Shacknews Outstanding Achievement in Accessibility 2024 - Tekken 8

Fighting games can be very hard to start for newcomers. The skill ceiling is often very high, the controls are technical, and the timing is pinpoint at high-skill play, all of which can be intimidating. Plus, most fighting games are built around competition and focus their attention into multiplayer game modes. Maybe that’s why Tekken 8 feels like the perfect approach to making a game that appeases fighting game masters while also inviting newcomers in to see what it’s all about.

It begins with all sorts of QoL options for preferred gameplay. You can adjust sound and colors extensively to make it look however you need to best see what’s going on, and even add sound and visual cues to assist. If you just want to play the game for fun, Tekken 8 has a robust amount of single-player game modes, including an extensive story mode and arcade-style playthroughs with unique endings for each character. If you’re having trouble winning, you can even toggle on the Special Control system to allow one-button combos depending on your situation.

There is also a plethora of ways in which Tekken 8 helps you train and grow. Combo trials and training mode are just the start. This game introduced state save-load play that lets you save a state mid-gameplay in training and revert to that state with just a button press, great for working on parts of your combo strings that might be late in the combo. You can also engage in Punishment Training that teaches you how to appropriately counter blocked or completely missed attacks, or even load the replay of any recorded previous match and jump in to take control and see if there’s an option you could have selected that would have worked better.

Tekken 8 was an original innovator of some very important features in the fighting game space, like the state save/load in Training Mode. And some of its features, like Replay Takeover, are even being implemented in other games now. As high a barrier of entry as fighting games have had, Tekken 8 feels like a full package that aims to help players of every skill type and condition cross that barrier. And we’re seeing in real-time the effect it has on the genre. For that, it has achieved our Shacknews Award for Outstanding Achievement in Accessibility 2024

Be sure to read over the rest of the Shacknews Awards in our Year of the Games: 2024 feature.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.