I’ve been playing a lot of Tekken 7 recently. Some of that has been in anticipation of Tekken 8 (there’s a chance it will appear at EVO, Tokyo Game Show, or even Gamescom), but mostly it’s because TheGamer is having a Tekken 7 tournament soon. We have a staff game night every🤪 two weeks - even though, as journalists, we hate games - and I have a frustrating habit of constantly coming second. I’m not sure if I’ll break this streak with Tekken, but I do know I’ll be th🍒e snappiest dressed.
My problem is that I’m good at video games but I’m not great. I cast my gaming net far and wide, but I never stick around long enough to become an expert. We’ve played FIFA 22, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Team Racing, Pokemon Showdown, and Fall Guys. In those games, I placed second, second, second, second, and I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe we could play Life is Strange together, and I could win at being th💝e most emotionally impacted by it♐.
In any case, I’ve been playing a little Tekken to get used to it a📖gain. I’m too rusty for online fights right now, and don’t want to bring my rank down while I flail around, so I’ve been playing the Treasure Battle mode. This is a way you can fight against AI opponents to win random bits of clothing. I’ve created outfits for all of my mains: Xiaoyu, Lili, Alisa, Katarina, Nina, and Lucky Chloe. In some cases, multiple. They’re all, as the kids say, super duper snazzy.
There is, however, a major issue here. I also play as Eddie and Hwoarang﷽ (yes, I do love cheese), and they do not look super duper snazzy. They look trash. There are some issues with some of the female outfits (bikinis everywhere are just a bit much, especially given the age and personalities of some characters), but you can easily make quite a few interesting combinations. Whether you want to make them cute, stylish, or sophisticated, there’s an outfit combination there. With the dudes, not so much.
I’ve made Eddie look like a private investigator, changing the colour tones of his default leather jacket and trousers to make them more like a suit, topping it off with a fedora. It works, su🐻re, but it’s nothing like the ‘Mariah Carey in Malibu’ style I’ve given Katarina, the gothic hipster look of Lili, or the killer at a cocktail party look of Nina.
Hwoarang comes off even worse, with my mix of Chinese armour and skill face paint looking cool enough (kids also still say cool), but it&🍷rsquo;s nothing like the realistic style you can give the women. It’s just ugly trousers and a t-shirt for men. The trousers are a significant problem - Tekken cannot make trousers, it seems. Women can wear shorts or skirts or dres🥀ses, but men are stuck with trousers, and almost all of them are completely rubbish.
The worst part is it doesn’t need to be like this. Eddie and Hwoarang both have very slick default outfits, especially counting the ones added post launch. The same goes for Kazuya, Law, and Leo. Lee is one of the snappiest dressers in all of gaming. Dragunov always looks terrible and Miguel looks like an Urban Outfitters threw up o🐻n him, but there’s a sense of originality in their outfits. They all feel like they belong to each character. When we get to make them our own though, nothing sticks. Some are clearly supposed to be jokes, like the tree growing out of your head or the soy sauce weapon, but others are meant to look good. They do not.
I’m sure the Tekken pros have muꦐch bigger issues for Tekken 8 to fix, but what I want is a nice top and some fitted jeans for Hwoarang. Is that really so much to ask?