After nearly a decade, the competitive Tekken community finally has a new title to sink their teeth into, and the pros are not wasting any time
Triple crown champion TM|Arslan Ash faced off against former Evo champion and legend DRX|KNee in Tekken 8 in person with an intense first to 10 wins exhibition match.
The event went down at the Middle East Film & Comic Con in Abu Dhabi this past weekend, and while the long set wasn’t streamed, Abu Dhabi Gaming just released the full set on their YouTube channel.
Arslan begins the set with newcomer Victor showing off his strong range as well as his Power Crush and how dangerous he can be in Heat mode though he does transition to mostly Jun in the second half of the match up with her big combos on display.
Meanwhile, Knee kicked things off with Bryan looking to do a lot of damage early on, but switch completely to Dragunov when he decided he needed to be trickier to try and take down the Tekken World Tour champion.
We won’t spoil the games, but the set starts out looking like it’s going to be a wash taking a 6-2 and then a 7-3 lead though that would certainly change.
After a wild comeback, it would all come down to the very last game with everything tied up 9-9 where one player’s momentum ultimately could not be stopped.
Although it’s a long match, this is a fun early look at competitive Tekken 8 at a high level showing off what two of the best pros have been cooking up with the new Heat systems and mechanics.
There was apparently no hard feelings after this exhibition either considering they were running casuals in the hotel later on and joking about how one of Arslan’s former Tekken 7 mains is “trash” in the new game.
You can check out the wild set in full below.
Be warned, however, there does appear to be choppy frame rate and audio sync issues throughout the footage, so it’s not the highest of quality (but hopefully you can acclimate after a few minutes like we did).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL0drz1jFg8