Was a very fun game until they introduced a character that can kill you across the screen being safe, with an arsenal of tools that look like they're from another game

Here's my whining.

I'm a Tekken newcomer and this is my first Tekken game. I came from MK11-MK1, so I'm definitely not the kind of person to take too seriosly when it comes to balancing complaints and so on, as I'm more of a casual player (Grand Master in MK11 and 1 and Battle Ruler in T8).
But if you're the kind of person like me, and deciding if maybe Tekken is what you've been looking for, this review is for you.

I was definitely fed up with MK1's cameo spam BS, getting zoned and mixed to hell with almost unblockable setups by people who could've as well been orangutans with gamepads pressing two buttons. I decided to look for a more "honest" fighting, I didn't like the visual style of SF, and Tekken always was in the back of my mind as "THE figthing game".

At first I was really impressed by Tekken 8, it definitely has a lot of good things going for it. The amount of effort put into the game is very respectable. The customization is nice, although a lot of it is paid.
The quality of life features are amazing, it's almost everything you could ask for. The only quality of life thing I found lacking was being able to keep recorded moves for opponents in practice between launches of the game. When it comes to just basic things like ease of watching replays or doing things in practice mode, or finding other people, or their games, the bar has been raised so high for me with Tekken 8 that I don't think it will ever be beaten by another fighting game.

Gameplay-wise its incredibly satisfying and learning new things, managing to pull them off in game, or just solving your opponents gameplan are top-notch dopamine rushes. Way more satisfying than it was for me in MK.

The community seems quite nice, a lot of information is available for the new players, and there're character specific discord servers with many active members discussing latest tech.

Why am I not recommending this game then? The answer is simple - expectations from the player.
There's a 25+ year old history of Tekken games, with moves and characters straight up passing from previous to the next one, with additions. At this point, there're 120-150 moves/strings on average per character. Some characters have up to ~200. A lot of moves are similar, and fall under a whole family of similar moves (for example, many characters have a variation of Bryan's "snake edge" move, that is a slow reactable low homing launcher that is launch-punishable on block). You can recognize those moves and adapt during the match, especially if you're familiar with the game.
Same goes for strings mostly, many three hit strings come in pairs, only different in last hit - it's either a duckable plus high that you can full launch on read, or a mid that is -13 or so that you can do a smaller punish for.
Usually there's an answer for every move, you just have to know it. Yes, for thousands of moves. For 30-40 characters.

It would've been nice if you could semi-casually play the game and learn the matchups and move counterplays as you play and gradually go through ranks. But to me that doesn't quite seem possible.
Some characters in the game have simple and clear animations and strings, you can learn them by playing against them. Others...well, let's just say you can play 10 games in a row against them and learn next to nothing unless you just decide to give up on playing the game and simply lose experimenting while blocking them or trying to press some button. And even then you will learn almost nothing useful, because the next time you see that character you will forget everything. Or maybe they will just use some new 20 barely distinguishable moves.

The female characters are notoriously rage inducing to play against for the new (and not only new) players. As one of the pros, Ulsan, recently said "This game makes you hate female characters". They're very evasive, their animations I found to be extremely unpredictable. Some of them will hit you a few times and then almost fall to the floor and stay there for some moments, and then just suddenly jump into your face defying any laws of physics when you try to press. They will do flips after flips after flips, dance around the screen unpredictable, turn around and spin, giving you unreactable lows. Your jabs will whiff when you try to take your turns, sometimes their moves go under MIDS. You won't even understand where one string ended and the other began. It's heavily aggravated by the sheer number of stances developers put into the game which allow those characters to continue pressure almost endlessly without you being able to recognize the situation.

Many characters have 3-4 stances with up to 20+ moves, good luck playing against Hwoarang, Steve, or Lidia without spending many hours in labbing.
Then there's King. He's the grappler character. Teching throws in this game supposedly (?) can be done on reaction by looking at which hand/hands were used to grab you. If they grabbed you with their left - you press 1, if right - 2, if both - 1+2. For most characters you only need to press 1+2 vs (1 OR 2). The throws have 12 frames of startup, and a 10(?) frame break window.
I will admit it, I can only tech throws that I spent time in practice mode learning how to recognize and tech without thinking, and I'm not too good at it. Maybe it's just my boomer reaction time, but anyway, King has around 20 throws with different tech options, AND some of them don't even follow the "left hand - 1, right hand - 2" rule. You HAVE to train teching them.

Some genius also at some point in the series decided to add one or two 10-hit strings to almost every character. Have fun memorizing those sequences of lows and mids and highs for 40 chars. Have fun getting downranked if you don't.

Now I will get to my point - you can play the game and enjoy it. But at some point you will start hitting 50% of your matches being HARD knowledge checks by stances like Lidia/Hwoarang. Or grappler characters like King/Nina. Or unrecognizable string spam by the likes of Steve or Lili. Or whatever weird things Yoshimitsu does. Or Xiaoyu/Zafina going under your mids. Or Devil Jin flying away randomly. Or Alisa chainsawing you though block when you helplessly watch.
There's an answer to all of these, and the answer is labbing for days and weeks and months, and reading articles, discords, watching videos, watching your replays, etc. I think you're supposed to spend more time in practice than in the matches. Otherwise ranking feels almost insurmountable, and a game of luck.

Or do what I did and get a friend to play against, it's very fun and rewarding. Maybe find some players in discords and steam friends. Don't buy it in hopes of playing ranked. Don't even go there if you're new to Tekken, there's no reason to not just play quick matches instead.

Also matchmaking system is one of the worst I've ever seen. There's a system called "Tekken prowess", which is basically a hard MMR tied to your account that you can't really lose. It pretty much only grows. You want to try a few characters? Well, now you only get to play against people who had twice your rank on their one character. There's no escape.

I will admit that I'm not very good at the game. I will also admit that I get frustrated with it more than I should.
But hopefully it will at least give some overview to someone else like me.
Thanks for reading :)

Years after years,
Always a good game !