What Are We Doing Here, Tekken 8?

Tekken 8 announced its third DLC fighter of Season 2 will be none other than Armor King… who was the third DLC fighter of Tekken 7 Season 2 (or fourth fighter; he and Marduk released at the same time, but the analogy works better this way). At this point, I’m really unsure what Tekken 8’s DLC strategy actually is.

I understand fighting game rosters only have a finite number of spaces available at a given time, and that not every character can return. But given that Tekken 8 only introduced three newcomers in the base game, I figured the obvious answer was to fill up the DLC with new fighters. Instead we got Eddy Gordo and Lidia, who were two of the most glaring omissions from the base game, so it makes sense. After that, Heihachi was a surprise (albeit not exactly new and exciting), and Clive from Final Fantasy 16 – who is cool, but I've seen this film before. 

Tekken 8 Season 2 is where things really started to get sketchy for me. Anna Williams kicked things off; she was the first fighter of Tekken 7’s second season. Then came the announcement of Fahkumram, the ugliest fighting game character of all time, who almost everyone in the Tekken community thinks is straight ass – especially since he’s replacing actual good Muay Thai fighters like Josie and Bruce.

Now we have Armor King. He’s a cool character for sure, but why are we now at the point where four out of seven DLC fighters were also DLC in the previous game, with Clive being the only character who wasn’t in Tekken 7 at all. Even then, another Final Fantasy protagonist was. Plus, datamining has pegged Marduk to come back at some point too, so that number is going to rise.

On top of all of this, Tekken 8 is following Street Fighter 6 with four new characters per season (Tekken 7’s season 2 had six, but the others fluctuated). Street Fighter 6 at least has the excuse of new World Tour stories coming with each of them.

When a DLC pick is lame for SF6, it’s disappointing because it’s one of only four. Yet after a Season 1 filled with a newcomer and SF5 characters (two of whom were DLC in that game), Street Fighter's second hit out with three wildcards and boring old Bison. But when we arrive at Tekken 8’s third year, only two characters who weren’t in Tekken 7 will be in there.

Due to the size of Tekken 7’s roster by the end, it's going to be hard to avoid bringing back characters from there (unless we bring back weirdos like Alex and Bosconovitch). At the very least, base roster characters who didn’t make it back would be appreciated. There are characters like Miguel whose arc would fit perfectly into the story of Tekken 8 considering how much his is intertwined with Jin Kazama. And if we’re going to do more guest fighters, some from series’ that aren’t already in Tekken would be appreciated, not a second Final Fantasy rep.