Amazing game.

As a precursor this is the first fighting game that I’ve seriously played. I’ve played Super Smash Bros casually and I tried start GBFVR albeit only casually button mashing with friends and never cared to look up meta or the nitty gritty, those games didn’t really appeal to me at the time or were just frustrating.



Competitive Scene

GBFVR I started as a brand new player, matching at the lowest rank into players that had 400 games over me on day 1.

Typically, the way I like to learn a game is to play against somebody who I consider slightly better than me, so it makes my learning experience digestible, when you’re against somebody who is leagues better than you, the experience is just a stomp, and I don’t really learn anything and the experience is incredibly demotivating.

In comes Tekken, the game that I’ve long since heard from some of my veteran friends as the hardest fighting game of all time; day 1 I log on and start mashing buttons and the opponent does too, but when I lose, I don’t feel like I got stomped (most of the time). Of course, there were veterans starting at the bottom too, as the ranks needed to distribute properly but it wasn’t much or the distribution felt like it worked pretty good, as I kept queueing up against people who mashed buttons just like me but knew the game a bit better, it wasn’t so demotivating at that time. When I could identify a pattern in a playstyle and made an adjustment it sometimes yielded positive results that affirmed that I could actually grow as a player.

That ends my competitive rant about FG, as Tekken 8 gave me at least a modicum of a window to be able to enjoy the game and grow as a player.



Gameplay

The game itself is very fleshed out, I realize they’ve literally had 8+ iterations of this game over the past 3 decades so if it was bad, I’d actually be pretty disappointed because what the fuck was Harada doing for the last 3 decades besides not implementing good roll back (It’s open source by the way, Harada if you ever read this).

The game feels really good, the movement is amazing, there are hundreds of different ways to defeat opponents, and inputs to attack correspond to L arm, R arm or their leg counterparts which also include unique stances; long story short the game is incredibly in depth despite such a simple concept. You could put in thousands of hours to properly learn a single character. The expression of skill is incredibly satisfying and the hours you put into learning tech/strings will likely convert to more wins in the game itself.

There’s only a few parts of the game that feel like bullshit, but I’d attribute those as being knowledge checks and they’re simply harder for newcomers like myself to deal with.

Actual bullshit is quickly recognized and patched, as there was a balance hotfix after like the first week.

Learning

The replay mode is amazing, many options to show your inputs to see if you’re doing them correctly as well as pop up tips to show what you ought to have done against an opponent that got hits on you. You can ever replay some of those segments to experiment to see what will and will not work.

The move list is pretty intuitive (mostly) and their examples of the combos with the metronome timing is not bad. One thing I wish they did change is to put maybe commas in some places for example a combo that reads like < 2 > might be back+2 THEN forward, but to my yakubian ape cranium that might read as do back and 2 AND forward at the same time like bro what. Other than that, it’s straight forward and if you actually take the time, you can do it.



Music

Not much to say here, it’s pretty good. I’m an outlier when it comes to music taste, and I just listen to the same genres and styles over and over in general so some of the Tekken 8 music activates my neurons but not all. I put the jukebox on random, so I feel like I’m entering a new game every time, so it doesn’t get old.



Customization

What can I say, with all the Monkey D Luffy, Tifa, Drake skins I’ve seen? It’s pretty great, player customizations of characters are hilariously recognizable. They did something right; wish they had more options but its part of what makes the game very fun. I can send my Paul cosplaying as Gon from HxH to beat up Bryan as Hitler. How much better could it get? It’s fortnite levels of universe crossover without the chug jug kids.



NetCode

Only part of the game that’s meh for me, at the bottom right of the screen it tells you how many rollback frames there are but I don’t feel it in game. In fact the rollback feel awful. It’s open source technology, you can do better after 30 years, Harada.



I also would’ve liked more options when it came to matchmaking, not that I don’t have a choice to reject or not it would just be nice to choose to connect to only Ethernet Players and to see their packet loss graph before you enter a game. Often times, I’ll enter a game against a dude with full bars of Wi-Fi, and in game their bar will fluctuate between 1 and 5 and suddenly it’s the worst game possible. I don’t care if I win or lose those, I don’t rematch those type of games; call me unsportsmanlike I don’t care I’m not putting myself through that.



The game is 70 USD or 80 CAD, some people are buying the wrong things, why are they buying Tekken? They need to buy a mf router or new internet, but that’s besides the point and it’s not Harada’s fault.



Performance

I think the game is optimized for Console, which makes sense. My game black screens once every session (while I can still input and hear audio), it also kills my discord. Would like for them to patch this in the future. I’m running a 5900x Ryzen and a 3070 GPU, do I need more? Would be ridiculous if so. Other than that, game mostly runs fine at an almost consistent 60fps.



Overall

Great entry into FGC for newcomers, as mashing early works and it feels immediately gratifying early giving you more incentive, motivation and interest to learn the game as you gradually get stomped and change your ways. The game’s progression is incredibly good at being a model of the dunning Krueger effect.

Start new game and think you know a lot, then quickly realize you know so little.

Would recommend. Not to pussies, though.

A solid game.
The trails game I've played so far with the least amount of "bullshit". The port felt really smooth, the dialogue was consistent and I liked all the characters. I think this was one of the lighter stories in the series in terms of the tragedies that the trail games love to play on but it's fine. Genuinely enjoyed it.

Not much to say about the OST, they keep it consistent across all the games albiet minor differences, quite enjoyed it.

Gameplay is not clunky, Fast Mode works smoothly unlike some of the other games. It's also compatible with the steamdeck, and as I would say Bed Gaming is W Gaming, because we are so back.

Falcolm can do it right, just gotta get Llyod to ask them to overcome the barriers.