After 2 Years, Blind Tekken 8 Player Just Reached The Tekken God Rank

It's not often that we get an excuse to do a community highlight, but today is a special occasion.

Tekken streamer BlindGuitarFox recently shared their latest achievement over at Reddit. After grinding the game since pretty much it came out, they have achieved the Tekken God rank in spite of being legally blind.

They were born with glaucoma, and entirely lost their right eye during the game's launch. Their remaining left eye only offers blurry tunnel vision, which means that they only get a limited view of things that they are directly looking at.

In spite of this, they managed to achieve one of the highest ranks in Tekken, with only Tekken God Supreme and God of Destruction going higher than that.

In their post, they shared the general methods and tactics involved in making this possible. Since they have a hard time telling apart strings and reacting to certain things, their approach became entirely focused around the overarching strategy.

For starters, they sought to optimize their combos and get as much damage as possible out of any won interaction. After all, the more damage you deal while your opponent can't do anything, the less opportunities they have to beat you.

Whenever they secured a knockdown, they made sure to continue pressuring opponents and never let them get up for free,

Lastly, the major part of their success is down to simply playing smart. They don't go for big gambles and instead focus on "small Tekken." Doing safe pokes, sidestepping, dash blocking, seeing how their opponent reacts, and then scoring hits by anticipating how they will act.

What's truly shocking is that they did all this without utilizing Tekken's accessibility for the sake of competitive integrity. Not because it would give them an unfair advantage in online matches, but because tournaments offline are typically ran in a way that doesn't allow to use these options for only one player. In that scenario, they do not want to impede the other player with visual settings that could throw them off.

They also note that while Tekken 8 has some new audio cues that allow making plays without relying on visuals, it's still not in a state where visually impaired gamers can play relying solely on sound, so hopefully this is considered in future updates.

As for BlindGuitarFox, if you want to support them and watch their gameplay, you can do so by following them on Twitch.