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.
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.
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.
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.