Recent reviews by Sr Virtual.

Now that I'm 2 full rank sets higher than when I made my first review and quadrupled my playtime (Garyu -> Fujin), I figured I'd update it with my current thoughts on the game.

Tekken 8 is very aggressive and with the current state of the game, defense isn't really a valid strategy. Most characters have chunky unreactable attacks with ambiguous animations & very high damage combos.

This by itself wouldn't really be a complete deal-breaker, however with 30+ characters, each having ~80 moves each (and only around 10% of the moveset being universal) ranked turns into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ where both parties are scrambling to knowledge check eachother. In real world terms, this means that many of the things that boost your winrate (e.g indiscriminately power-crushing/low jabbing strings you're unfamiliar with, spamming command grabs, "combo hunting", etc) give you no extra progress towards being good, making the ranked mode almost meaningless.

For a game to work in a format such as this without requiring an investment of 3000 hours to learn every matchup and every character's intricacies, characters would either have to share upwards of 90% of their moveset with a few "signature moves" setting them apart, or if they insist on keeping the degree of variety identical, there would need to be very few characters - maybe 4-6.

In contrast to my first review, where I recommended Tekken 8 overall & added that picking it up with friends is the cherry on top, I now believe that picking the game up with friends to set up an "arms race" of sorts is the only way to enjoy the game - as the constant cycle of innovation & adaptation leads to a far less overwhelming, bottom-up approach of learning a few character matchups. This is important as playing a matchup both parties are familiar with is quite fun and is how Tekken is best enjoyed - it feels like a glorified version of rock-paper-scissors, with a heavy focus on mindgames and reading.

If you have no friends, there's not much for you to do. Ranked is quite unfun, and even if it wasn't, grinding solo in a game where it takes almost a thousand hours to be considered "decent" and start playing the game as it was intended is frustrating, intimidating and just plain not worth it.

tl;dr - only buy if you have a group of friends willing to start grinding simultaneously

yea

need for speed

decent but not outstanding

man

gustavo fring and the hell nutz are my favorite extreme demons

no