Even the main menu screen reflects this, depicting nothing but the shadowed face of a very old Heihachi. He’s a tired, old man who is just ready to die. As the story progresses, it’s clear that, despite all of his grandiose posturing and attempts to kill his son, Heihachi has serious regrets about how things have turned out. In a way, the game sort of telegraphs that this would be the ultimate outcome. It’s perfectly framed from a gameplay perspective, with each round ramping things up with drama that eventually escalates to Heihachi, with a tiny life bar, fighting a full-power Devil Kazuya before everything just devolves into two angry, grown men slugging the shit out of each other until Kazuya finally ends his dad and, fittingly, drops his body into a volcano. Oh, and Akuma from Street Fighter is there, too, for plot reasons that are lightly explained.īut my favorite part of the story mode has to be the final battle between Heihachi and Kazuya. She was originally the final boss of the arcade version, but the story mode adds a lot of context to her role, and how her fate ended up affecting Heihachi and Kazuya. The game also goes far deeper into the backstory of the Mishima family’s drama, and finally introduces Heihachi’s wife/Kazuya’s mother, Kazumi. The weakest element is the narrator, a nameless journalist with a flat line delivery (and whose face is purposefully and bizarrely kept hidden from view), but any time the Mishimas are on screen, it’s really fun. Between all of the bodies getting tossed off of cliffs, implausible escapes from certain death, the Devil Gene, and everything else, it can be pretty easy to write Tekken’s storyline off as Just Another Shitty Fighting Game Story.Įxcept Tekken 7 really does make a concerted, genuine effort to tell a story retains elements of Tekken’s crazier elements while bringing some genuine pathos to Heihachi and Kazuya’s story. I mean, the Tekken storyline is bonkers, even when it’s distilled down to just the personal war between Heihachi and Kazuya. And the story is actually presented really well with the fights generally inserted with proper context, along with additional mid-fight cinematic flair for dramatic effect. Harada had said that the game would bring the series’s primary conflict, the age-old struggle between asshole dad Heihachi Mishima and his asshole son (and Jin’s asshole dad) Kazuya to a legitimate conclusion.

In all honesty, what’s really impressed me the most with Tekken 7 is the story mode.

And, possibly the most amazing point from a personal perspective, I’m not completely embarrassing myself in ranked matches. And…this might actually be my favorite Tekken?! The fighting feels as good as ever, and the rage arts add a new twist to take into account. This Father’s Day weekend, I finally got started on Tekken 7, playing through its story mode and dipping my toes into fighting online.

Who is the narrarator of tekken 7