The 9 Craziest Moments in the Tekken Series

pcmag.com:

Fighting games are notorious for some pretty wild narrative twists—how else to explain the same cast of characters getting together to beat the stuffing out of each other year after year? But fans know that one series stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to narrative insanity, and that’s Tekken. What started out as a simple tournament to crown the King of the Iron Fist has spiraled into a family saga with some truly nutty twists. With Netflix’s Tekken: Bloodline premiering this week, let's look back at the franchise’s craziest moments.

So the essential conflict at the core of Tekken is the battle between Heihachi Mishima, the host of the tournament, and his son Kazuya. Fathers and sons often don’t get along, but these guys take it to the next level. In Kazuya’s ending for Tekken 1, he defeats his dad and unceremoniously hurls him off a cliff to his death. That would be enough, but this scene repeats in numerous variations throughout the series. In Tekken 2, Heihachi is a playable character and throws Kazuya off the same cliff in his ending. Tekken 4? Kazuya throws Heihachi again, and then again in Tekken 7, which revealed that Dad started it before the first game by throwing Kazuya off as a little kid to test if he had inherited the “Devil Gene” (we’ll get to that).

When great evil threatens the Earth, all manner of forces unite to fight back. One of the most unlikely is a training dummy made from white oak to help martial arts masters train 2,000 years ago. Preserved in a museum, when the events of Tekken 3 begin the dummy is animated by a spiritual force. Calling itself Mokujin, the sphere-handed wooden humanoid heads to the tournament to battle its way to supremacy. After evil is conquered, Mokujin