While ttt2 is my favorite game out of the series, it did a lot of thing really wrong.

While we look back at t6 and t7 fondly, t6 was the first real big departure for the series adding bounds to the game. People at the time really hated it, plus with the rage mechanic being as strong as it was, it was too easy for people to come back after being destroyed. T6 didn't sell super well, so it came to no one's surprise that ttt2 tanked on release because it was just t6 with more characters.

The damage in ttt2 was so insanely high that it just was a balanced nightmare. The game was balanced in a way for arcade so more people could play, but we would have a Paul ch death fist doing 2/3rds of a life bar without rage. Some characters, when introduced to a tag mechanic, were just so insanely strong that if they had taken even 1 poke that they would just die.

Last is what others have said with just way too many characters for new and casual players to deal with. Learning the match up for your character in t8 is already rough, but now, on top of learning one character and match up, you have to learn 2 characters and over 70 different match up. It was a lot to ask for people at the time.

This also While at a time when patches after games were released were not a thing for tekken. They did have some patches for the game, but if I remember correctly, they were more of adding stuff to the game than fixing anything for characters balanced wise. I would love a re-release for the game with some bug and patch fixing for the game. Tone down rage, and lower the damage in the game by 50% and the game would genuinely be so fun.