To its major credit Tekken 7 held the spotlight for its franchise for an incredible nine years. We find ourselves now in 2024 and with a brand new King of Iron Fist entry in Tekken 8, with benefits from nearly a decade’s worth of new bells, whistles, and gaming platform progress.
Though they update sufficiently enough to continually feel fresh and new, Bandai Namco has tended towards a “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” approach with Tekken, meaning character play styles and appearances (perhaps save for Yoshimitsu) don’t tend to change all that rapidly. As such, it was relatively easy for Digital Foundry to round up a handful of side by side comparisons of some of the games’ most prominent fighters to as to show us just how far the franchise has come from a graphical standpoint.
The first image of the bunch sees Jin Kazama in his standard ready stance. One might vividly recall just how advanced the graphics of Tekken 7 looked when we first saw them circa 2015, perhaps even going as far as to claim the gap between games and reality couldn’t close much further without fully closing.
Looking at the side by side now we see there was actually a lot more that could be done as Tekken 8’s brilliant detail and light-depicting ray tracing wows us in a similar way here nine years later.
We also note the backgrounds are much more vivid and crisp, something that’s especially apparent in the fifth image featuring Asuka.
Look through the six image gallery by clicking the thumbnails below and let us know in the comments afterwards how much you’re enjoying Tekken 8 thus far.
Click images for larger versions
If you haven’t already seen it, be sure to check out the T8 input delay numbers for all platforms it’s featured on.