Tekken 8 Roster Adds Nina Williams, Reveals New Gameplay Mechanics

During the Tekken World Tour Finals 2022, Bandai Namco announced that Nina Williams will be part of the Tekken 8 roster. She’s the latest character to be confirmed after Jin, Kazuya, King, Lars, Paul, Jack-8 and Law.

Nina Williams was previously in Tekken 7 as well, but she has a brand new costume and design in Tekken 8. Her combos now also utilize guns, which is awesome.

As for new Tekken 8 gameplay mechanics, Tekken executive director Katsuhiro Harada and Tekken 8 director Kohei Ikeda explained several new mechanics in a 36-minute-long video..

Firstly, there will be a new Rage System in Tekken 8, where players can simply press R2 to execute Rage Arts (which are the game’s version of ultimate attacks or supers).

In addition, Tekken 8 will introduce a new recoverable gauge, where players can recover some of the health that they’ve suffered from damage. However, the health gauge doesn’t recover automatically, since players will now have to hit the opponent or successfully guard to recover their health.

There will also be a brand new gameplay mechanic in Tekken 8 called the Heat System. It’s a bit complicated, but basically, it’s like a temporary heightened state that players can enter to execute more powerful attacks and their attacks inflict more damage. You can either enter Heat Burst by pressing R1, or use specific moves called Heat Engagers (there are five Heat Engager moves for each character).

There will also be two controller styles; Arcade Style and Special Style. Arcade Style is the traditional way of playing the game, while Special Style combines the Easy Combo and Assist modes from Tekken 7, where beginners can assign combos to certain buttons.

Fun fact: Tekken 8 is being co-developed by Akira Nishitani and his company Arika. He’s known for Street Fighter 2/Street Fighter EX/ Fighting EX Layer fame.

Both Harada and Ikeda go into these gameplay mechanics in more detail, which you can check out in the video below. For more information on the Tekken 8 Closed Alpha tests, head on over here.

Tekken is slated to launch for the PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam.