We’re still waiting for Tekken 8, but fighting game fans got a little something to tide them over until the next King of Iron Fist Tournament at this year’s Game Awards: a brand-new trailer, complete with a look at the game’s story mode, a bunch of returning favorites (and one we haven’t seen in the Tekken canon since the original PlayStation), a glimpse of Tekken 8’s Heat system, which encourages aggressive play, more on what might be the final showdown between protagonist/anti-hero Jin Kazama and Father-of-the-Year nominee Kazuya Mishima, and a glimpse at the new tech powering all of it.
It’s quite a bit to take in. Luckily, IGN got to sit down with Tekken 8 executive producer Katsuhiro Harada to break everything down.
A Family Affair
It’s no surprise the upcoming showdown between Jin Kazama and Kazuya Mishima remains front and center, just as the fight between Kazuya and Heihachi Mishima was in Tekken 7. While that fight resolved itself in what seems like a pretty definitive win for Kazuya – but really, who would be surprised if one of the first (or last) moments of Tekken 8 was Heihachi climbing out of that volcano – the stakes are just as high the showdown between the last two members of the Mishima bloodline (and the last two carriers of the Devil Gene): Jin wants to kill his dad and put an end to the whole thing. Kazuya, fresh off of his win against Heihachi, is destroying cities and encouraging humanity to unleash the dogs of war.
According to Harada, Tekken 8 takes place six months after Tekken 7, and while the father/son conflict in Tekken 8 mirrors what happened in Tekken 7, the conflict between Kazuya and Jin is a little different than the one between Heihachi and Kazuya. While the two of them were ultimately motivated by power and revenge, and each viewed the other as the biggest obstacle in his path, Jin’s struggle is against the bloodline he inherited from his father and the Devil Gene itself. The game’s newly-revealed tagline, “Fist Meets Fate,” and the way the “8” in Tekken 8’s logo resembles a broken chain, symbolizes Jin’s struggle against his destiny and his attempt to break the chains that bind them.
He’s not against using his own Devil Gene to do that. At the beginning of the trailer, a gloved hand reaches out to him from a pool of black smoke as Jin falls. Is his own Devil trying to help him out? Interestingly, we also see Jin call upon his Devil powers in some of the gameplay footage, too. Traditionally, Jin and Devil Jin have been separate characters with very different movesets. Could Tekken 8’s story change that? We’ll have to wait to find out. Either way, Harada has admitted that what’s happening in Tekken 8 is “different than what I originally envisioned” because of how long Tekken has taken to get to this point.
That might explain why it’s taken us so long to see the return of Jun Kazama, Jin’s mother, who is a “focal point of the story.” While she’s appeared in the non-canonical Tekken Tag Tournament spinoffs, this is the first time she’s appeared in a canonical Tekken game since 1995’s Tekken 2, and her fourth appearance in the series overall. Many younger Tekken fans have probably never seen Jun in a Tekken game before, but she does appear in this year’s Tekken Bloodline, which loosely adapts the events of Tekken 3.
“When we’re looking back at Jun’s appearances throughout the series, obviously back in the Tekken 2 era, not just Jun, but most of the characters didn’t have a lot to say in the game, right?” Harada says. “For Tekken Tag Tournament, she starts to speak a little bit more because of the advancement of the technology in the game, but Jun as a character is someone who doesn’t speak a lot until now. Perhaps this time she’ll start to speak more, and you’ll learn some new things as a result.”
Jun and Jin may be mother and son, but Harada admits that the series hasn’t really touched on their relationship up to this point.
“We felt we needed to touch more on Jun and her relationship with Jin and how that affects him in order to more understand Jin’s powers and how that affects the outcome of the battle between him and his father. We also felt we needed to show it because the fans have been waiting so long and it’s something they often enquire about.”
We felt we needed to touch more on Jun and her relationship with Jin
Harada also says that the plan was to bring her back earlier, but as later installments of the series have been more detailed in their exploration of Tekken’s story, it took longer to get here than they originally expected.
Every part of Jun’s design, including her affinity for animals, is important to explain who she is.
“Jun has always been close to animals,” Harada says. “They approach her in various movies because she’s into the conservation of wildlife, but it also speaks to martial arts. I’m not sure this is well understood in the West, but from a Japanese mentality of martial arts, you have these skilled warriors who are fighting throughout history. They have a fighting spirit that emanates from them, and, likewise, you can detect it off of your opponents if they’re highly skilled and trained. It’s said in Japanese lore that when they achieve a higher level of mastery, they’re intentionally able to avoid projecting that fighting spirit. The birds and animals approaching her show that she is able to avoid emanating that fighting spirit. It’s a very Eastern concept.”
That concept reflects her fighting style, as well. Harada couldn’t provide much detail about how Jun fights, but she is still using the Kazama traditional style martial arts she employed in earlier appearances. While Tekken 8 as a whole is built on aggression (more on that later) and Jun is more than capable of fighting aggressively, Jun does “possess unique defensive capabilities where she can neutralize opponents’ attacks.”
A Visceral, Visual Experience
Tekken 8 is being built from the ground up for Unreal Engine 5 and current generation hardware (PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC) and the results are immediate and impressive. The first thing long-time fans will probably notice is the new character models. Every character in the trailer – Jin, Kazuya, Jun, King, Paul, Lars, Marshall Law, and Jack-8 – is playable, but all of them have had their designs tweaked, something Harada is eager to point out. “You may notice that we have kept some elements that have defined these particular characters, but the costumes have been completely redesigned for this iteration. But not just the look of a character, the actual character models themselves, including the rigging and the bones, were made from scratch for Tekken 8. So when you see the game, they look completely different and the game feels a lot more fresh because of the extra work that went into redoing these models.”
But it’s not just the models. Harada emphasizes that some of the technical elements you’ll see in the trailer, including the lighting and visual elements, are still works in progress and not quite up to the level they want them to be yet.
“This is important because it’s not like the human eye where you’re seeing the reflection of the light. You’re creating how this is supposed to look artificially, so the lighting and the environmental effects and these kinds of things that make the game more immersive are actually going to improve,” Harada says.
A few of the stages shown have multiple versions which take place at different times of the day. This not only adds to the variety of the stages themselves, but it changes the atmosphere of the arena and how the stage feels to play, too.
“Some of this is due to the way our designers designed the stages to give it a totally different feeling, but a lot of it is the technical prowess of Unreal Engine 5 and the technology we have access to this time as opposed to Unreal Engine 4.”
The new consoles and Unreal Engine 5 make new things possible in terms of what players will see visually, but they also affect how what they see will impact the feel of the game.
“Many of the things we’ve achieved in the game you could technically perhaps do in Unreal Engine 4. It’s just really maxing out the specs, like the depth field and the dynamic lighting you see in the bird scene. You could do some of these things before, but doing them all at the same time at a smooth frame rate, and while moving the camera around, and it coming together is something you need the machine power of the new consoles and the improvements to UE5 to accomplish,” Harada says.
“It sounds so simple when you say lighting, but if you look at cinematography in movies, it’s very important how they do the lighting and it can change the whole look of something. Those advances in lighting technology greatly affect the models and everything else about the game. That said, it also means we have to spend a lot more time on getting the scenes exactly right, so there’s a lot more work that goes into that as well.”
Heat Up, Be Aggressive
“The key word to relay the concept for the battle system is aggressiveness,” Harada says. “This is something we’ve focused on in all the various elements of the gameplay. Fighting games are kind of an interesting genre because it’s you and another human opponent in most cases, right? Say if somehow, you’re both able to block 100% of attacks, then the match itself wouldn’t progress because nobody would do damage.”
The changes in Tekken 8 come from the team thinking about how they would go about making the game exciting to both play and watch. “We felt that the person attacking should be really enjoying the gameplay and enjoying themselves and to feel like they’re at advantage and they have a better chance to win if they go on the offensive rather than turtling up.”
One other thing the trailer introduces is the new Heat system, which is meant to “enhance and articulate ‘aggressive’…and how that’s actually going to be implemented into the gameplay.”
While Harada couldn’t share the finer details of what the Heat system would mean for Tekken 8’s gameplay, he did say that this is what the game would look like in motion and promised more details next year.
It’s not just important that a game be fun for the person playing it. It has to look fun to play to captivate and bring in new people
Much of Tekken 8’s design has been influenced by the esports scene and even Tekken 7’s reception.
“It’s not just important that a game be fun for the person playing it. It has to look fun to play to captivate and bring in new people. That was the design philosophy that we implemented in Tekken 7 and it turned into a strong conviction after seeing that was the case and we should improve that experience for Tekken 8,” Harada says.
“This ties into aggressiveness, as well. If you’re looking at the esports scene where two people are at the same kind of level, there might not be a lot of offense going on because it’s hard for both players to open up their opponent and not a whole lot happens. And you can see this in boxing and other martial arts as well when two people are on the same skill level and there’s not a lot of attacking going on. We wanted to make sure the game is entertaining to watch by motivating players to go on offense and to try to open up their opponents, not just because it makes the game more enjoyable for them, but a much more entertaining experience for spectators, too.”
But Harada doesn’t think this design change will just benefit high-level players or those who enjoy watching high-level Tekken.
“This goes throughout the game: the stage destruction, the reactions of characters when they’re being hit, the camera, and the way it moves when all this action unfolds,” Harada says. “It’s not just about esports and people who are interested in that scene, it’s about making the game interesting to watch and to experience as a whole, whether that’s against a human opponent or you’re just playing against the CPU.”
Get Ready for the Next Battle
Obviously, Tekken 8 still has a ways to go in the development process, and while this trailer answered some of our questions, it raised others. We may have to wait for answers, but what’s clear is Harada’s passion and love for the franchise… and his sense of humor.
If you’re worried that Jun’s appearance means Harada isn’t thinking about throwing her son (or anyone else) into a volcano, think again: “The first people that came to mind were perhaps certain executives at our company,” Harada says. “They change quite frequently and some of them are only interested in obtaining the highest profits possible to further their careers, and they have no regard for development schedules or brand timelines. So some of them quickly flashed into my head. But if I had to think and I had to pick a Tekken character, it’s tough because most of them would probably survive if we look at past instances.”
If I had to pick one from a positive meaning, it would be Jin Kazama because his father and grandfather have each had their turn, but he hasn’t. Not to kill him or anything, but to force him to go to the next level, to be the better version of himself. I think just throwing him into a volcano might help that.”
Will Borgers is a freelance writer at IGN
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