The Captain wrote:Anyway. Tekken, the series singlehandedly responsible for confusing, non-sequiteur endings, along with stories lacking 99% of all necessary information. Who in the blue hell is Doctor Abel? Why is there an angel kicking heads in? Why is Armour King sat depressed on a bench? Why does Yoshimitsu's ending shamelessly rip off the Goosebumps book Monster Blood II? No idea. But you can betchyer ass I'm watching Bryan Fury chuck that tank turret another five times.
Tekken is one of those series where stuff really could have done with additional explanation in the first three games as very little was told to the player. Armour King in King's Tekken 3 ending was feeling down because seeing the second King become champion made him reminisce about his dear friend (the first King) who was murdered by Ogre. The game doesn't tell you that stuff but if the player knew the moments would hold meaning as opposed to just being confusing.
Doesn't matter anyway as the story spiralled out of control after 5 (Jin Kazama starts a global war, killing millions, just so he can prematurely awaken a monster that will destroy the world unless defeated and with it erase the Devil Gene (which ends up not happening)
).
As for new characters, I do think Tekken has fallen victim to the very thing Tekken 3 was made to avoid. With 3 they replaced almost the entire cast with new characters and dramatically changed the tone of the game to fit the time that it was made in. These changes paid off massively, Jin Kazama was a far more appealing lead character than Kazuya or Heihachi ever could be, every new character had an obvious appeal and it helped make those characters iconic. Just look at how the game was sold to people in regards to the charaters:
People know these characters, even the returning characters like Yoshimitsu, Nina, Paul and Lei are best remembered for how they looked in 3. The time skip they did with Tekken 3 was a very smart move for its time and no other game has ever got it right since (Soul Calibur tried it but it failed because Soul Calibur is a historical game, Tekken is supposed to be contemporary).