Bandai Namco announced the continuation of its iconic fighting series with Tekken 8. We also caught a glimpse of how the game is going to look, as well as some gameplay, making the wait for its launch fell much longer. After the ending of Tekken 7 the story has reached a whole new point, and there is much to expect from this sequel.
How will Tekken continue? What can we expect? Only the master, Katsuhiro Harada can give us these answers. But for now, we can talk about things we would love to see in this new entry.
This list has spoilers for Tekken 7
5 Deeper Story Mode
Tekken has been testing ways to develop its story content for quite some time now. Instead of using the Arcade Mode for the story, the devs had a mix of the two in Tekken 5, along with a unique mode where you would play as Jin, and a similar mode in Tekken 6 called Scenario Mode.
Tekken 7 had something a bit similar to Mortal Kombat, where you have a sort of movie, and the fights break into gameplay. Still, while the idea works well, the execution had a few hiccups, with few characters, too much narration, and weird pacing in some moments. An expanded version of the Story Mode would be a more than welcome treat, using everything that worked well, and fixing the parts that didn't function on the same level.
4 Kazuya As The Main Villain
"What are you talking about? Kazuya has always been the villain!" Yes, it's true. Kazuya Mishima has never been a good person, even when he was the protagonist of the first game, and he showed his true colors as the main antagonist of the second. After that, he's been an antagonist since his return in Tekken 4, but the point here is that he hasn't been the big bad guy for a while.
Rather than having some new character introduced to take this spot, like in the recent few games, it would be much better to simply have one protagonist - Jin, and one antagonist - Kazuya, fighting one another. Sure, other characters are more than welcome, and necessary to keep a story going, but the fight between these two should be the center of the plot.
3 More Characters Involved
There are a lot of Tekken characters with compelling backstories who haven't been explored ever since they were introduced, while other characters stagnated, having the same plot in every game or being reduced to joke characters. Even characters that appear a bit more in the story are still stale. Lee Chaolan is more of an archetype than a character, and Nina Williams is nothing more than a Deluxe minion nowadays.
The game offers Character Episodes for the story, but they are a simple text intro, one fight, and a short cutscene that is either comical or ends right when it starts to get somewhere. They need to be more involved with what is going on as well as having their personal stakes in the matter. The roster is far too big, so it's understandable that the game can't give everyone compelling plots, but characters outside the Mishima story need some love too.
2 Bigger Variety In Content
One of the reasons so many entries from this list concerned a Story Mode is because the plot is usually a good way to give variety to a game. At the end of the day, playing arcade mode to unlock a quick cutscene that will likely just be something silly isn't worth it. Especially considering that those who really want to do nothing more than to check these scenes can easily find them on YouTube.
Tekken 7 already offered some good variety with Tekken Bowl, brought all the way back from Tekken Tag Tournament. More modes based on fighting are also welcome. Team Battle could make its return, putting your knowledge of multiple characters into practice. Tekken Force is another good option, which featured your character walking around an environment fighting people, in a beat 'em up arcade style. There's also Tekken Ball, an old mode from Tekken 3, where you would beat your opponent by hitting them with a beach volleyball.
1 Online Improvements
To be fair, Tekken 7's Online Mode works very well. But that doesn't stop us from wanting things to be even better. Online Mode uses rollback netcode, which helps prevent lag, but Tekken 7's netcode isn't as efficient compared to other fighting games, especially if you consider the PlayStation 4 version. So that is a good place to start improvements.
With that said, quicker matchmaking, as well as taking the suggested game modes above and implementing them into an online scenario, would be highly beneficial for the game. It would give us more single player content as well as a plethora of things to do online.