Over the course of its 30 year legacy, the Tekken series has amassed dozens of interesting fighters for players to choose from. Despite being canonically dead, Bandai Namco just announced the return of one of the franchise’s most popular combatants, Heihachi Mishima, as the third DLC fighter for Tekken 8’s season 1 of DLC.
There exist several characters in Tekken, though, while recognizable, don’t have quite as much of a presence due to how similar they are to other fighters on the roster. A character like Mokujin simply uses a random fighting style found in whichever game he is a part of, and unfortunately for fans of the more gimmicky fighters in Tekken, it appears the game’s developers don’t really plan on bringing them back any time soon.
IGN recently caught up with Tekken Project Director Katsuhiro Harada, Producer Michael Murray, and Development Producer and Game Director Kohei Ikeda at Evo 2024 to ask some questions about the latest content and things to come.
While the interview opened up with a bit of insight into why Harada lied about Heihachi’s inclusion into Tekken 8 initially, there were numerous other fascinating details to learn here throughout the discussion.
At one point during the talk, IGN brought up characters that are more on the oddball side of things, like Mokujin, Roger, Gon, and Alex. Outside of Kuma and Panda, who are generally categorized similarly, we haven’t seen much of them at all in recent years, and the developers provided some reasoning as to why that is.
As mentioned previously, it looks like the motivation to bring characters like that in isn’t very high given the current landscape of the game. Harada says through Murray’s translation that though they won’t say they’ll never return, the likelihood of them coming back without having a massive roster is low.
“The strategy and thinking behind the franchise hasn’t changed. It’s not like we’re intentionally removing those characters per say,” Harada began. “But if you really take a close look at how they were back in those iterations, it was more like they were, we call them ‘compatible’ characters in Japanese, which means the move set is another character and just the skin is different, right?
“So, there are many of those characters in the past, not just the animals that you mentioned, and over the series we have tried to flesh them out and to do away with that portion making sure that each of the characters is unique. Even if you have Kuma and Panda, their moves might be slightly different or the Rage Arts, or whatever. They’re their own unique character.
“That was the main thinking behind that, and it wasn’t intentional that the other characters are not making an appearance. That said, in order to get everyone’s favorites and then also include characters like that, we’d have to have a roster of sixty-some characters which just isn’t viable from launch and then also for the player base to learn how to play against that number of characters is a lot.
“We wouldn’t say that they’re not going to make an appearance ever again, that’s just the current state,” Harada concluded.
While this might be disconcerting news to longtime fans of characters like Mokujin or those anxiously waiting for the return of Gon, it does make sense why the Tekken developers aren’t prioritizing them right now. Especially considering the fact that players would have to pay money to access DLC characters that essentially use fighting styles and assets from already existing characters, this could definitely rub people the wrong way and turn out poorly for Bandai Namco.
All of that having been said, I guess there is nothing stopping the Tekken team from revamping some of these older, more joke-y characters into something entirely new and bringing them back that way. Though that doesn’t seem to be where the developers’ heads are at right now.
After the massive surprise reveal of Heihachi as the third DLC character in Tekken 8 Season 1, fans are wondering how Bandai Namco might try and top it with the fourth and final character in this season pass.
Who do you want to see as the next DLC character in Tekken 8? Let us know in the comments below.