Tekken 8's Built-In Teaching Tools Are Legitimately Awesome – IGN First
27.10.2023 - 16:39
/ ign.com
To quote an excellent Tekken player who happens to be a friend I train with: in Tekken, “the simple act of moving backwards properly requires practice.” Fighting games are notoriously complicated, and that can intimidate new players or keep them away entirely. Even if you’re an oldhead, learning a new game takes time. But Tekken 8 looks like it’s trying to flatten that curve by providing some of the best teaching tools in the genre. So, listen up, people: class is in session.
In Tekken 8, picking up a character and having a good time is as simple as picking your character and turning on Special Style. But say you want to explore everything that character has to offer. What then? Well, you’ll want to head to training mode. And that’s where you’ll notice the first major change in Tekken 8. Previous Tekkens, including the excellent Tekken 7, only listed a character’s entire movelist – which could total more than a hundred moves – in a single, numbered list. Not so in Tekken 8. Like SoulCalibur before it, Tekken 8 has that same movelist that Tekken fans are used to, but it also has a separate tab for “Main Techniques” – your character’s go-to moves, from pokes, pressure strings, combo starters, and launchers. Better yet, it’ll tell you what they’re good for and if they’re a combo starter, they’ll give you a sample combo to do (with an accompanying demo you can access at any time).
This isn’t new, but Tekken 8’s combo trials are particularly good at walking you through your character of choice’s combo routing. By the time you’ve finished them, you should have an idea of how your character’s moves fit together — and how to construct your own combos.
And this is where the new stuff comes in. One of the coolest new features in Tekken 8 is the ability to remember and reproduce a status. Say you’re practicing a combo, but you want to try out some different routings or just practice a part that’s giving you trouble. As any fighting game player will tell you, it can be a drag to have to set up the situation you want over and over again instead of just being able to start there. With this feature, you can just perform the situation once, have the game remember the status of the characters at that moment, and reset it whenever you want. Want to practice those pesky side wall combos without having to manually reset your positioning each time? Now you can. Looking to practice your low parry follow-ups from the moment the low parry hits? You can do that, too. It’s an incredibly cool and convenient feature, and something I hope will become a genre staple after it appears in Tekken 8.
All of those things will teach you how to play your character, but what if you want to learn a matchup? Say… how to fight Kazuya, or how to