Though is it worth spending money on?
Battle passes are taking hold across much of the video game industry, and that’s including more fighting games now.
Bandai Namco’s new update for Tekken 8 this week didn’t just add Eddy Gordo as the first DLC character, but also the Tekken Fight Pass Round 1, which we’ve taken a closer look at to see what it has to offer and if it’s worth spending money on.
The setup for Tekken’s pass will probably appear pretty familiar to anyone who’s seen them in other recent games with levels to rank up to receive rewards by completing various in-game missions and objectives.
There’s currently 60 levels to complete in both the free and premium versions with items ranging from character and avatar customization pieces to titles, profiles, life bars and more.
Obviously, most of the best and highly coveted rewards (including a vast majority for the actual fighters is locked behind the premium pass.
Street Fighter 6’s Fighting Pass is probably the best point of comparison at the moment in the fighting game space, and Tekken’s does look better overall just in terms of what and how much it has to offer.
Only 30 of the 60 levels give a reward in the free pass with most of them front loaded in the first half, but that’s still more than SF6’s with just 6 free items in 20 levels.
The premium passes dish out goodies for each level for both games of course, and you can buy it at any time to get all of the previous rewards “earned.”
Pricing for the premium version is where things get more annoying for Tekken.
To get the paid pass, players need to spend 600 Tekken Coins (or about $6 USD), but of course Bamco is doing the most frustrating part of premium currency where you can’t just buy 600 coins.
Since the smallest amount you can get is 500 for $5, users will need to cough up at least $10 for the 1,050 Tekken Coins pack unless they already had some left over.
So at face value, you’re technically getting more bang for your buck in Tekken with 90 rewards for $6 compared to 36 in SF6 for $5 except you really need to spend at least $10 in Tekken 8.
Like SF6 and many other games, you can at least earn back your 600 Tekken Coins by completing all 60 levels in the pass.
They also offer the Premium Pass Plus version of the pass for 2,000 Tekken Coins that instantly boosts you 20 ranks, so you’d need to spend at least $20 for that.
Street Fighter offers pretty much the same thing with the premium pass and 10-tier skip for 600 Fighter Coins (jumping one-third of the levels as well), which you likely would have to get the 610 coin bundle for that costs $12.
Tekken’s pass is also a two-month pass while SF6’s last around 3–4 weeks, so we have to take that into account as well too.
Most of your Fight Pass EXP is going to come from completing Daily and Weekly missions, which currently all revolve around playing online with ones for playing matches, winning rounds and dealing certain levels of damage while more can be earned just for playing certain online modes in general (seemingly 75 points for a Ranked win for example).
Since the daily experience only seems to net you around 600 EXP out of the 1,000 needed to level up, it seems the weekly missions are going to be doing the heavy lifting.
How much of a grind that’ll be remains to be seen, but the highest weekly ones so far require playing 50 matches online and winning 50 rounds.
Playing matches in SF6 is also probably the fastest option for earning Kudos to level up the Fighting Pass too, but they offer other ways to quickly get Kudos too.
Overall, the Tekken Fight Pass doesn’t appear to be as bad as it could have been, especially since you can earn your money back, but the annoying first purchase and lack of truly compelling content does not do much to justify its existence in a fighting game that already cost $70 plus a season pass and premium shop.
We still feel that MultiVersus probably did the battle pass best in the fighter space, but that’s largely because the game was free to play already.
At least players will be able to get some more small things for free by just playing online matches while dropping more money is probably going to be a tougher sell to most.