Well with the latest update to Bandai Namco’s Tekken 8 we finally have… Fahkumram. More importantly, Tekken 8 also brought balance changes in Bandai’s continued efforts to undo the damage they did to the game at the turn of Season 2. How did they do? Well you can read the notes for yourself and form an opinion.

Get ready for Patch 2.03, Fighters

On July 7 at 16:00 PDT | July 8 1:00 CEST | 08:00 JST, get ready to meet the towering Fahkumram, and discover the new balance changes, new #TEKKEN Fight Lounge features & new items in the TEKKEN Shop! pic.twitter.com/z8cvN43ro3

— TEKKEN (@TEKKEN) July 7, 2025

The highlights include several balance adjustments to the cast. After the insane debut of Season 2 on April of this year, Tekken 8 has been put through the proverbial ringer in terms of their public relations, holding Mixed reviews on Steam (after previously holding a Negative majority). Nobody enjoys the gameplay, nobody enjoys the in-game transactions, and the DLC choices have been incredibly unpopular to say the least, with most of them just being recycled DLC from Tekken 7. Fahkumram being one of the least popular characters in Tekken in general. This newest patch looks to rectify at least some of that, but did Bandai succeed?

Well, any glance at the community would tell you: “Absolutely not.” Just scrolling down on the Steam page up there you can see the reviews from players who have spents 200+ hours on Tekken 8 unanimously reviewing it negatively. Even the tweets on the official Tekken account’s update post are mostly negative.

You can only laugh at this point, this is a case study on flying too close to the sun and alienating a passionate playerbase and community.

We’ll see if there’s a SF5ish redemption arc, but for now I’ll see you man in SF6 https://t.co/rvxJAyK56N

— josh (@_cupofnoodles) July 7, 2025

ragearts being -18 is cool but god damn is this patch ass https://t.co/kIC99DkukO

— T4T | Eddie Miami (@BonjiBangaichi) July 7, 2025

Back to street fighter this patch didnt do shit! https://t.co/Lm3zwGk4lz

— holden (@AstrusLFT) July 7, 2025

It really doesn’t help that Tekken recently announced a collab with Koei Tecmo’s Atelier Yumia which only gave players the opportunity to… give their characters a strand of hair slightly out of place.

a strand of hair… this entire collab is a strand of hair…. https://t.co/WFZu4nT7ha

— Amèlia! ❀ (@amielilaque) July 7, 2025

Tekken 8 is not doing well. The Season 2 patch seems to have done irreparable damage to the game and, typical as it is to pull out the SteamCharts metrics, you can clearly see that the playerbase is trending downward and the latest patch as well as the release of Fahkumram has done very little to pull the player count up. It’s sad one of the titans of the genre is going down like this, especially after watching another name brand in the form of Mortal Kombat 1 crash and burn almost as spectacularly, but this is just the reality of poorly implemented ideas and their consequences.