Fighting Game Bad Guys Can’t Seem To Stay Dead

By Elijah Gonzalez | July 30, 2024 | 1:18pm

Video Games Features Tekken

Fighting Game Bad Guys Can’t Seem To Stay Dead

All things considered, Evo 2024 was one to be remembered. The prestigious fighting game tournament was defined by exciting storylines, whether it was Hayao, a Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike player who performed one of the most impressive sequences I’ve ever seen while doing splits in real life, or Punk, who finally won it big and became the first American in almost 15 years to take it in Street Fighter. Some of the best players of all time continued their dominance, such as SonicFox, who won their 7th Evo (which is second only behind Justin Wong), or Arslan Ash, who won his 5th while adapting to Tekken 8’s many changes. As far as the matches were concerned, it was one to remember.

However, outside of competition, something irked me a bit (beyond the increasing time spent on advertisements following Sony’s acquisition of the tournament). As we waited for Tekken 8’s Top 6 to begin, there was a break for the next add-on character’s reveal trailer. In the teaser, we saw a masked man performing Mishima-style martial arts as he trained his crew of underlings. We learned how this powerful group working for the masked man is making moves that make them the next big threat. If you hadn’t already guessed the identity of this mysterious figure, a burly silhouette emerged from behind volcano smoke to reveal someone we saw die, Heihachi Mishima.

At least for me, this reveal landed with a dull thud. While killing off significant characters and then bringing them back is a time-honored tradition in fighting games, Heihachi’s “death” in Tekken 7 was a highlight in an otherwise lackluster story mode. After several hours dragged down by dull narration, that game ended in a climactic final battle between father and son that melodramatically harped on the series’ long history. As Kazuya pummeled his dad, the weight of their shared past came across in every punch as scenes from past games flashed before our eyes. It was a sequence that used cutaways and double exposure to channel something similar to Metal Gear Solid 4’s extended fight scene between Snake and Liquid, weaponizing decades-long attachments to these over-the-top antics. After enduring a beatdown, Kazuya knocked his dad unconscious before hucking him in a volcano. “A fight is about who’s left standing. Nothing else,” the victor said as he watched his father sizzle.

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Tekken 8’s main story existed in a post-Heihachi landscape, and as a result, the other characters had room to breathe: a different father and son pair took center stage as Jin attempted to best his own megalomaniacal pops, Kazuya. Meanwhile, we were introduced to Reina, a girl who was clearly positioned as Heihachi’s successor—she sports several of his moves and has a similarly brutal streak that’s already made her a fan favorite. As the game reached its climax, we witnessed a battle between good (Jin) and evil (Kazuya) that felt surprisingly definitive, setting Reina up to seemingly become the series’ next big foe. Altogether, this maximalist action adventure successfully maintained the verve and momentum of the final fight from Tekken 7, flying at a breakneck clip as it delivered conclusive turns that made it seem this series’ mainline story was done spinning its wheels (its most recent arc essentially began in Tekken 6, 17 years ago). It was saccharine and ridiculous but a complete blast.

Now though, it seems this apparent blank slate was a bit of a head fake. Despite setting up an exciting new status quo with Reina as Heichachi’s successor, the old man is somehow back and will be the central figure of the upcoming story DLC, something that takes the pop out of Tekken 7’s ending and makes it appear that Tekken 8’s “decisive” finale was a bit misleading.

Impressively, this isn’t the only long-running fighting game series that recently revealed the return of a deceased big bad who was dramatically killed off in the last entry. About a month and a half ago, M. Bison, the central antagonist of Street Fighter, was announced and promptly released for Street Fighter 6. Again, at least for me, this produced similar feelings of disappointment. Street Fighter V’s story mode, which was the series’ first attempt at a Mortal Kombat-styled “cinematic” single-player experience, centered entirely on defeating this long-time villain, seemingly permanently. Nearly every good guy formed an alliance to take down Bison’s organization, Shadaloo, culminating in Ryu exorcising his personal demons and finally besting his arch-nemesis.

Having killed this guy off, Street Fighter 6 legitimately felt like a new chapter. Chun-Li got her long-awaited revenge for her father, Cammy rescued the other women who had been made into human weapons by Shadaloo, and Ryu was just hanging out. While admittedly, Street Fighter 6 didn’t really do much with this fresh start beyond these interesting character tidbits, in large part because they chose to center the story around a bland self-insert protagonist, the game did introduce the new villain JP, who was clearly meant to take the previous bad guy’s place, Psycho Power and all.

But just like Tekken, they couldn’t help themselves, and another trailer revealed an old foe who couldn’t die. While I think M. Bison’s revival is less egregious, as this version of the character doesn’t remember who he was and may never take back the mantle of being the central antagonist, it’s still a bit of a bummer considering how much Street Fighter V hyped up his demise (and because now that the Dictator is back, we all have to deal with Double Knee Press and Devil Reverse spam online).

On its face, none of this is anything new, as both Heihachi and M. Bison have been killed off and brought back before. Heihachi “died” in Tekken 5, and M. Bison’s whole schtick is that he’s borderline immortal because when his body is destroyed, his soul manifests as an evil energy called Psycho Power, allowing him to possess his next host. As a whole, fighting games are constantly killing off and reviving characters, whether it’s Charlie in SFV or, like, every fighter in Mortal Kombat.

But what makes these latest resurrections a little bit different is that in a post-Mortal Kombat (2011) landscape, many fighting games are now frequently focused on delivering a cohesive “story mode” (i.e., interactive movies interspersed with occasional fights). As mentioned, Street Fighter V was presented this way, and Tekken has shifted towards the same. While the execution of these modes has been mixed, it’s clear that storytelling is a big point of focus for these new installments, which makes it feel all the more hackneyed when the big moments from the previous tale are invalidated because they want to sell these villains as DLC again.

Overall, this shift towards prioritizing these story modes makes a lot of sense, and one reason Mortal Kombat is usually the highest-selling traditional fighter is because it’s built a reputation for its single player offerings. Mortal Kombat (2011) ’s story mode is genuinely a lot of pulpy fun, and while the series hasn’t quite been able to recapture that, there are usually a bunch of other offerings for offline players that give it a wider audience than its peers, like Mortal Kombat 11’s puzzle-oriented Krypt. Beyond this, it makes sense for these games to emphasize their stories because many players are curious about what’s going on with these oddball characters. For instance, while I admit that Guilty Gear’s narrative is a sprawling mess, I had fun diving into these weirdo’s personal histories and found some genuinely resonant narrative threads buried in there.

However, despite Tekken and Street Fighter emphasizing their single player modes more than ever before and gesturing towards fresh futures without their longstanding villains, both couldn’t last a single game without walking things back. While Reina and JP felt set up to carry the torch in their respective series, it appears that neither foe will fully take the limelight. Another significant narrative issue with these revivals is pretty obvious: if popular characters always just get resurrected, then it’s hard to take their deaths seriously. Mortal Kombat has been grappling with this issue for some time, and its constant timeline resets to get around character deaths collapsed in Mortal Kombat 1’s haphazard story, which fully jumped the shark once they brought back the previous game’s Shang Tsung (another guy who seemed like he was defeated in the previous game).

On the one hand, I get it. It sucks when your main, who you may have been playing for decades, is killed off, and you can’t play them anymore. Maybe you can’t find a new character that scratches that same itch, or that matches your playstyle. At first glance, there seems to be a fundamental tension here between gameplay considerations and storytelling because what’s best for one part may not be for the other. As someone who has invested a lot of time into the genre in the past, if I had to pick which half to prioritize, I would probably choose the former over the latter.

However, when it comes to bringing back the dead, there’s a very simple solution: include them for multiplayer and leave them out of the mainline plot. They can be there, it’s just not “canon” or whatever. That way, everyone wins; the people who like that character get to keep playing them, the publisher is happy because the popular character is still in the game driving sales for DLC purchases (which is the cynical interpretation for why these revivals keep happening in the first place), and those who care about the story won’t feel as jilted.

However, in many ways, fighting games are a genre that feels particularly tied to the past. They came to prominence in arcades, and most of today’s big franchises have been around since that era. Many motion inputs from Street Fighter II, like quarter-circles, Dragon Punch motions, and more, are still used today. Sure, there have been gameplay affordances for new players, like bigger buffer windows or autocombos, and plenty of sub-genres have developed over time, such as tag games (King of Fighters), 3D fighters (Tekken), air dashers (Guilty Gear), and platform fighters (Super Smash Bros.). However, compared to many other genres that have entirely transformed over time, the space is relatively close to where it was more than 30 years ago.

Overall, it feels that there’s a very backward-looking quality to the genre’s design, and it took years for certain important features, like rollback netcode, to take root. Tied to this, these games are largely afraid of deviating too much from their expected casts or existing stories, especially after Street Fighter III met an initially lukewarm reception when it featured few returning characters. While I enjoy many of the genre’s old-school sensibilities, including these games’ complexity, I don’t understand why that same stagnant impulse needs to affect their storytelling.

Mortal Kombat 1 was completely unable to deliver on its timeline reset, and now both Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 are adding back villains who were recently defeated in dramatic fashion. In the case of Heihachi, the series’ creative director, Katsuhiro Harada, literally said that the character was dead for good (something they lampshaded when they included a clip of this statement after the announcement).

Listen, I get that fighting game story modes, even the best-executed ones like Mortal Kombat (2011) or Tekken 8, are very silly and shot through with longstanding conventions and references that can make them a little hard to get into. But for a brief window, it seemed like several of the big series were genuinely moving forward: Mortal Kombat 1 with a timeline reset, Tekken 7 and 8 largely clearing away its existing baddies, and Street Fighter 6 moving past the Dictator. Maybe that shift will still happen, and the revived foes will only exist in a secondary role, but I wouldn’t count on it. As the genre attempts to appeal to a broader audience by doubling down on single player pursuits, now more than ever, they’d benefit from making a clean break from what came before, at least as far as their narratives are concerned. Otherwise, we’ll be throwing the same old men into volcanoes for the rest of our lives.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.