Combo Breaker 2025’s shirtless Tekken 8 tournament becomes iconic FGC moment

Combo Breaker 2025 has all the usual staples of a big fighting game event — massive and epic matches, all the top pros in the world in one place and, of course, FGC antics. Between exciting battles and wild game updates, the crowd went crazy for something even more unexpected — shirtless matches.

Over the weekend, the Combo Breaker 2025 audience started crowdfunding an important cause: get all the pros to compete on stage without shirts. And they were able to raise enough to make it happen.

Between serious tournaments, Combo Breaker featured some fun and chaotic tournaments. One of those was Tekken 8’s auction tournament. A character name is pulled out of a hat and players must bid on the character in order to play them in the upcoming match.

But the crowd apparently wanted to make it even crazier. During the tourney, fans were crowdfunding for the competitors, including top players such as Arslan Ash, to compete on stage without shirts.

By Match 5, the shirts started coming off after enough cash was raised, encouraged by Artorias. One hilarious moment was during Match 9 when Kim ‘CBM’ Jae-hyun was a bit shy to strip and the commentators and crowd started chanting ‘pop that shirt.’ When that wasn’t enough, his competitor offered him $100, which resulted in CBM humbly agreeing to take off his shirt for the match.

Going into Match 12, the crowd started chanting for Jeong ‘Rangchu’ Hyeon-ho to take off his shirt. Rangchu looked hesitant as well, but eventually started peeling away layers as the commentators called him a ‘tease’ for taking his sweet time.

The biggest moment by far was when Artorias presented enough cash to get Arslan Ash and Rangchu to compete shirtless together in the Grand Finals. For Tekken 8 fans, this is sure to be a match that will go down in history for the absurdity of the concept as well as the hilarious commentators.

One fan joked that a ‘cursed calendar’ would result from the event. Another noted that they thought the screenshots of Arslan Ash and Rangchu were AI when they first saw it. Another said: “This will go down as one of the greatest FGC moments in history.”

At the end of the tournament, Arslan Ash came out victorious and shared the cash with the audience.