Tekken's striking return to form, after a forgettable era during the 7th generation, has been one of the biggest highlights this generation. Namco has managed to make the game exciting again. Exciting to play, and more importantly, extremely exciting to watch, which is an important success criterion in the age of Youtube and Twitch.
The Tekken World Tour, a new global competition format, in which a series of 27 tournaments are held worldwide to identify the best players and invite them at the end of each year to the Tekken World Tour Finals, with a prize pool that's been increasing year over year. This helped the game grow beyond Namco's expectations, helping Harada receiving the necessary support to expand the game with 3 seasons passes and beyond. Harada has managed to keep the game fresh with old, new & guest characters. Akuma (SF), Geese (KOF) are prominent characters that are probably more fun to watch in Tekken than the games they were ported from 
Moreover, new techniques like rage drive, rage art & other experimental techniques that seem to be resonating well among the Tekken community. Despite lacking in the graphical department, the game still managed to be flashier than ever, the real time Slow Mo that gets activated at certain moments during the fight worked so well for Tekken and managed to make the tournaments even more fun to watch:
2018 TWT Finals saw Ranchu, a Korean player, stealing the show by playing and winning the tournament with a character that many viewed as a low-tier character.
This helped kicking off 2019 tournaments with lots of hype and anticipation. Which obscure character was gonna steal the show next? Akuma & Kazumi, a guest character & a new character, were the rising stars of Tekken 2019, both characters have been part of Tekken 7 since its release but were written off by competitive community until this year. The scene was still populated witch iconic Tekken characters nonetheless.
This is the craziest set featuring the best Tekken Akuma player in 2019:
The prize pool for this year's finals was 185k dollars, 75k dollars for the winner of the tournament and 6.25k dollars for those who end up 7th/8th in the top 8. Harda finished the year off by releasing a new exciting character that looks & plays fresh:
It will be interesting to see where Tekken 2020 will land in terms of popularity and sales.
Last edited by LurkerJ - on 21 December 2019
