Taking off from a strong first year since its launch on console and PC back in June of 2017, Tekken 7 is now in its second season, featuring the return of 2 classic characters, a brand new mechanic, and a whole bunch of character overhauls. With that in mind, is the Second Season Pass worth buying? Here’s everything you need to know about Season 2.
First things first, with or without the season pass, Season 2 introduces quite a few but desirable changes in the game. First off, the main menu screen looks slicker than ever, where you’ll see slow-mo clips of fights running on the background. No more Heihachi staring down at you all day. (And I’m digging the new main menu BGM!)
The new season also introduces a new mechanic called the wall bounce, where certain moves strike your opponent hard enough that they bounce back towards you, so you can continue your combo for max damage (bad example below).
Another feature introduced in Season 2 is the Easy Combo and Assist. For those who’ve played the story mode, you’ve probably seen this in the easiest difficulty where you can pull off simple combos by mashing a single button, and be able to perform simple moves by holding the assist button and pressing a corresponding face button. Now they’ve implemented this feature across all modes. While I’m personally not a fan of it, this can be helpful for newcomers wanting to learn the basic mechanics of the game in an actual battle. Think of it as training wheels – for you to really learn how to ride your bike, you’ll have to get rid of them eventually.
You can now also track your Ranked Mode progress with the addition of the progression gauge. Now there’s no more guessing as to when you’ll get promoted, or demoted, which is pretty much a huge guessing game since the introduction of the ranking system in Tekken 5.
And of course, major overhauls for all characters. You can check out the full patch notes here for each character.
With all the base changes aside, let’s now talk about the Season Pass. Season Pass 2 packs in 6 DLC characters, featuring the return Nina Williams’s equally lethal and seductive sister Anna Williams, and the comedic Hong Kong police martial artist Lei Wulong. While the 3 other characters haven’t been revealed yet, Tekken 7 Season 2 features another unexpected cross-over, this time with the AMC’s The Walking Dead’s Negan. No gameplay and release date has been confirmed for Negan, but this is something I’ll be watching out for.
Season Pass 2 also comes packed with the Tekken World Tour Set costumes; Summer Lesson set, featuring hairstyles, costumes, accessories and player customization items from Bandai Namco’s VR Dating Sim Summer Lesson; some more effects and character customization items.
So is the new season pass worth getting? Personally and honestly, I’m quite disappointed with the move to turn veteran characters Lei and Anna as paid DLC characters. They’ve been mainstays in Tekken since Tekken 2, plus I know a lot of players have them as mains before Tekken 7. Aside from that, there’s no new character story for the two, so I really don’t know how they fit in in the Tekken lore now (yes there is such a thing, no matter how silly it sounds). I would have preferred to pay for cross-over characters over classic ones, or entirely new ones for that matter. But then again, the new season pass comes packed with 6 characters, unlike season 1 which only had 3 characters for the same price, so this time, you’re really getting more.
I guess it comes to this. If you’ve played Anna and Lei as mains before, want to go and get the 3 other unannounced characters, and you’re excited to test out a brand new character soon, then go ahead and grab the season pass. But if you’d like to wait and see first, or you just want to pick a few select characters, you can also grab them individually.
So… Any guesses as to who the other 3 characters are? My bet is on Julia Chang/JC, another crossover character and finally… MOKU-effin-JIN – now that’s a lot of value there! He’s worth all the characters lol!
Just started to get into Tekken 7? Don’t forget to check out our full review!
