The most boring-sounding Tekken 8 mode is the series’ most important innovation in years
“If you’ve noticed, some people are like ‘yeah, we need to teach people how play new games,’ and then they just have a long-ass tutorial where you go through a menu and pick all the stuff, and it teaches you what it means in the game,” says Tekken 8 producer (and long-time Tekken advocate), Michael ‘Mishimaikeru’ Murray.
“In Tekken, that’s something that [veteran developer] Katsuhiro Harada, in particular, hates. “He always says that ‘you have to learn the game through playing it’ and ‘we can’t just have a straight-up tutorial. You have to have fun with the game whilst you’re playing it.”
That philosophy has never been more present than in Tekken 8, a game that contains a nearly-embarrassing level of content on-disc at launch. Aside from the modes that are expected in a post-Mortal Kombat X world (like a cinematic story mode, character episodes, and Tekken’s funky new online-adjacent single-player mode, Arcade Quest), Tekken 8 has got one of the most robust and beginner-friendly training modes I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. And I’ve been playing since the mid-90s!