Though there are some doubts now
Tekken 8 is now a little more than a month away from releasing, and we still don’t know who is coming to the game as DLC… or do we?
There currently exists an alleged leak that includes the identity of Tekken 8’s Playable Character Year 1 Pass floating around online.
The supposed leak was said to have been pulled from the German PlayStation Store for Tekken 8’s Deluxe Edition featuring the names of the four DLC characters before being removed from the listing.
A screenshot of said listing appeared online from Reddit though it seems to have been shared on a Discord server before that.
As to who they are, the named fighters are Roger the boxing kangaroo, Armor King, Eddy Gordo and newcomer Xiao Meng.
Eddy has been featured in every mainline title since Tekken 3, but the Capoeira user failed to make the starting roster in the new game, making his inclusion fairly likely at some point.
Roger Sr. first appeared back in Tekken 2 though he’s been relegated to a background character with Roger Jr. being the more probable inclusion if this is true, who was last included in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
Armor King was sold as DLC for Tekken 7, so it’s not too surprising that he’d be relegated to post-launch content again.
And then there’s the most interesting inclusion of all, Xiao Meng, with a pretty specific name to make up if the leak is fabricated.
We would say it’s weird to have a character named Xiao Meng in the same game as Xiaoyu, but this is the same franchise that has fighters named Lee, Lei and two guys named Law.
That’s on top of multiple other characters each holding the name / title of King, Armor King, Roger and Kunimitsu.
So maybe it’s not that weird after all.
While the alleged leak looks pretty real on its face, there are some aspects that we have doubts on.
For starters, we’ve seen no other confirmation that the German Tekken listing actually included character names beyond that one screenshot.
This could pretty easily be faked in seconds by editing the web text through the page’s console and code, so that ultimately doesn’t prove anything by itself.
See, we can do it too
The timing is also suspicious to appear shortly before The Game Awards 2023 perhaps suggesting a DLC reveal at the show, which of course didn’t happen.
We can’t say for certain whether the leak is legit or faked, so take these characters with a pretty big grain of salt.
All we do really know for sure is that Tekken 8 will launch January 25 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC with 32 main roster characters including newcomer Reina.
It’s Year 1 DLC Pass does include four more DLC fighters, and we’ll just have to wait a bit longer to get confirmation as to who they actually are.