Geist

Nobody was expected to endlessly "glaze" the current game when Tekken followed an iterative release model. People played the arcade versions, provided feedback, and Namco eventually released improved versions for consoles. People generally agreed that T5 DR was better than T5, T6 BR was better than T6, and T7 FR was better than T7. The community wasn't silent back then either. People discussed and criticized these games on forums long before social media became as prominent as it is today. What people fundamentally dislike about modern Tekken is the combination of live-service design and patch culture. Namco promises regular updates that supposedly improve the game, so naturally people keep providing feedback and expecting improvements. But since T7 Season 3, they've repeatedly undermined the series' foundational design philosophy, changing core mechanics without adequately addressing the underlying problems. Your entire framing is wrong because this was never about whether older Tekken games were universally praised as flawless masterpieces. It's about whether they were good Tekken games and whether subsequent releases represented meaningful improvements. Our argument has always been fairly specific: DR through T7 Season 2 represented a period of fundamentally good Tekken games. We aren't blindly claiming that everything old was good and everything new is bad. We have a very clear cutoff point where we believe Namco started taking the series in the wrong direction, and we can explain exactly which design decisions led us to that conclusion.