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erenaeoth · 3 months

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Hiii! I'm here to read your ramble about TK8's story. Personally I've tried to keep my expectations as low as possible. But I still ended up disappointed. So what's your take? Gimme the good, the bad, and the missed opportunities.

Tekken 8 Story Thoughts

hello hello hello. Tekken 8 spoilers ahead, I'll put them under the cut.

First off, I have to say I'm having a really good time. I enjoyed playing through story mode, I enjoyed the character episodes. I'm loving customising characters, I'm looking forward to my fight stick arriving and learning some cool new combos and playing with mates.

Everything feels really nice, looks very cool (aside from some giant shoulders and oddly proportioned necks), and I adore little touches like Jin and Hwoarang getting to wear each other's clothes.

Story mode.

Well, what can I say.

It's as I feared, really. Honestly, all I can say is that there's a deep lack of appreciation for the skill of writing in the video game world. One day, perhaps Tekken will hire people who care about stories, about plot, about character development and character presentation. There is no conflict in the Tekken 8 story. I know this sounds weird given that 90% of it is Jin and Kazuya punching each other, but here's an example of what I mean:

Leo meets their father for the first time in nearly 15 years. It happens off screen.

Lars goes from wanting to kill Jin, to forgiving him. It happens off screen.

Kazuya goes from having life ambition 'kill Heihachi' to developing a philosophy that advocates the enslavement of the world to his will. It happens off screen.

Hwoarang travels back from the Middle East with one eye; Claudio decides to stop being conniving and instead genuinely help Xiao; Lee builds airships and perfects battlesuits; the UN decides to work with Yggdrasil despite Lars gunning down their troops in TK7. All of this happens off screen.

And still Kazuya and Jin do not manage to have a single conversation. The closest we get is in chapter one, where Kazuya accuses Jin of being just like him. Jin fears, rightly, later, that Kazuya is right, but he's essentially told that if he chooses to be nicer, then no they're not the same. There's no consequences for his actions as head of the Zaibatsu, no real conflict between Jin and any of the people he's hurt, not even Alisa, who sits down for a heart to heart with him and never brings up the way he forced her to hurt Lars and spoke of her as merely a tool and not a person. There is conflict in this story but no Conflict. No drama. No points of difficulty that require meaningful resolution.

And instead we have trite versions of a story that boil down Jin's conundrum to one of acceptance of a force that has destroyed his life, literally torn apart his friends, eaten people, and been a source of torture to him. He's told 'just accept it's a part of you!' as if this is about a surface level appearance, rather than a violence that has destroyed everything he loves, and that he can see the consequences of in Kazuya. I think Devil Jin was treated poorly and tritely in this story, and that if one wants a 'redemption' acceptance for this devil power, it has to come with interrogation and recognition of the way it has hurt Jin and those around him. It canonically hospitalised Hwoarang, and there's no awareness of this in the story.

That said, I really, truly loved this line from Jin to his mother's apparition.

It moved me emotionally in a way that no other video game cutscene has, and for all its misdoings, I'm so pleased this was included in Tekken 8. This is a deeply Jin line to me, written by someone who understands him. Jin's suicidal tendencies have been a recurring theme ever since Devil first awoke, and post-TK6 this is exacerbated further. There's no one on earth who hates Jin more than Jin, and him needing the desire to live as an important part of his strength against Kazuya, is really well done. I wish we could have seen more from Jin conencting with his uncles, Xiao, and Hwoarang to achieve this state of mind, but I commend the sentiment anyway.

When he asked his mother and she granted him the ability to help him, I thought for sure this was going to be about purification. In a way I suppose it was, but I was very tired and unimpressed by Angel Jin. From the overdesign to yet another emphasis on pure violence to defeat Kazuya, I was just completely uninterested. This uninterest was momentarily suspended when they lost their Devil powers, something I thought was brave and interesting of them to do. Somehow this changed absolutely nothing though, and Jin and Kaz don't even pause for a conversation really before they go on.

I do think it's in character for Kazuya to consider his Devil a tool to use for an end, but I think that's much more something he'd say than actually feel. He's had Devil's power with him since he was five years old, and he's relied on it time and again to save him, I think internally he'd be terrified of losing it. Devil is all that's stood between Kazuya and Heihachi for all his life. There's some trite remark about Devil Jin trying to 'protect Jin'. This is only true in so far as DJ awoke when Heihachi gunned Jin down. Devil Kazuya, however, has kept Kazuya alive all his life, and given him the strength to survive in a world where he's constantly been at Heihachi's mercy. Kazuya's desire to live is absolutely what fuelled him all his life, and his need for power comes out of that survival. His infatuation with power grows beyond this, and after Heihachi's death, we see how warped and out of control this grows, but I feel there are deep inconsistencies in the Tekken 8 story because no one ever sat down to really think about Kazuya's relationship with his Devil, and what that might mean for what they were spinning for Jin.

That said, someone was drinking the good stuff when they wrote this:

This is Kazuya's only good line in Tekken 8, in my humble opinion. It's the one moment where they let him have a tiny bit of actual characterisation. They hint at tying his motivations back into experiences linked to fear and lack of control. It's such a shame, because they acheived this much better in Tekken 7, where they drew clear parallels between the childhood trauma Kazuya faced and his final fight against Heihachi. And yet they leave his motivations again in obscurity in this game, leaving the majority of people, including Jin, none the wiser for why he is doing this other than to be evil for evil's sake.

Why does Jin never ask him about Jun? Or mention that he's been seeing his mother? Why does he not talk about purification linked to being a Kazama? Why has he got so much time for thinking about his own difficulties, but never seeks to ask about Kazuya's? One of the reasons I love Kazuya as a character is because he revels in his own villainhood, and will never volunteer a justification for his actions in the way Heihachi or Jin would. He would rather be seen as cruel than as weak. And it's weakness to him to admit or even evaluate within himself why it is that he needs to be all powerful. But that means that, narratively, he needs a foil to play across from him, and ask the questions that will otherwise never be raised. He needs someone like Jin, or Jun, or Lee, who knows him or has the interest in understanding him, to force him to speak about his past.

There's so much missing from this game, I don't really know where to start. I was discussing this with friends, and we feel like someone on the team had some vision, and was trying to do something interesting, but they were largely shot down at every turn by whoever watched Blood Rebellion and wanted that but 2 hours longer and no cute refridgerator scene.

I can't believe I played all of Tekken 8 and I still don't know if Jun is alive, or why Jin isn't being held accountable for his actions, or why Jin and Kazuya even have any beef. Tekken 7 left us with so many questions and Tekken 8 answers basically none of them. At least they managed to tie more of the cast into this game? But then why did everyone just forget about Zafina and Claudio when they collapsed? Don't they care? Where did Hwoarang go? He got on a bike in that fight then never had a battlefield fight or appeared in front of the Sanctum at Yakushima. Why don't Victor or Raven care about Lars defying them last game? Is Raven salty that Jin blew up a helicopter with him (maybe) and all his men in it? Does Jin hear Azazel return to life? Is he affected by it? That MF was talking in his head for months. If Kazuya could have defeated Azazel so easily, why did he just waltz off in TK6?

I do like the idea that the 'two evil stars colliding' as the end of Azazel being Jin and Kazuya destroying each others devils, forshadowed in TK6 and brought to conclusion here, but all the meaning and interest in this is destroyed by whatever they're trying to do with Reina. I cannot expressed how frustrated I am with her as a character. I suppose perhaps she's from the Devil-Human Integration period of research Heihachi undertook, though my understanding was that he never retrieved Devil cells that were needed for the research, or he would have injected himself with Devil. Perhaps Reina was part of a programme that continued on where Steve and the supersoldier programme were left off. I don't know. I just know that it takes a way a lot of impact that could have meant exploring a devil-free Tekken game in future.

One thing I do Not want to see, is Tekken 9 waltzing in with Kazuya suddenly being a good guy, teaming up with Jin and fighting Reina. Not without serious weight and reflection on his actions, or discussing the corrupting influence of Devil over him. And I've lost a lot of faith in Tekken really understanding their characters or story-writing enough to do this.

I didn't even get on to character episodes, but I think I've rambled enough for one day! Thank you for the asks.

#tekken 8 #tekken 8 spoilers #tekken #asks #tekken thoughts

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