Fighting game tournament season is now fully underway, and although it wasn’t quite as large in scale as Combo Breaker last weekend, DreamHack Dallas 2024 was almost just as stacked with world-level talent.
Now that the action has wrapped up for the Esports World Cup qualifier event, we’ve gone through and gathered the full characters stats for Tekken 8 at the major event.
Between the top 64 finalists, there were three fighters in total who stood out more than the rest of the cast in terms of usage, who were each mained by 5 different players.
Dragunov isn’t too surprising to see up there because he’s been a strong contender since the start of the new game, but it’s interesting to see Nina rise to that level now too with competitors like TM|Arslan Ash and others finding success with her.
Reina’s overall popularity has helped keep her up there too even though the highest placement she received at this tournament was 17th place under the control of Matsu.
Feng and Shaheen were next in line, who’ve also seen a ton of competitive success in these early months too.
Overall, we ended up seeing 28 different mains in the top 64 plus Panda being played alongside Kuma by former Tekken World Tour champion Varrel|Rangchu here, which means there were only four who apparently didn’t see any usage on the big stage at all.
Those would be Jun, Yoshimitsu, Paul and Leroy, so that’s pretty interesting to see after last month’s balance update.
In the top 8, we got to see 7 different mains between Dragunov, Kuma, Jin, Claudio, Nina, Victor and Shaheen, who was the only repeat in the finals.
With a whopping 486 players signed up to fight for those qualifying spots, the top 64 here represents the best 13% of competitors who made it the farthest in the brackets.
You can check out our full breakdown for Tekken 8 below, and be sure to do the same for the similarly stacked Street Fighter 6 tournament stats for DreamHack Dallas too if you haven’t already.
• Dragunov – 5
• Nina – 5
• Reina – 5
• Feng – 4 (1)
• Shaheen – 4
• Claudio – 3
• Eddy – 3
• Hwoarang – 3
• JACK-8 – 3
• Jin – 3
• Victor – 3
• Bryan – 2
• Leo – 2
• Lili – 2
• Raven – 2
• Steve – 2
• Alisa – 1
• Asuka – 1
• Azucena – 1
• Devil Jin – 1
• Kazuya – 1
• King – 1
• Kuma – 1
• Lars – 1
• Law – 1
• Lee – 1
• Xiaoyu – 1
• Zafina – 1
• Panda – 0 (1)
• Jun – 0
• Leroy – 0
• Paul – 0
• Yoshimitsu – 0
• Unknown – 1
Note: Numbers in parenthesis represent secondary / side choices.