 5 level recommended level jump for no reason. Nearly every gameplay element in the game is something that could work but has a botched enough execution that frustrates me because, man, I really do want to love this game.

But most frustrating of all is the story here, the only way I can describe is like bad Fire Emblem. There's a shitload of characters and they all interact with many others in the army but unlike Fire Emblem these characters offer the substance and flavour of white rice, these characters are truly bland in a way that seems almost alien to me compared to the characters in like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels. The story is also dead simple but still does a few things that really hurt its narrative, the villains in this game are fuckin terrible and their motivations never amount to anything interesting, meanwhile all the good guys are so generically good that even the bad guys that become good have some crutch excuse like mind control, hostage situation, or some other hackneyed out that prevents these characters from really flourishing. The rapport system is something I usually always like because it gives these characters that don't really interact in the main story a chance to be fleshed out as characters but all it can offer is the most shallow looks at these characters in their totality to the point that they're just functions to me, Armour guy, Horse guy, Bow guy they never offer anything more interesting than hating the evil empire because they're evil and it's just really surprising to see a game with so much love put into the production lean back so heavily on just being so consistently mid.

Just a really frustrating offering from Vanillaware from me, especially for a game that nearly bankrupted the company I expected so much better because this game really only has its visuals going for it, but I can get that from any other Vanillaware game and actually have a good game too.

I find it extremely hillarious that Konami, and her affinity to ruin a so-loved franchise of theirs, are able to make it even worse than expected. It is abysmal the fact that they try to make the game's message so obvious in the most cringe and bland way possible, where even the game's content can't even save it.

Should I start by the game's horrible chase sequences? The horrible voice acting and the attempt at lip synching it with 'live action' cutscenes? Or the fact that the game's protagonist is unispiring and boring to the point you actually don't give a crap about what they did and if they deserve redemption or forgiveness?

I sat for almost two hours playing this, hoping there could at least be something which would make me say it's decent. Which thankfully there was and it was the monster design and how nostalgic the soundtrack felt to the ancestors of this game. But it still baffles me that Akira Yamaoka chooses to return to create such masterful pieces of music for a franchise that the company itself gives no shit about. Akira has a deep connection with Silent Hill and it's obvious... But even he can't save the cringefest that involves the rest of the team behind the creation of projects such as this.