The big question a Tekken player always wants to know is: which DLC character is coming next? Well, you’ll know by the end of the week, as the studio is planning to reveal this at Geoff Keighley’s winter festival of expensive advertising, the Game Awards. However, there may already be some clues in a trailer they’ve just released, which suggests some sisterful slapping is overdue. The trailer also promises new moves for all characters in a Season 2 update next spring, along with some minor presents in a winter update due sooner than that. But yes, come see for yourself.
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You see the helicopter chasing Nina Williams at 2:12? It has a lipsticky kiss mark on the missile, a nod to scrappy sister Anna Williams, the red roughhouser to Nina’s purple pugilist. That puts Anna a good bet for the reveal, but who knows? It could all be a scarlet red herring. The developers are planning to reveal all on Thursday evening (that’s the wee hours of Friday morning for us in the UK).
More concretely, the trailer promises new moves for every chracter, in case the hundred attacks of the average character aren’t enough for you (I see my favourite coffee baroness Azucena performing a freshly brewed sweepy kick). There’s also going to be a “major balance update”, which for Tekken often means a lot of changes to frame data for various attacks across all characters. Finally, the trailer pumps up the Tekken World Tour – the annual fraternal fisticuffs that is often interesting but I most fondly remember for crowning a Panda as the globe’s best bare-knuckle brawler.
But that’s all Season 2 stuff. Players will get the winter update before all that, and it is slightly less dramatic. It’ll offer the gift of extra photo mode features, for example. This will let you add “wetness” and “grime” to fighters’ faces (it’s just what I always wanted!). You’ll also soon be able to search for other players online by username. Extra slots for customised characters will get added early next year too, say the devs.
The latest entry in the Iron Fist Tournament is pretty slick, as I judged in our Tekken 8 review. But it’s also missing the characters I love most (Lei, Miguel, Josie), which is ultimately why Tekken 7 is the bruiser that got onto our list of the best games, aka the RPS 100. Anna, she’s cool and all. But can she pretend to be drunk and roll around on the ground to freak out her opponent? No.