Tekken 8 Pro Claims God of Destruction Rank While Playing Blindfolded

After roughly 4 months, SuperBrine has accomplished his challenge of going from Beginner to God of Destruction with Alisa while playing blindfolded.

The entire series of videos is available through highlights on his Twitch channel, with facecam and inputs on display during all of these matches.

With Tekken 8 being in the state that it is, this has been met with a mix of congratulations, bewilderment, and a whole lot of insults targeting Alisa, Alisa players, and Tekken developers.

To some extent, this challenge does illuminate some of the issues with modern Tekken. Since the rank system makes it easy to drift towards higher ranks over a long period of time, you get a lot of players in the highest skill brackets that still struggle not only with adapting to opponent's gameplay, but simply responding to common strings.

It also shows how much emphasis this game really puts on aggression. Perhaps SuperBrine will shed more nuance on this in the eventual YouTube video, but from checking some of the highlights, it seems like his plan was generally to prevent the opponent from taking their turn with non-stop offense, often using an armored move on wake-up or after getting hit to regain momentum once he does get hit.

Defense in Tekken has always been harder than offense, but it only got more difficult over time, as characters get more moves, rosters grew bigger, and movement became less reliable. In some cases it leads to situations where your only option is to stand there and block, hoping that you can swing the tides with your next gamble.

Though, unfortunately, we also have to maintain a certain level of skepticism when it comes to blindfolded challenges. If you follow the speedrunning scene, you know that it's one of the most common things for people to fake.

Unlike highly technical speedruns, all you need to fake blindfolded gameplay is using some sort of cloth that appears dark but allows you to make out what's happening on the screen, or peeking through the gaps in the blindfold.

It's hard for the viewers to figure out if something's wrong, while the runner is playing the game like they normally would.

In this case, we hope SuperBrine is entirely legit, but it's hard to ignore the abnormalities. For example, he regularly played music in the background while streaming his matches, yet it's an odd decision to make when you can only rely on sound. 

During certain matches, it also appears that he switches to a more reserved and reactive playstyle when the set could go either way. A sharp contrast to highly aggressive early rounds and matches where he has a confident lead.

In some instances, it seems weird that he would led go of inputs when it's ambiguous whether he got launched or not. Same goes for a few instances where he chooses to stay on the ground instead of doing the usual get-up kicks or standing up into an immediate armored move.

Hopefully once the final video is out, he can reassure people of the run's legitimacy, or have other high level players chime in on the nuances of this challenge, confirming the logic and reasoning behind some of the less obvious decisions.