Some time in late November 2023, we had the privilege of playing a build of TEKKEN 8 for roughly around three to four hours. And we’re here to share everything we learned about the heavily anticipated fighting game. 

The first two hours were dedicated to Story and Single player gameplay, while the rest was to explore the versus mode, Tekken Ball, and some of the practice and replay features. Let’s get right to it! 

Plenty for single players to enjoy (Mild Spoilers, skip if you go in blind) 

We were allowed to play up to Chapter Four of story mode which took about 40-45 minutes to complete. Your mileage will certainly vary. We asked if they reveal how many chapters there will be and how long it will take to complete by their estimate but the folks who worked on TEKKEN 8 weren’t ready to reveal these details. They did say that it’s about 1.7 times larger than TEKKEN 7.

This should be encouraging for mostly Single Player types who might not be enthusiastic about tussling with other players online. 

In addition to that, outside of the Main Story, each character will have their own mini episodes that you can play through. With 32 characters at launch, that’s plenty of content to go around. 

Also, no spoilers, but the three new characters: Reina, Victor, and Azucena will figure prominently in the main storyline. In the early chapters, Reina appears to be the most… intriguing. 

Arcade Quest 

This is another Single Player experience but one that attempts to mimic the feeling of being out and about in Arcades. Your personally designed Avatar (you can go crazy, the customization is pretty vast), will hop from arcade to arcade with the aim of besting its top player. It’s almost like challenging a Pokémon gym leader. 

Here, you can make Ghost Characters. A Ghost Character is essentially the AI learning exactly how you fight. After gathering enough data from fights, you can then proceed to fight that ghost character. The more you use a single character, the more data the AI will have on you. 

What happens then is that it creates a model of that character with YOUR fighting style. Hence, the ghost character. From here, you can learn your own tendencies and find counters where necessary. This one’s going to be for those hardcore competitive players.

In Arcade Quest, you also earn Fight Money which you can use to buy cosmetic upgrades both for your avatar and for the 32 playable characters. Here’s a video from our friends over at One More Game on the customizations you can apply:

Arcade Style vs Special Style

To be even friendlier to newcomers, TEKKEN 8 implements two styles: Arcade and Special. Arcade is what most versus fighting players have come to know and love. Meanwhile, Special gives players a single button access to combos and Rage Arts. 

You can switch to either style mid-fight by pressing the L1 button. 

Will there be disadvantages? With Arcade Style, depending on your skill level and mastery of a character, you’ll have access to the character’s full set of moves. Meanwhile, with Special, it’s a bit more limited. You have less freedom in terms of the moves you can execute with how certain combos are mapped to a single button. 

During our playthrough, we found ourselves shifting between the two styles constantly. Again, it really depends on your mastery and level of comfort in controlling the characters.

Want to see all the Rage Arts? Here’s another video from One More Game. 

MyReplay & Tips, Practice Mode

Speaking of mastering characters, the makers of TEKKEN 8 went out of their way to make sure players have all the tools they need to master the characters. 

They were particularly excited for us to try MyReplay & Tips. How it works is it records your fights from certain Game Modes and allows you to play them back. But more than just a replay, it shows you where you might have messed up or what you could have done better at a particular section. 

You can then replay it to your heart’s content until you get the timing down. From the time we tried it, it sounds better in theory than in practice. But this is most likely because we chose the standard difficulty and weren’t having that much of a trouble with the fights. Naturally, there weren’t many learning opportunities. 

How it works may seem kind of confusing at first as well. Some fights really just have no pointers so they will end up being just recordings of fights. Perhaps an improvement can be to show more alternative ways to deal with an opponent instead of simply finding where you might have messed up and providing a solution. 

Tekken Ball 

Tekken Ball is as fun as ever. But this is best played against another person. A few bouts versus the ‘computer’ and we found ourselves wanting to move on to other modes. 

Other than that, it’s also a good way to familiarize yourself with each characters’ moves and whether you’re more comfortable using Arcade or Special Style on them. 

TEKKEN 8 DEMO 

Want to try these for yourself? The TEKKEN 8 demo will be releasing on the following dates for the following platforms: 

• PlayStation 5 – December 14 
• Xbox Series X|S – December 21 

The Demo is supposed to have all the game modes that were available in our preview but also have available The Gallery where players can catch-up on where the story of TEKKEN stands on its latest installment. 

TEKKEN 8 will be released exclusively on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam on January 26, 2024. Pre-Orders for the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate Versions are now available on said platforms.