Bandai Namco announced two characters at the most significant event for fighting games.
Let’s start with the leaks: we previously reported on who players discovered during the Closed Network Test (CNT) when examining the files of the PC version. (The cracked PC version caused a somewhat humorous story on Twitch by Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada, which we also reported.) There was also an image that surfaced from the fighting game, and it shows the character menu with pictures of the fighters.
But during the EVO event, there were also some spy shots of the game on Unreal Engine 5. One of them shows Steve, and the exciting thing starts here: the image in the corner of the screen matches the leaked character list, thus authenticating the leaked image, as it’s hard to get the same image pixel by pixel for a character otherwise (for an 8-bit game, it might be possible by hand, but technology has improved a bit since the 80s…).
Interestingly, Tekken 8 still doesn’t have a release date, and we somewhat felt that Bandai Namco and Harada might announce during the EVO finale when we could expect to see the current-gen-only platform fighter in stores, but that didn’t happen. Instead, two characters were revealed. One of them, Raven, is a returning character, so fans of the franchise will easily recognize him (speaking of which, when will Yoshimitsu, who has been around since the first episode, be revealed?!). Still, the other character, Azucena, a Peruvian, is a newcomer. Both characters have been given a separate introductory video.
Tekken 8 is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC (Steam). A release date should be announced soon because they can’t keep quiet about it indefinitely. It’s safe to say that the nearly 30-year-old franchise’s newest title will launch after Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1.
Steve Fox in-game UI leaked & matches the Tekken 8 roster leak pic.twitter.com/JZzJSEypWl
— Moonsault Slayer (@VolSkimmer) August 5, 2023
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