Ahead of Knee winning his fourth title at Evo Japan on Sunday, May 11, Bandai Namco was busy mending a broken Tekken 8 — a game on the fritz since the now-infamous patch v2.00.02 rolled out in April. Naturally, the team at Bandai did the only thing that could return them to good graces with its devoted community: announce the most disliked character in recent Tekken history as the next DLC character. And trust, the Evo crowd went absolutely silent for the return of Fahkumram.
Additional content was also shown, with patch version 2.01 kicking things off on Monday, May 12, “with balance adjustments.” Patch version 2.02 is scheduled for a June 3 release and aims to incorporate Karate Kid content, and what was detailed as a “vision takeover” for an unnamed stage. Finally, patch 2.03 arrives later in the summer to celebrate Pac-Man’s birthday with a slew of exclusive cosmetics, the aforementioned stage, hit sparks, and more.
Under normal circumstances, this information would all sound super dope, but Tekken 8 isn’t in a great place, and the community didn’t take well to the new DLC announcement.
Fans and pillars of the community spoke their minds on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend. Players have been practically begging Katsuhiro Harada and co. to bring back legacy characters like Lei, Marduk, Bruce, Julia, Armor King, and Christie, so they felt like this DLC character announcement was a slap in the face.
“Bro this is all so uninteresting as fuck,” one comment read. “Yeah its over,” another post declared, seemingly picking out casket designs for Tekken 8. It even got to the point where fans began mentioning Harada directly to voice their frustrations, with one player writing, “@Harada_TEKKEN You guys released Fahk 2020 and even after 4 years he was never balanced… either broken or unplayable. Now when balacing [sic] is the biggest issue in the game you bring HIM back? Fahk over Lei? Wang? Julia? AK? Marduk? Ogre? Dr. B? Mokujin? Roger? Miguel? Kuni? BRUCE?”
And it didn’t stop there. The criticism began flowing outside the Fahkumram of it all and into the game’s core mechanics and gameplay, with the fans taking exception to the dev’s perceived failure to adhere to community feedback.
“They said Season 2 was going to be a defense focused patch but all they did was give a bunch of characters new moves and made almost everyone become two touch characters, rolled out almost 0 nerfs, and added 0 new defensive changes. This is literally unplayable. The most they did was change heat and HP,” another fan of the game insisted.
Hell, even Knee voiced his disdain for the direction of Tekken after becoming Evo champion yet again. He uploaded a retrospective post on his X account, acknowledging being frustrated by Tekken 8 and still rising above despite everything. However, unlike a lot of the core community, Knee showed love to the devs, whom he felt were making the game “better” through “hard work.”
“Since Tekken 8 dropped, my results have been rough. People said I was done, washed up, too old to compete. I didn’t even make it to TWT Finals for the first time. I was frustrated with the game and honestly, I still am in some ways. But thanks to the dev team’s hard work, it’s been getting better,” he wrote.
Tekken 8 came out of the gate swinging in January 2024. Upon release, the game was met with critical acclaim for the amazing offensive options, graphics, and fidelity. But since then, the game has flown off the rails with the devs making input changes to legacy characters and giving most of the cast forced 50/50 options with no defensive answers to respond. As Fahkumram makes his way to the ring, these issues seem only to be the start of a tumultuous Tekken 8 era.
