Tekken 8 shows off Jun Kazama and proves nothing is stronger than a mother’s love

Don’t take it from us, Bandai Namco themselves said it: “Love is a mother's most powerful weapon.” The company has just presented the gameplay trailer for Jun Kazama, the new addition to the Tekken 8 fighter roster. Jin's mother has been present in the franchise since Tekken 2, but since that installment, back in 1996, we had only seen her in cameos and in the Tag Tournament spin-offs. After regaining importance with Tekken Bloodline, the acclaimed Netflix anime about the saga, the character signs up for this new edition of the King of Iron Fist tournament.

We hope to be able to talk about Tekken 8 soon (wink wink) and confirm if it upgrades the controls as well as they did visually. For now, Bandai Namco seems to be very serious about going back to being a pillar of the fighting genre. The game has been designed with the brand new Unreal Engine 5 from scratch and will not recycle or use a single asset from Tekken 7. “I know that sounds kind of trite,” Katsuhiro Harada (director and creator of the franchise) declared at the time, “but if you look back at the franchise and see where it did well – like Tekken 3 on the PlayStation 1, maybe Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2 – there was the variety of modes and the gameplay that people liked, but an important aspect has always been the kind of graphics people can expect on new hardware.” This is why they decided on what the graphic benchmark of the game was going to be at the beginning of the project.

Unfortunately, one of the sacrifices for this will be that we will only see Tekken 8 in the new generation (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC). The question that remains to be answered now is when. The development seems quite advanced and its great rival, Street Fighter 6, will go on sale on June 2, 2023, so let's hope that Bandai Namco wants to measure himself against them and look to prevent Tekken 8 from missing 2023.

All confirmed fighters for Tekken 8