Tekken 7 was a very special game to me, despite briefly playing Tekken 6 as a kid I never had much interest in the series or fighting games as a whole but T7 changed all of that. Something about the game was just incredibly addicting to me, despite the lack of content I still loved the game and poured in around 1200 hours into it between season 1 and 3, but the pay to win DLCs, questionable balancing decisions and the lack of offline tourneys during Covid ended up killing my interest in it. I still came back to play the game on occasion and I watched the big tournaments, but I just wanted Tekken 8 to come out already.

Now that Tekken 8 is here and I've spent 300 hours on it so far, I can say that the game is polarizing. I do enjoy a good chunk of what's here though. The story is....good? In terms of the quality of writing it's absolute dogshit, it all feels way too rushed so none of the emotional beats end up hitting and Jin's whole arc boils down to him accepting and overcoming his guilt over starting a FUCKING WORLD WAR, and that just isn't something that can be done believably in a 3 hour long storymode. But the story is still hype and is packed with fan service from Azazel coming back, Lars reminding Kazuya of Heihachi to the entirety of the final battle. The story is fun, and that's really all I could want out of a Tekken plot. Other areas of the game that are worthy of praise to me are the stages, there's not a lot of them compared to 7 but that's because they went for quality over quantity and they're all so unique with the variety of old and new stage gimmicks that are added. They also look great, as does the game as a whole, I don't think I can ever play T7 again based on how dated T8 makes it feel with its visuals. What makes these stages even better is that Jukebox is back and I had a blast going through old Tekken OSTs and mixing and matching what themes go best with what stages, though I was tempted to just put Arisa on every stage because it's just that good. In terms of offline content the game is solid, character episodes are enjoyable and much better than whatever T7 had but I do wish there were more serious ones, for me the endings lean too much on comedy for me whereas past games achieved a better balance, but they're still good, especially Steve's ending. Arcade Quest is a fun little mode that I enjoyed going through once but I'm also never playing it again. Replays and tips though, has to be the best feature in this game, it makes the previously daunting task of labbing very specific situations so much more manageable and if you use it enough, you could level up your gameplay really quickly, it really feels like a Godsend for anyone trying to improve at the game. There's also Tekken Ball, Tekken Ball is peak.

So the package as a whole is great, but how is the actual fighting? I loved what I played of the CNT and CBT and I enjoyed the game on launch too, but as time goes on I like it less and less and now that I'm 3 months in and am playing this game everyday, I'm starting to think it's actually shit. Ok so, prior to the games release, the dev team kept pushing this narrative how this would be an "aggressive" game, I was initially skeptical, but I warmed up to this approach over time since too much of Tekken 7s gameplay boiled down to backdashing away, whiff punishing and playing keepout with the plethora of CH launchers that every character had. This was most evident at the highest level with almost every grand final at the end of the game's lifespan just being 2 top tiers using safe pokes with minimal risk, so clearly something had to be done...I just wish they didn't take this approach to such an extreme. Before I dive into the negatives, I just want to say the things I do like. To begin with, sidestepping is better here and backdashes are nerfed, I like this, it's a 3D game, so lateral movement should take precedence and it feels good here to sidestep moves here when I barely ever did it in 7 because it just didn't feel as necessary in that game. I also like the removal of CH launchers for the vast majority of the roster since to me, it's a good way of encouraging offensive gameplay.

What isn't a good way of encouraging offense is everything else this game adds/changes. Chip damage is dumb, I should not be punished for the simple act of blocking a move and my opponent shouldn't be rewarded for not even landing his attack. Recoverable health is an equally stupid addition to me for similar reasons. Low Parries, a defensive option is also heavily nerfed here since you get no tornado spin after them in this game so they do much less damage here. It's one thing to faciliate aggressive play, but when you go the extra mile and punish a player for playing defensively, you create a game where offense is often the best option, in other words, you get Mashing. Mashen 8, that's what this game feels like, you can't land a move in this game without getting hit by a Jin uf2, or a Victor/Azucena powercrush, or a dickjab and it becomes this annoying game of who can lockdown the other player with plus frames first or who can steal their turn back quicker. Then there's throws which are grossly overtuned, CH throws are a thing now which make the break window much tighter which I'm fine with, since in prior games once you got good at throw breaking, throws barely played a role in matches, especially in tourneys where it'd be a surprise anytime a throw was successful, but for whatever reason throws are also homing now? Why remove the counterplay? It makes characters like King an absolute nightmare to fight and it's just too much.

Tekken 7 leaned heavily on defense but you could still play the game offensively without feeling too held back, in this game, if you try playing it defensively you're playing it wrong and poking/turtle style characters like Asuka or Leroy are unanimously considered to be low tier because of it. When almost every character starts feeling like the same rushdown/50/50 archetype, you lose a lot of what makes these characters stand out. No better example of this exists in the game than Eddy, my Tekken 7 main, he was based around poking and spacing in that game with his incredible backdash, but he also had the worst sidestep in the game, for Tekken 8 they couldn't keep the poking style he had in T7 without making him suck, so they completely reworked him into a rushdown character that can sidestep normally and has an average backdash just like everyone else and there's really not much that makes him feel unique here other than the fact that he's got cheesy one button strings and he occasionally crushes a move when in negativa.

So I generally dislike the changes to the gameplay and the direction the game is heading towards and the same goes for this game's main addition, heat. You enter heat in one of two ways, either landing a heat engager which rewards you by giving you back recoverable health or doing it manually via heat burst. Heat Engagers I'm fine with, they reward you for landing a move, it makes sense, and my only gripe with them is some are way too easy to just throw out, safe armoured heat engagers are the obvious example of this. Heat Burst though, should be removed entirely. You press a button, do a move that's armoured, unsteppable and almost impossible to whiff, and you are now in heat, whether it lands or is blocked, or is even interrupted with a low or throw. There's no risk involved in doing it and you get huge reward for throwing it out depending on how good your characters heat mode is. Some heat modes are also straight up busted. When Kuma is in heat for example you might aswell hold back and do nothing else because of his electric having no counterplay. A lot of heat modes also give a character multiple free mixups so you're forced to guess like with Lars' f3+4 or Eddy 3+4 and it just isn't fun, it isn't skill based to lose a round just because you guessed wrong, there's a reason high level players say this game is a Casino. There's also heat smashes and they're terribly designed too, you can't powercrush them, can't low parry them, heaven forbid you could do something other than block in a game that discourages blocking. Most of them are mid and + on block so your only counter is to step them, but a lot of them have the character run so far away that you can't get any meaningful punish, it sucks, I avoid Alisa's or Eddy's heat smash just to get nothing in return. There's also DJin's heat smash, which is probably the most blatant example of a move having nothing you can do against it.

I didn't even mention the scummy way microtransactions were implemented, the battlepass, the limited customization, the pluggers, or the other ways in which this game's balancing feels like a joke at points. I do think this game will get much better with time since unlike other Tekkens, this one had no arcade run that could've been used as a form of ironing out the flaws for the full release. I'm keeping my score as a 9 just because that's what I would have given the game in my first month of playing but it'll probably drop down since playing this game in its current state is hazardous to your health.

Tenchu 2 is both frustrating and fascinating since as a sequel, it's not too different from its predecessor and even manages to identify and rectify some of the problems with the first game, but it also misses the mark entirely on the level design which makes some of the faults that carried on from the first game much more prominent here.

There's still a lot of good stuff here though, first off, the game actually has a tutorial this time around so getting into the game is much easier. Secondly, replayability has seen a big boost with 3 characters being available instead of 2 and they go through different stages and even fight different bosses so it's actually worth it to play as them all. Thirdly, the story is much better here, it was basically a non-factor in the first game but here there's plenty of cutscenes with voice-acting that's quite good for the time and its cool to learn things like how Rikimaru got his scar or what kind of person Lord Gohda is. The fact that this game has a tutorial and is a prequel to the first game makes it a good entry point for the series.

Now this game does have more content than the first game, but I don't feel compelled to actually check it out outside of my playthrough with Rikimaru because of multiple reasons. One of which is the level design, whereas in the first game, levels were small but filled with enemies, here the stages are way bigger and are virtually empty by comparison, what makes it worse is that the grappling hooks and items altogether have been nerfed. The grappling hook is way harder to use here unless you're looking straight at the rooftop you want to cling to and if you're a couple degrees off-axis, you'll fall and have to do it again and seeing the same falling animation just put me off from trying to use it, it's too finnicky. As for items, I got waaaay less of them here than in the first game, a lot of them are hidden within stages but with how empty and uninteresting they are I didn't bother to search for them. Additionally, getting Grand Master rank to unlock items is extremely tedious here with it requiring way more kills than it did in the first game, I'm sure once you get these items, the game does open up and become more fun, but I'm just not interested in doing it. With the limited items and the grappling hook being less useful, it really constricts player expression here and what I ended up doing for every stage was just running around behind enemies and stealth killing them when I could, I never enjoyed the game enough to go out of my way to experiment with the tools at my disposal like I did in the first game. A big reason why I found the missions here to not be as interesting is because of the music, or lack thereof, outside of battles, all you get is silence here. In the first game, music helped keep your attention during the downtime, here, you don't have anything to keep you interested (not to mention that there's way less happening in these stages to boot) so I end up being bored for a good chunk of the game.

The other reason why I don't really care to continue playing this game are the bossfights. Bosses now use items here which includes stuff like shurikens, smoke bombs, explosives etc, I can appreciate the attempt to make them more interesting than what they were in the first game, but the core combat is still jank as all hell here so the attempts at spicing it up just serve to add to the frustration since it gives you more stuff to worry about. Keep in mind dying at the boss means you have to redo the stage all over again! Also, it might just be me, but I've had way more trouble with the camera during bossfights here than I ever did in Tenchu 1, whenever you block attacks, you get pushed back, and if you get pushed back to the wall, you basically can't see anything and if you try to move away and regain your view, you'll often just get hit in the process and it gets really fucking annoying. By the end of the game I was just making a beeline towards the boss in every stage since what's the point of trying to play the game properly when I'll just have to redo the entire stage over again since I failed at a part of the game that has nothing to do with the actual stealth.

In fairness, some of the issues I have here were also in Tenchu 1, like the lack of a clear destination in the missions or the clunky bossfights, but the disparity between the quality of the level design acts like a parasite which makes issues that were alleviated by how fun Tenchu 1 was to play, instead feel more pronounced here.

It isn't a bad game, but if I had to explain my journey with one word, it'd be soulless, stages are vast and hollow, most enemies just stand around waiting for you to kill them and there's no music. It improves in the minor areas while completely missing the mark in the major ones and overall the game is just a letdown.

Tenchu can be a difficult game to get into since like many games of the PS1 era, it makes basically no attempt at explaining its core mechanics to the player in the game itself. However, if you're willing to stick with it and watch a guide or two, what you'll end up with is a deeply rewarding experience that I'd consider to be one of the best games that the PS1 has to offer.

Now I'm no expert on stealth games, my experience with the genre starts and ends with MGS, but what I can say is that I had a ton of fun throughout basically the entire game. Playing Tenchu can be a slow burn with how much waiting is involved but that's what makes the game so enjoyable, having to wait from a safe distance, analyze an enemies movement pattern and find your perfect moment to strike and then get rewarded with a sick looking takedown animation never got old. This is also helped by the excellent level design, there's only 10 of them but the game does an excellent job in forcing you to mix up how you approach a stage from traversing primarily on rooftops in mission 1 to being forced to do all of mission 3 on foot to then having to deal with the uneven terrain of mission 8. Missions are usually short and concise and it's not always clear on where you're meant to go but with how well designed the stages are, I didn't mind it, instead I was happy to spend more time than necessary if it meant I could secure a couple Grand Master ranks and unlock more items. Speaking of items, there's a ton of them here from shurikens, caltrops, poisoned rices, land mines etc and they do an excellent job at giving the player a number of options to diversify the way you tackle a mission.

As I already mentioned, there's a lot of downtime when playing Tenchu as you try to get a view of the enemies while putting up with the game's terribly aged rendering system, luckily though, this game has one of the best OSTs to any game I've played so there's always a tune you can latch onto while waiting around. Seriously, it's insane how good the music is here.

Now I've been singing the games praises and rightfully so, but even I can't deny that this games got some flaws. Aside from the fact that the game doesn't explain its mechanics and the draw distance often leads to instances where you try to slowly nudge yourself towards an out of sight enemy but once you see them they also see you, there's also the fact that combat here is really janky. This is fine for normal encounters since combat is something you're meant to avoid so it wouldn't make sense for it to feel good, but the game has a lot of bossfights where you're forced to deal with the janky combat and they're just not that fun. I just cheesed them with items usually since I didn't want to risk having to redo an entire mission from dying at the boss. Also, replay value could've been better. Replaying missions to get Grand Master ranks was fun but more could've been done with the fact that the game has two playable characters. Rikimaru and Ayame basically both control the same and go through the exact same missions with the only difference being their dialogue in cutscenes which doesn't really warrant playing as both of them.

So yes, its not perfect but what game is. What matters is that It succeeds in all the areas that it needs to and even though I tried bringing up some things wrong with it, I'd be lying if I said any of it really impacted my playthrough. It is a fantastic game and the definition of a hidden gem