The Asuka analysis was fire.
I would love to hear your take on other characters as well.

I started playing Tekken with T8 Season 2 (played many 2d anime fighters, mainly gg xrd and bbcf), and was searching for a character overview on youtube. Of those that I watched about T8 none told me about characters playstyle, except the obvious ones like this one is the gappler, this one has ultra evasion, this one is bear, etc. The only thing talked about in all those videos was character's difficulty, lol.
After reaching 100+ hours in T8 and hearing more things about older games, I became more and more interested to play this older Tekken, so I went to youtube and searched character overview for T7. I watched the one from That Blasted Salami, and this video single-handedly made me want to learn how to play every single character. Which probably is enough to tell how much T8 ruined many identities.
I was on my journey to make 300 wins on every character in T7, but I took a break from fighting games for some time. At the moment I have something like 400+ w on Kazumi, 100+ on Kazuya, and learnt a bit about other characters in the proccess. Maybe I'll continue this journey in T8, seeing as it heals a little bit

I miss that older Tekken feel

This was a great take. I like the categorization the most because it signals to me that the devs should’ve already had a plan for how they’d adjust characters when the time came for it. It’s an easy framework to follow because literally every character has a list of several signature moves.

That said, the devs still need to undo season 2’s remaining damage: homing. There’s still too much homing plus, homing plus into stance, homing lows (I main Nina and her only tracking low tracks to her strong side in db3). Most of the buffed lows or just lows by default in tekken 8 have absurd tracking, such as slides.

Great video.
The devs core idea of making everyone aggressive itself is so extremely flawed.
The way they did is make everyone a different rushdown mix of Anna, hwoarang, dragunov and lei
and simultaneously gave them good punishment, wall combos, wall travel.

Since Paul lost his 1 hit big damage in favor of mixups, he doesn't feel the same...

I think youre making the best tekken content at the minute, my man. Appreciate the content!

Regarding character identity: I've always said that Heat is the main driver of characters losing their identities, as inherently as soon as Heat is popped, the character becomes a rush down character. In my opinion this is very poor design. I think a character like Dragunov should be a rush down character in heat. But a character like Steve when in Heat should receive more counter hit tools, or more evasion tools, this way he becomes a stronger character during Heat, but only on the basis of his character archetype. Asuka for example, should receive more sabaki's and parry's during heat. Heat in its current form just waters down the identities even more, and makes the game very boring (I haven't played tekken in around 3 months, and probably won't come back until a tekken 9. I just dont enjoy the game design, unfortunately)

Outside of heat there are issues with character identities, but I think changing Heat would get the biggest bang for your buck. I dont think Lee should have b33, I dont think drag should have a hatchet kick, etc etc etc etc

One of the best Tekken vids I've seen in a long time

AMAZING take on the game. If they'd follow this advice, Tekken 8 would be so much more interesting and deep.
I honestly hope Namco hires you 😅

Man, amazing video, amazing writing, amazing informations, amazing editing

The only video that TEKKEN devs should watch and listen to.

Master class video.

I was gonna make a similar one on the same topic, but I scrapped it like 3 times because I lost all motivation since the Season 2. Glad at least you could.

One other thing that comes to mind is just how stacked with good properties some moves, and maaaaybe that gets fixed eventually at this point, but I'm still skeptical. I don't actually think they'll solve the fundamental issue, because that requires taking away moves

You clearly have a great understanding of design clarity, a language that many people don't understand when it comes to logical consistency. Amazing video.

The main problem to me is perhaps that bamco is NOT incompetent (as we all like to believe) but that this homogenizing of the characters is intentional. Why? Because they desperately want to attract new players and the game just needs to be dumber and dumber to capture the sad state of dopamine gaming in the modern day (push any button, get nice reward). Of course the hardcore fanbase cares and is vocal but I don't think we are the main targets of T8. Perhaps now that the game has already ended its "release period" that bamco will begin to realise that no new players are coming no matter how simple and monkeybrained the game is, and perhaps S3 is their slow attempt at bringing the game back. But for now, I truly believe that the design of the game thus far was intentionally braindead to cater for the masses. Here's to hoping that they realise who really is keeping this game alive,: us.

Insane level of depth of analysis, subbed & liked

Finally i see someone made a whole video about character identities

1:29 also i like that you show that every recent character has ws 13f punish with heat engager

1:51 Ayo we rubbin one out? 👀

Amazing video, great content for newer players that dont yet understand what made older Tekken so great. Keep em coming!

Informative video and learning so much about what is a fun top tier compared to a generic one.

Fire video man, Core-A Gaming level analysis. Keep it up🔥