Today Bandai Namco revealed a whopping five returning characters that will be playable in its upcoming fighting game Tekken 8.
As shown by a new trailer, the game is bringing back Devil Jin, Zafina, Alisa Bosconovich, Lee Chaolan, and Panda, albeit you may consider Panda simply as an alternate skin for Kuma.
This brings the currently announced roster to 30 characters, with two fighters that are yet to be revealed.
That being said, we won't have to wait long to hear about these two missing characters. The first will be announced on November 2, while the second will be revealed on November 12, for a total of 32 playable characters.
You can check out the trailer showing the characters in action below.
At a pre-Tokyo Game Show event at Bandai Namco's headquarters in Tokyo, game designer Michael Murray explained that the development team had to work very hard to include such a large roster in the game, especially considering that all the assets have been redone from scratch and not recycled from Tekken 7.
This was done because the developers knew that is what the fanbase expects, but it required locking in the roster very early in development, to give the team the proper time to work on each character.
Incidentally, at Tokyo Game Show we saw the reveal of Feng Wei and we learned about the return of the Tekken Ball minigame.
The previous big reveal made at EVO 2023 was Azucena, the new coffee-powered character from Peru, created as a homage to the active Peruvian community dedicated to the Tekken franchise. At the same time, we also saw the return of Raven.
The wait for the brand-new chapter of the Tekken franchise is almost over. Tekken 8 will be released for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on January 26.
