Miary Zo Is Everything Wrong With Tekken 8
Reflections From a Tekken Player
I’ve been a Tekken fan on and off for my entire gaming life.
Some of the first games I ever played on the humble PS2 were Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken 5, later, Tekken 6 would be one of my first Xbox 360 games and a regular pick for split-screen when I had a guest; this is a franchise I have a deep fondness for, so much so that from 2023-2024, over a period of about 14 months, I played over 5 hours a day in an attempt to become a tournament-level player.
My tournament aspirations never came to pass, partially because there are much better things to invest 5 hours a day into (like writing this Substack) and in no small part because Tekken 8 is an absolute mess.
Tekken’s Identity
Before we look at what Tekken shouldn’t be, we need to establish what it should aspire to.
Tekken was part of the original wave of 3D fighting games that emerged in the mid-1990’s, the early entries of Tekken were built to compete with Virtua Fighter, taking that game’s grounded fighting style and elaborate move lists but adding a stronger emphasis on story, more wacky character designs and what is to me, Tekken’s most defining trait: its dark characterisation; half of Tekken’s roster is made up of antiheroes or just straight up villains.
The fact that the first Tekken was cheaper to play in arcades than Virtua Fighter 2 and available on the PlayStation 1 certainly helped and Tekken was actually the first PlayStation game to sell more than 1 million units.
Tekken 2 and Tekken 3 were where Tekken’s gameplay and cast of characters really took shape whereas Tekken 4 sculpted the tone and world of Tekken: grounded, dark and foreboding, that’s Tekken to me.
Jin Kazama is a master of Kyokushin Karate, a style known for its taxing hard sparring and painful striking. In Tekken 4, you could sit and watch Jin perform kata.
Tekken’s gameplay was always grounded in real martial arts and physics. Yes, Devil Jin, Kazuya and other characters had electric-based attacks, there were the animal joke characters and the mid-air juggling is videogame nonsense but Tekken often balanced a tone that was between gritty and real, and meditative or brooding.
Tekken has held a certain reputation within the fighting community for a very long time: hard to learn, impossible to master and heavily favouring defensive gameplay and skilled movement. This is a stark contrast to Street Fighter and other 2D fighters where you cannot sidestep attacks and Tekken similarly plays different to Soul Calibur with its weapons; the face buttons in Tekken are roughly mapped to the fighter’s four limbs giving it a specific kind of feedback.
What Changed?
The 2000’s were a very bad time for the already niche fighting genre. While the genre as a whole was contracting and falling out of favour, arcades were also vanishing, this was a near fatal occurrence for Tekken as the series has always launched in arcades first and with home consoles second. The situation became terminal and when Tekken 6 proved to be a disappointing sequel and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 was pretty widely detested.
By the time the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 had arrived the series was in dire straits and it became clear that Tekken 7 was going to be the last chance to save it.
Tekken 7 arrived in arcades in 2015 and working closely with the community and on player feedback, Bandai-Namco set about refining the game for its eventual second version and console release. That console release came in 2017 and while things were slow at the beginning… magic began to happen.
The disappointing launch of Street Fighter 5 and Akuma’s inclusion as a fully-canon guest character in Tekken 7 began to generate word of mouth and convince Street Fighter players to come and try Tekken and what did they find when they got there? Tekken 7 wasn’t just good, it was great: the best in the series since Tekken 5 on the PS2.
Tekken 7 isn’t a particularly well-made game. Its net code is poor, the graphics are dreadful and the single player content is virtually non-existent but what Tekken 7 has is excellent gameplay and balance. It’s a fighting game for fighting game fans.
Better yet? Tekken 7 is also fun to watch and for the first time in the history of the series, South Korea’s competitive dominance was being upended… by Pakistan of all places. Furthermore, American streamers and fighting game players were finally being exposed to Tekken after the country historically never showing much interest in the series, this led to one of the great feel-good stories of gaming: Lil Majin’s legendary tournament run as King: a character typically seen as a noob crusher with poor tournament viability.
As great as this all was… the warning signs had already begun to appear.
Akuma was detested by the Tekken community for his cheap move-set and potent power; Akuma is known for facilitating one of the most disgusting match steals in Tekken history.
This pretty much cemented Akuma as the most broken Tekken character ever… until Leroy.
Unfortunately, things started to get worse. Tekken 7 kept introducing newer, even more overpowered guest characters like Geese Howard and fucking Negan from The Walking Dead of all people, these generated hype and got in new players but frustrated Tekken loyalists.
The State Of Tekken 8
Tekken 8 launched in January 2024 to generally high praise… but pretty soon the cracks began to show. Bandai-Namco had made a flashier, more visually striking fighter while sacrificing Tekken’s identity.
For one, the gameplay had been drastically altered for the first time in about 20 years. The famous Korean Backdash: a movement technique synonymous with competitive Tekken and defensive play was rendered nearly useless. A new mechanic: Heat allowed for constant offense and a range of devastating, easy to use options that eroded Tekken’s identity as a defensive fighter. Additionally, the new arrivals and even some legacy characters were readjusted to follow a stance-based gameplay style that allows for virtually unlimited offense by swapping between different stances, which open up their own sets of moves.
A player on the defence has to memorise and account for all of these offensive options while making use of a neutered backdash and contending with Tekken 8’s persistent hitbox issues where sidestepping an attack can still get you tagged and damaged.
In Tekken, some characters have what’s called a 50/50: it’s a situation where the defender has to guess which of 2 moves the opponent will use and whoever loses that bet will take massive consequences. My character: Kazuya has the most famous 50/50. If you don’t crouch to block Kazuya’s hellsweep, you will be put on the floor and be subjected to more 50/50’s and the Steel Petal kick which does high damage to grounded opponents; if you choose to crouch and Kazuya uses his FF3 (forward-forward-three) kick instead of the hellsweep, you will be subjected to similar punishment. On the flip side, if you choose correctly and block/avoid one of these attacks, Kazuya is opened up to devastating counter attacks. This high-risk, high-reward playstyle is why I love playing the character and what makes him a fan-favourite.
Almost every character in Tekken 8 has a 50/50 now, it reduces some character matchups to an absolute casino of trying to guess right.
A hallmark of Tekken was its respect for and relative adherence to real martial arts; only 1 character: Yoshimitsu (yes Soul Calibur players, that Yohsimitsu) ever had a weapon in Tekken. Everyone fought in the King of Iron Fist Tournament bare handed… not in Tekken 8. Victor, Yoshimitsu, Clive and many more now incorporate weapons into their move sets and some like Zafina and even Kazuya: the Tekken equivalent to Ryu, the character upon which the whole fighting system is based, has cross-arena laser beams and shockwave attacks.
Cool? Yes. Tekken? No.
Look At The Screen, Michael
Miary Zo is Tekken’s newest character, due to arrive soon. Bandai-Namco listened to fans’ hopes that Ogre from Tekken 3 would return, they listened to Tekken’s African community wanting representation too, so what do we get? A pole-dancing anime girl from Madagascar who fights with magic and has Ogre powers.
Great job guys.
It should go without saying, if you watch the trailer, that Miary Zo is kind of a distilled shot of everything Tekken fans are tired of. She looks like a collection of sexual fetishes rather than a martial artist from Madagascar, her moves are obnoxious and flashy too. Worse yet, looking back at concept art, there’s strong evidence that Bamco lightened her skin and gave Miary more Asian features, which is gross on so many different levels.
As of writing, Tekken 8 is in the midst of its second season, a disastrous affair that has seen long-standing gripes doubled down on, changes rolled out too slowly and a mass exodus of players from Tekken’s ranked play; this season has been so bad photos have even circulated of completely dead local tournaments in areas with small Tekken communities like Australia.
Tekken is the last man standing in the 3D fighting game genre and if they don’t get their shit together soon, it might die the last of its species.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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Well-articulated as per usual.
I think the thing you're missing here, and probably considered yourself but decided to cut for expediency's sake, is that Tekken 8 is being developed in the wake of Soul Calibur's demise. Soul Calibur is a weapon fighter and was always the goofier, less technical sibling of the two. Namco's inability to properly manage and promote 2 separate fighting games at once means you have a lot of senior devs from that team floating around in the T8 offices, pitching ideas and influencing the design philosophy. In fact, the wall tech Miary has in her trailer is a mechanic borrowed from Cervantes in Soul Calibur. Weirdly enough I think I'm probably more likely to buy her and try to pick her up than any of the other season 2 characters.
I'll say for my own part that I enjoy Tekken 8 quite a bit, but it's got fundamental issues. I could write an essay on the Heat system in particular and why it creates more problems than it can ever solve. I'm looking forward to the new Virtua Fighter from the RGG studio guys. This series is badly in need of competition to keep it honest, ironically enough, T7 played a similar role by siphoning players away from Street Fighter 5, leading to SF6's almost unprecedented popularity a few years later. Cause for optimism, I'd say.
Nice breakdown of the facts. I can't say I understand all the details, but that's because the last Tekken game I played with regularity was Tekken 3 on the PlayStation...and I was never much of a strategic fighter anyway. So I can't fathom the granular level of knowledge folks like you have.