This game was quite the surprise, I already heard good things about before buying the game on sale but I'm surprised by how much more time I gave the game than I was expecting to give it at all.
Usually, with fighting games I play, I play the story mode or at the very least the closest thing to a story mode and play one or two character routes in Tekken's case, play through the Mishimas' arcade story mode and call it day but nope, I even played a few of the character episodes and even got a decent number of the character endings. I honestly haven't recalled playing a fighting game for this long outside of Mortal Kombat 9. This is the newbie friendly Tekken game that I heard Tekken 7 was but could never really get into.
I might as well mention the big improvements over T7. There is an actual tutorial mode now, but it's through Arcade Quest, it does a good enough job at teaching me the basics and while I was never really "amazing" at the game, I at least had enough of an idea to say do some zoning, mix ups with some high and low attacks, guard from both high and low positions, do the "heat moves" of sorts, perform some grabs, and with Jin have a decent amount of his combos down, all though I was mashing like mad. I could've learned a lot of this stuff through previously playing T5 but I do like that T8 has a better tutorial.
Some other improvements over 7 is that the story mode production values are a massive improvement, like monumental. Where Tekken 7 had occasional cutscenes with a bored narrator sucking me out of the drama, T8 has cutscenes so well made that I often had to look hard to notice the changes between the cutscenes and in engine gameplay.
The story I can actually follow this time too, the game does have some weird quirks like characters speaking different languages and somehow understanding each other really well, but unlike 7, I did connect to Jin Kazama's face turn more so than Kazuya's plight to kill Heihachi in 7. There were some geniune insane moments in the story and the attempt to involve other Tekken characters outside of the Mishimas was commendable if ultimately still going to be about the latter at the end of the day. Kazuya is a decent enough villain at making me want to see him defeated, he does have a major worf effect moment where he defeats Azazel. The story also has those aforementioned insane moments like Jin becoming an angel and having a super over the top fight between him and Kazuya that lasts 3 whole chapters, this would be a great way to end the series but there is obviously going to be more after this and it makes me wonder how much is Namco going to top how insanely over the top this game is.
The final improvement is that the normal difficulty actually feel approachable for newcomers, where T7's normal I got beat up by Akuma so much that I lowered to easy, T8's normal I was able to beat to the end without ever lowering to easy or use "special style". I like that this was a normal mode that while can be challenging for a newbie like me, didn't feel impossible. Not a big fan of the game switching up characters outside of Jin but they were decent enough one offs.
Speaking of character switching, might as well mention some negatives, while the return to the "Tekken Force" mode for a part of the campaign was cool, the controls for it wasn't that great, I had a hard time avoid attackings since it seems to involve the 3D fighting movement of one on one fights but with multiple enemies which doesn't make for the most smooth of controls.
The character episodes were also a massive wasted opportunity, it could've been a great moment to tell the player what the other characters besides Jin were up to during the story especially during his battle with Kazuya towards the end of the campaign story mode, it instead just seems like a bunch of isolated arcade mode endings which seems to take place in it's own canon. I did get to play around with some characters I did enjoy playing as like Paul Pheonix, Nina Williams, Jun Kazama, and Steve Fox and while I mostly enjoy my time, the game's monotony does start to set in like how most of the non Mishima characters took place in the Iron Fist tournament with the same cage match stage over and over. I was slowly starting to get sick of the scenery and the non canon endings.
I'll give T8 credit for being the most time I spent with a fighting game offline and in single player, I'm not sure if I will ever be anything more than just a casual player who plays these games occasionally and while the competitive scene seems really intense and interesting, I'm not sure if I'm that passionate enough to even bother.
Overall, Tekken 8 is a great surprise for genre that I play casually. I'm not sure if I ever go beyond being a causal fan of the genre but I'm glad there was a game that made me try out more than I normally would and I commend T8 for that.
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