#i went a bit crazy in its trivia section on the wiki. and dont get me started on its implications for kazuya

[erenaeoth]

This is actually good.This is very good in fact .If Kazuya story ended like that i would not be mad at all.It is even better than a redemption arc because i do not know how it could have been pulled and it would have been less satisfying.

Now regarding the whole lore of Tekken i think they should do a reboot starting from tekken 4 in my opinion . Because the whole Jin start World War 3 was off for me and Akuma who appear just now is even more off. What do you think?

Sorry the thread was too long for me to reblog. But i still enjoy reading it .

Jin & His Gradual Fall Into Devil Jin

-> previous thread

I'm not a fan of reboots. I came to Tekken from Mortal Kombat where we got a reboot every 5 seconds trivialising previous storylines.

I know lots of people are dismayed by Jin's choices in Tekken 6, but if you look closely just at the material referring to him in Tekken 4 and Tekken 5, (and including Devil Within), you can see all the groundwork for this boy going off the deep end. He spends two games losing it to the Devil Gene, and making it very clear that he cannot control himself. He even returned to the only home where he felt at peace, and his devil destroyed enormous swathes of forest there. This is someone raised by Jun Kazama for whom that forest would have been near sacred. He's sent secret letters to his friends warning them, he's tried to stay away from them, and all his profiles talk about him losing a battle to his devil.

Like in Tekken 4 we have him solely thinking of revenge and trying to end the Mishimas, isolating himself on his own and trying to unlearn his karate, as if that will help. We have him struggling over his Devil in Hon Maru and managing to hold out. Then we get his Tekken 5 prologue:

Jin Kazama. A child of destiny. After fighting Kazuya and Heihachi, an evil spirit swelled within Jin. Awakened by an unknown voice, Jin looked around at a forest completely destroyed. And he knew he was the one who did it. Returning to Yakushima, Jin was plagued with nightmares triggering the devil gene.

"If this keeps eating away at me, I don't know how long I can hold on" says Jin.

Jin sets out on a journey to end this evil, with destiny as his only guide.

And don't forget this happens during Tekken 5:

During the tournament, Jin was defeated by his rival, Hwoarang. However, Jin's devil form took over him and as a devil he brutally injured Hwoarang, allowing him to progress in the tournament.

And bear in mind we have an entire mini game (which may even be canonical) where Jin slowly loses it to his devil. Devil Within is filled with Jin's own nightmares, and it becomes unclear if he really fights all those creatures or if the game is actually an extended metaphor of him losing himself, but he descends deeper into places where he has less control, and it's no accident that completing the game is one of the ways you unlock Devil Jin as a playable character (the game itself goes back through Jin's traumas - he starts off looking for his mother, then fights Heihachi, Ogre, etc. whilst fighting for control of himself). And then of course Jin's Tekken 5 ending gives us that very Kazuya-like smirk from him on his throne on the end.

I think a lot of people were put off by Jin seeming in control and like his rationalisations made him cogent and vaguely believable in Tekken 6, but if you look just at the character arc itself, he's clearly lost a battle to the dominant influence of the devil, and his characterisation is deliberately a mirror of Kazuya (think also of all that stuff about two evil stars clashing). Lots of Jin's aims in Tekken 6 talk about balance and restoration in a warped dark mirror of Kazama teachings, and Jin himself talks about Azazel's voice in his head in that game, guiding his actions (although he thinks he's in control enough to make the choice to listen to that voice himself). Jin is certainly still fighting his devil, since he doesn't yet have control over it, so hasn't merged like Kazuya has, but he's lost a significant amount of his moral agency to the thing, or at least this is what's heavily implied.

For this to have resolvable importance, the devs are going to have to talk to us about how much responsability someone being consumed by a foreign devil entity has over their actions, since the only real difference between Jin and Kazuya at this point is that Jin still probably has regret and wants to ultimately be rid of that evil. If Jin isn't culpable for the war, then neither is Kazuya for his actions, so I don't think they'll go that route, but its certainly the case that Jin has lost a lot of himself in a fight to his devil, and that his choices have been warped by that influence.

So that's why I'm not interested in a reboot: I feel like Tekken 6 is a natural progression of Jin's storyline. Akuma is another story and his inclusion irritates me no end, not least because it implies the canonical existence of Satsui no Hado, and both Heihachi and Kazuya would not have left a power like that go unpursued. That said, I strongly suspect Akuma will never be mentioned in a Tekken game again, and they will just casually ignore that they threw him into the plotline and all the inconsistencies that came with it.