This video is sponsored by Geologie.
--- So I am pretty awful at fighting games all
told.
Like many, I can never seem to get past the huge lists of inputs and knowledge of frame
data and the like required to really get into most of these games.
And yet, the one series I keep coming back to time and time again, despite being perhaps
one of the worst perpetrators in that regard, is none other than Tekken.
Indeed, despite the intimidating combo lists, I can play Tekken all day every day.
It says a lot that despite my being terrible at them, I would genuinely consider 3 and
Tag Tournament 1 to be up there as some of the best games I’ve ever played—they’re
so silky smooth and there is zero messing around with 3’s Forest Law theme.
But there’s another reason why my love of these games has run so deep over the years…
and that’s the story.
Now anyone who is vaguely aware of Tekken at this point probably has their head in their
hands saying “really?”
No one plays fighting games for the story, especially one as daft as Tekken’s.
But I dunno, I can’t help but love the universe that’s been crafted here and crucially,
how it’s been delivered to players.
Moreso than other fighting games, I think the Tekken series shows such dedication to
its lore, while doing some bonkers things to mess with our very notion of canon, in
a way that renders diving into this now decades-long and completely insane narrative being spun
not merely a case of “so bad it’s good,” but legitimately kind of engaging.
Let me explain.
See, on the surface, yeah, buried in there somewhere lies a defined timeline of events
between each of the seven numbered entries—one that starts off fairly standard.
In a very broad, general sense (and yes before you head to the comments I know in reality
it’s far more complicated than this), you have Heihachi Mishima, owner of the Mishima
Zaibatsu—the biggest, richest company that does… military stuff I guess.
Heihachi throws his son Kazuya in a volcano to see if he’s powerful enough to climb
out of it and take control of the company (even though that’s retconned in Tekken
7, like I say it’s complicated).
Years later, Heihachi sets up the King of Iron Fist Tournament to find the strongest
warrior.
Kazuya appears and beats him, getting revenge for being thrown in a volcano by… throwing
his dad in a volcano.
Then Heihachi returns, interrupting Kazuya’s search for the ultimate power by beating Kazuya
in the new tournament and throwing Kazuya in a volcano again, but not before Kazuya
awakens the Devil Gene within himself and also impregnates Jun Kazama who gives birth
to Jin and then dies after Heihachi awakens Ogre in search of an ancient fighting spirit
who kills her, resulting in Jin seeking out Heihachi, who trains Jin to take Ogre down
before Heihachi betrays Jin once Heihachi can take the power for himself, but this awakens
the devil gene within Jin, who goes mental.
At this point we’ve only covered three games in the franchise, and we haven’t even gotten
to new company G Corporation bringing back Kazuya from his volcanic grave and also awakening
Heihachi’s dad whom Heihachi imprisoned under a temple fifty years prior but is also
now a devil who has organised another tournament so that someone can kill this dad before he
destroys everything, only for Jin to win and, with the power of the Mishima Zaibatsu at
his fingertips (seemingly the prize for every single one of these daft tournaments) decides
to… declare war on… the world… for some reason?!
Argh!
But look, you get my point—while it’s maybe not so simple to just explain, there
is a discernable, singular timeline that runs through the Tekken franchise.
In this, Tekken is no different from many other fighting games, that often have similarly
vast universes, but there’s a couple of key differences.
One is in how the story is broadly delivered to you—while other fighting games may have
a bunch of text to read through, some lines connecting webs of people from other games,
or require you to watch a full blown anime in some cases, nothing compares to the perfectly
paced, mile-a-minute dopamine blast of simply battling through ten quick stages or so in
an arcade mode and unlocking a completely off-the-wall cutscene, then going and doing
it again with someone else—perhaps one of the many new characters you unlock as you
progress.
But where Tekken really sets itself apart, is in the fact that this densely layered tapestry
of family drama being carefully woven over all these years, decades even, should crumble
as soon as you ask one question at any point along the timeline—you know, what happens
if any of the tournaments here are won by anyone else?!
We’re not talking Soul Calibur here, whose arcade modes are often structured pretty similarly
but whose character endings largely adhere to a much more standard binary of “will
this generic fantasy martial arts dude keep or destroy the evil sword.”
Tekken has to take its epic central struggle of legacy and the occult and the universe-altering
stakes at the core of it all, and simultaneously imagine a scenario in which control of the
world’s largest military multinational corporation—untold power that we’ve seen can be used to conquer
the entire planet—goes to a bear that wants to get with a panda; the owner of said panda
who wants to build a theme park; or, indeed, a genetically modified kangaroo just looking
for a bit of financial security; each stumbling into the depths of hell, fighting legitimate
devils in order to achieve their goals.
Rather than folding under the weight of such absurdity however, the series absolutely leans
into it—often very directly answering those kinds of conundrums, no matter how wacky the
outcome might be.
The way I’ve ended up thinking about it is that as soon as you select arcade mode
and come up against that character select screen, you’re essentially in the midst
of a kind of choose your own adventure, where each of these selections and the ten or so
fights that follow, act as a branching path dictating the larger story—and honestly,
when you break it down, Tekken manages to be far more accommodating in the resultant
trajectory of its narrative than many other games.
Because you know, while the Mishima bloodline drama is clearly front and centre, what you
end up with are all these non-canon but nonetheless consistently established timelines all going
on at once, across multiple games; drawing upon and expanding on the various relationships
that develop between this crazy cast of characters; relationships who themselves inform future
games and future branches; the series managing to deliver it all through wondrously rendered
and delightfully brisk cutscenes and neatly drawn stills.
Crucially though, all while leaving enough room for your imagination to fill in the blanks
and join the dots in a way that makes uncovering all this stuff genuinely intriguing.
What happened after Yoshimitsu’s daring escape with his old pal Bonskonovitch after
he accidentally created a giant rat?
Did the larger Mishima feud get put on hold after giving away their fortune to some mad
robot alien who might be hundreds of years old?
You be the judge!
Even playing a bunch of the games again for this piece I was noticing stuff I haven’t
previously in all the years I’ve been obsessed with Tekken.
In the Paul timeline, turns out he was the one who actually took down Ogre, but because,
in typical Paul style, he chose to just leave before the evolution into True Ogre, Paul
didn’t get any of the glory of actually winning the tournament—framing his progression
through the stages in Tekken 4 as a far more high stakes redemption arc with his reputation
on the line; a means to prove himself to a world skeptical of his abilities, rather than
simply winning money or gaining power.
And hell, even then, once he achieves that power, he still finds himself corrupted by
it—making a conscious choice upon realising his wayward ways that he’ll reject all of
it in favour of the purer life he left behind.
It’s legitimately unexpected and quite nice, for a character that’s usually played for
laughs, given that he also has an ongoing rivalry with the aforementioned bear.
Because yes, while the dialogue is certainly not going to win any awards, and the voice
acting is more than memeworthy, that’s not to say the story lacks the potential to surprise
you with something genuinely heartfelt.
Take the character of Wang Jinrei for example—he’s a secret character, one you might deem relatively
unassuming in the midst of ferocious animals and demons—but select him in 5 and suddenly
you’re treated to one of the most bittersweet narratives in the entire series.
Being older, it turns out he was a childhood friend of Jinpachi.
You see a man coming up against a younger generation that fails to show him respect;
you see a different side to Jinpachi as the terrifying mouth torso demon claiming he’ll
conquer all turns to something altogether more pitiful; leaving Wang pondering why doing
the right thing must be so difficult as his old companion turns to dust in his arms.
This all takes place during about five minutes of playtime and yet completely recontextualises
so much about what you’ve come to understand about certain characters and this larger world,
as it’s functioned across several games at this point.
And it all happens in the same game where you can have Heihachi cackling in the distance
as he sends a rocket flying into space with his entire family chained to the side.
This series is so goddamn fun.
And look, obviously the Tekken story is far from perfect.
At a certain point in the series you saw more of a narrative focus placed on each entry’s
variation on the Tekken Force mode introduced in 3—beat ‘em ups whose increasingly drab
environments and controls that clearly weren’t built for the genre making for a decidedly
awkward experience uncovering certain aspects of the story.
Did you think Tekken needed more abysmal gunplay?
Well here you go!
And Tekken 7, god, Tekken 7.
I love that game so dearly.
I can play it endlessly, it feels so good.
But I also can’t help but think, five years after its release, what a waste.
In what was marketed as the epic conclusion of the Mishima bloodline feud, instead of
a grand celebration of all these years of Tekken lore, we get a complete retconning
of events from the first game; a totally botched attempt to turn one of the most comically
evil dudes in this entire setup into a sympathetic villain, by essentially saying that he only
threw Kazuya into the volcano… as a form of witch trial (?).
Look, the sudden turn that Heihachi was merely acting in self-defense in killing Kazuya’s
mother and that she brought the Devil Gene into the Mishima bloodline and that’s why
Heihachi tried to kill Kazuya and Jin all those times, might ring a little more resonantly
had Heihachi not appeared to take such cartoonish, maniacal glee from doing all this.
In fact in playing the games again recently it’s become clearer that the only remotely
sympathetic Mishima is none other than Jinpachi, who despite being an absolute pain in the
arse to fight, is the only one who wanted peace—and who starved to death, imprisoned
beneath a temple for fifty years by Heihachi for the privilege.
I mean even Jin took the power of the Mishima Zaibatsu and decided, on a whim, to become
a complete tyrant—one who we’re expected to root for in 7’s cliffhanger conclusion.
The Mishimas are all complete edgelord arseholes, and 7’s focus on the poorly paced conclusion
to this feud, relegates the other, previously amazing little character arcs to meaningless
single bout affairs that do almost nothing to further the relationships between the people
involved that previously made it all so compelling.
You know, rather than further exploring the downright venomous rivalry between Brian Fury
and Yoshimitsu, you instead have “Bryan isn’t very nice.
He came across Bob.
Then he threw a metal beam at a plane.
The end.”
And what’s more, the main plot is all delivered through the most monotonous narration imaginable,
coming from a dude who really doesn’t seem to give too much of a shit that his family
was… burned alive… by Jin?
What is this pish?!
What does this war mean to you?!?
But ya know, the idea that a fighting game story having a lacklustre conclusion has gotten
me this heated is, in my eyes, testament to just how impressive a feat Tekken has managed
to pull off for all these years—taking so many absolutely ludicrous concepts at once,
developing so many unlikely relationships between insane characters and delivering them
all in a super condensed period of time, in a manner that’s equal parts hilarious and
genuinely engaging in its ongoing mystery.
The Tekken story on the surface might be dumb as all hell, but despite its many shortcomings,
I can’t help but absolutely adore it.
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