izigame.me

To preface this - it's currently the launch of season 2 of Tekken 8.
I like Tekken, I've played Tekken since Tekken 2. I've played every Tekken game to date.
I like this franchise so much that I've spent energy following it and playing it over the course of my life.
This game is quite possibly the worst Tekken game I have ever played. I would consider Death by Degrees to be more true to form to Tekken's formula and aesthetic than this game.

You can see right now I have hundreds of hours in this game, you might be asking why? If you don't like it - why spend so much time. Here's why - I have desperately tried to cling onto the idea that if I played enough/ranked up enough it would suddenly click. I've also always liked Tekken and didn't want to drop a franchise I've historically enjoyed so I thought I was missing something.
I wasn't and that point has been proven now.

Tekken 8 was given out to players initially as a review copy without a battle pass addition.
Once official release came around a battle pass was added to bypass the review phase.
This battle pass and each one afterwards till now contains items which were normally obtained in Tekken games through in-game currency obtained from Online Matches or Arcade mode or even other party modes added in previous games such as Tekken Bowling or Tekken Volleyball.
However with Tekken 8 this was a unwelcome surprise and now it requires real world money.

This is why Tekken 8 now has a asterisk with the message "This product has experienced one or more periods of off-topic review activity".
This is not one of those times.

With the launch of season 2 they emphasised that the updates would favour defence options a bit more.
Currently plus frames are rampant with many moves or heat activations which leave no room at all for you to retaliate and certain characters are utterly broken. I don't mean overpowered either but they have them too.

Paul can currently do f,1+2 into while standing 3 and it will bypass the guarding system and hit every time.
To go even further, he can press 2 after that unblockable ws,3 and if you're at the wall, you just got wall splat.
Which will possibly lead to you losing the match because you anticipated the move coming and blocked like a normal sane individual (You shouldn't have done that).

There is a plethora of similar issues with the game right now.
There are many reasons the game is in the state that it is in but it comes to who's currently in charge.
This narrows down to Kouhei Ikeda now being game director and Harada becoming an adviser.
All "heat" on this issue is directed towards Harada who is sun setting his time with Tekken.
All positive notes to take from T8 will be accredited to Ikeda's work on the game.
All drawbacks will be learned from for the next game hopefully but ultimately it's Ikeda's series now.
Many Soul Calibur developers have transitioned to Tekkens development.
That is the state of Tekken 8's development right now.

There is a bunch of issues why the game is not good right now:
Too many plus frames.
No actual defensive options.
Terrible Heat mechanic.
Many moves hitting off axis.
Combo damage is incredibly high.
Too many stance transitions (Everyone is Lei now apparently).
Stock/State Power ups.
Chip Damage.

The aesthetic of the previous games' are also lost entirely.
T4 still holds the bar for the best with so little to show for it.
They only needed a hint of flashy stuff or ridiculous concepts in Tekken.
If you look at Clive you can see that's been thrown out the window.

What's also really disappointing is that a lot of players have tried putting the thought into peoples head that previous Tekken games were worse and they don't have the stomach to actually say the series got worse.

It's a really funny twist of fate that Tekken Tag Tournament 2 didn't kill Tekken but Tekken 8 - their most lavish and expensive title to date is doing a better job than Tag 2 ever did.