Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, where we discuss the wasted potential of our favourite
plotlines.
I've made clear my disdain for fighting game rivalries that go nowhere and rehash the same
tired conflict over and over again for decades, even among the most iconic and commonly recurring
fighters in a series.
The Williams sisters are among the most guilty examples of this, and two of the most wasted
characters in all of Tekken.
Nina and Anna Williams are sisters and rival assassins.
A typical plot will see Nina trying to assassinate someone and Anna trying to stop her.
Here is their entire story from the start of the series to now:
Nina is hired to assassinate Heihachi Mishima.
Anna tries to stop her.
Nina fails.
Nina is hired to assassinate Kazuya Mishima.
Anna is hired to stop her.
Nina fails.
Nina is mind-controlled into trying to kill Jin Kazama, but she is freed from the control
and develops amnesia.
Anna tries to help her but Nina just leaves.
Nina is hired to kill Steve Fox, only to learn that he is her son and she fails.
Anna sits this one out.
Nina meets up with Anna and suddenly gets her memory back.
The two decide to settle things for good in the fifth Tekken tournament and nothing comes
of it.
Nina is hired by Jin to be his bodyguard.
Anna works for Kazuya again since their interests now align.
Nina remains with the Mishima Zaibatsu after Jin's disappearance and works for Heihachi
for a while.
She then leaves the Zaibatsu after failing to recover Jin from Lee's group, going off
to be an assassin again.
Anna isn't part of Tekken 7's story, but her bio for her DLC reveals that Nina killed her
fiancé, reigniting their rivalry.
It's pretty dull, right?
Seven games in and nothing has really changed for them.
They haven't even aged all that much thanks to being frozen for nineteen years.
But there is one thing that was introduced that had the potential to change everything:
Steve Fox.
Debuting in Tekken 4, Steve is a world champion boxer who decides to compete in the fourth
tournament.
He has a mysterious scar on his arm that goes unexplained in this game.
Instead, his ending reveals that he is Nina's son.
She underwent in-vitro fertilization while being used in the Mishima Zaibatsu's cryostasis
experiments.
While endings in 4 suggest Nina can't bring herself to assassinate Steve, her prologue
in 5 claims she felt nothing, leaving the reason she didn't or couldn't kill him unclear.
It was probably Lei's intervention, even though that's never mentioned in 5, but that's probably
supposed to be why he and Steve are now friends.
Speaking of Tekken 5, Steve's story shifts focus to the cause of his arm scar - that
he was experimented on by the Zaibatsu as a child - since Nina's story shifts back to
her rivalry with Anna.
That's fine for Steve, as it's good for fighting game characters to have more than one storyline.
And also rare...
So, moving Steve to the start of a different plotline for a game is fine, and gives the
writers more flexibility in telling his story as they now have more options.
Options that were completely ignored by Tekken 6, despite Nina now working for the Zaibatsu,
which could have easily allowed both of Steve's plotlines to coalesce into one.
But instead of any such thing, T6 dumps Steve in the Paul and Law story, where they're making
a team that will split the prize money if one of them wins, to increase their odds of
winning.
There's some potential here, as Law wants the money, Paul wants the glory and Steve
is just interested in the experience, but there's really nothing here to justify putting
both of his ongoing plots on hold for an entire game.
We don't even get a thing about him respecting the two veterans of the tournament, which
could help to give the two a small victory, since they're usually presented as jokes.
Steve's story finally got some development in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
Think about that.
Steve's story got some development for the first time since the 2005 PS2 release of Tekken
5... seven years later in a non-canon game.
Now, while the premise of the tag tournament and the presence of Jun, Ogre and Jinpachi
obviously aren't canonical, that doesn't mean the endings can't be.
Plus, why would you bother developing Steve's story in a non-canon game if that particular
revelation wasn't supposed to be canonical?
In fact, Tekken 7 actually acknowledges the development.
Said development is that Steve recalls the woman in charge of the experiments, Emma Kliesen,
mother of Tekken 6 newcomer, Leo Kliesen.
And Leo seems to learn some of this in their own ending.
It's not much of a development for Steve, but it does set up a potential dynamic between
him and Leo, as both are seeking answers surrounding Emma's involvement with the Mishimas and G
Corporation and her later death at the hand of Kazuya.
And maybe we'll get that after Leo stops engaging in generic anime sequences with Yoshimitsu.
Tekken 7 then brings Steve back to his plot with Nina, since her role in the story mode
is over by around the halfway mark.
She then goes back to being an assassin and finally manages to successfully pull off a
hit, which marks the first time outside of Death by Degrees.
She poses as the bride of a mob boss and kills him (solely to justify the wedding dress they
put her in in Fated Retribution), with Steve catching up to her during her escape.
Despite both characters having this fight in their "story modes", only Steve's has any
substance, as Nina just leaves Steve unconscious in her version.
We could've had him meet Leo in his story while Nina opens up to him in hers, but no,
making two different outcomes to the same encounter is clearly a better use of the side
characters than giving each one a unique encounter.
It's like Playstation Al-Stars all over again...
In Steve's, however, Nina explains that the experiments were to create a super soldier,
but they failed.
And when he calls her his mother, she tells him she doesn't care about him, but he still
fights off the Tekken Force so she can escape, similar to him helping her escape Lei in Tekken
4.
Now, it's disappointing that Nina just immediately says she doesn't care for Steve.
It could be a lie, but I get the sense it's not.
To me, this ending feels like it's supposed to either end this plotline so Nina can focus
on her stories with Anna and Jin, or maybe to set up Steve winning her over after a while.
But I see a potential story with what's happening here in Tekken 7's DLC.
One of the Season 2 characters is Anna, returning in a black funeral gown to contrast Nina's
white wedding dress, with her bio stating that the bride Nina posed as was her.
Anna wasn't involved with G Corporation or Nina because she'd found a man who made her
happy and she was set to marry him.
But Nina killing him reignited their rivalry.
Anna is present in the building where Steve confronts Nina, so this could work as a good
setup for my idea for how to develop this storyline.
Anna sees Steve fighting off the Tekken Force but is more focused on Nina.
She then returns to G Corp. to get Kazuya's help in tracking Nina down, in return for
her services once again.
Kazuya has gained access to Zaibatsu files following his final fight with Heihachi, which
Anna searches for anything useful that might lead her to Nina.
She learns about the experiments and, through some further research, learns that the boxer
Steve Fox from the 4th, 5th and 6th tournaments is actually Nina's son.
Anna then tracks Steve down and approaches him as his Aunt Anna.
She tells Steve all about his mother and offers to help him find her.
Maybe she's simply trying to manipulate him to hurt Nina, or maybe she develops a genuine
soft spot for her nephew, since she despises her sister, her father is long dead, her fiancé
is freshly dead, and her mother hasn't been mentioned since Tekken 1, so she may well
be dead as well, leaving Steve as the only family Anna has left.
From there, Anna uses Steve as a bargaining chip to call Nina out, either for a serious
fight, or in the tournament if they're not involved in 8's main plot.
Ann could plan to kill Steve to get to Nina, forcing Nina to acknowledge to herself that
she does care about Steve, even though she feels she's under no obligation to.
Maybe she's almost as lonely as Anna is, having no family but the sister she despises, and
having really nothing else going on in her life beyond her unsuccessful career as an
assassin.
We can give her some more depth and make her more than just a generic ice queen by giving
her more of a reason to want nothing to do with her son.
What if she was horrified by the breech of privacy that was Steve's creation.
She had her egg cells forcibly taken without her knowledge or consent while she was forcibly
frozen for two decades.
That her son was conceived against her will is tantamount to rape, so her wanting nothing
to do with this constant reminder of that fact makes perfect sense and adds some vulnerability
and range of emotion to the character.
At that point, she doesn't need to ever acknowledge Steve as her son because the nature of his
existence alone has had an effect on her character, which is more than can be said for anything
she's experienced post-4.
But ideally, she would eventually come to terms with it and accept Steve as her son.
Hell, if you really wanted to do something new and unexpected, he could bring the two
sisters together.
Maybe he learns from Anna about how the death of their father Richard drove a deeper wedge
between the sisters, as both blamed the other for his death.
Ignore Death by Degrees, that retcon was stupid.
So, Steve works with Lei to try and uncover what really happened to Richard, identifying
the real culprit, who could be some new member of the cast in Tekken 8 or 9, or maybe Kazuya
trying to manipulate Anna back then or something.
Steve brings this new knowledge to both of them, leading to a ceasefire while they avenge
their father, Steve joining them and helping them to reconnect.
Certainly sounds better than having the two constantly trying to kill each other while
the player is abundantly aware that neither will ever succeed because they'd have to be
removed from the series as a result.
Let fighting game characters move on with their lives.
Don't just rehash the same tired plot points over and over again.
God, the last time these two did anything interesting was when Anna tried to help Nina
through her amnesia.
And that was abruptly ended seventeen pissing years ago.
If you liked this video, why not subscribe and support me on Patreon like these fine
people here?
If not, then make sure to share it with your enemies so they can suffer along with you.
Today's recommended playlist is Gizou Gitai's Tekken Analysis series, covering the full
series up to six currently.
It discusses the story, the themes, the gameplay and other aspects, and has some genuinely
interesting and insightful takes, like how Tekken 6 is a commentary on the War on Terror,
and it actually makes sense.
What?