This Week in Anime
Is Tekken: Bloodline Worth Watching?

by Steve Jones & Monique Thomas,

Tekken franchise newbies Nicky and Steve try out the new six-episode anime series to see if the story (and action) hold up.

This series is streaming on Netflix

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Steve
Nicky, I just heard about this great international mixed martial arts tournament with a ton of prestige, a hefty cash prize, and open enrollment. There's just one teensy little catch: you might have to fight a bear.
Nicky
A bear is no problem. Ever since I spectated the last EVO, I have been spending day and night practicing combos and failing miserably. I'll never make it to the bear because I can't even avoid getting my butt kicked by Reindog. Though, a bear also scares me less than the idea of having to fight Neco-Arc.
Alas, the fighting life is not for everyone. After all, we can't all be born into a notorious zaibatsu dynasty which also happens to harbor some latent genetic coding for pure evil. We can't all have impossible haircuts. We can't all pull off flaming JNCOs. But for those of us who can, there's Tekken to play. And for those of us who can't, well, there's Tekken: Bloodline to watch.
Inspired by the plot of Tekken 3, Tekken: Bloodline focuses on Jin Kazama, who was raised by his mother, Jun Kazama, up until a creature called Ogre came a knockin' and blew his whole life apart. I'll note while it's based on the popular Japanese fighting game, the script and the original dub for this adaptation were completely written in English and animation being mainly done by the anime studio Larx Entertainment doing the kind of 3DCG we've all come to expect from Netflix.
Nobody churns out weird unasked-for six-episode OVAs (or I guess they're called ONAs now) like Netflix. For better or worse. Me, I've played about 1.5 Tekken games total in my lifetime, so right off the bat I'm going to cop to not knowing what I'm talking about. As per usual. Luckily, though, one of those that I played was indeed Tekken 3, so I'm not totally in the dark here. I know there's a jaguar man. It's normal.
And unfortunately I have even less experience with fighting games other than what I can randomly absorb through osmosis. Which is actually quite a bit considering all my best pals are huge nerds. Though I remember Kazuya's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate promo video particularly for making tossing other characters into an active volcano like his father did to him an equally dramatic and hilarious bit. And I wish Tekken: Bloodline carried even a fifth of that energy.
More so than any particularities, the most important thing to understand about Tekken lore is that, like most fighting games, the story is completely insane. And about half of it involves cliffs. Heihachi threw Kazuya off a cliff when he was a kid. Kazuya throws Heihachi off a cliff at the end of OG Tekken. Heihachi throws Kazuya into a volcano at the end of Tekken 2. It's a whole thing with the Mishima family, and you don't have to understand it to enjoy the absurdity of it.

The rub is that, while most fighting game stories are totally fun, campy nonsense, translating them into other media tends to not work out, at least historically.

Personally, reading the Tekken wiki boggled me less than trying to read the Guilty Gear one. (I both greatly anticipate and dread the day an actual Guilty Gear anime gets announced.) Cuz when you zoom out, it really is just the story of one really violent family with a lot of flashy execution and stuff in-between. Some of which follows some archetypes commonly found in other martial arts based narratives. Like Tiger Masks?!
I mean, to be fair, there is also the part where the company chairman has a bodyguard grizzly bear who joins the fray, But yes, that is a good point, especially when Bloodline begins as a pretty standard martial arts coming-of-age narrative for Jin. In fact, it's so standard, hitting all the expected plot beats, that I was tuned out until one of the Pillar Men showed up.
Yeah, while trying to be a more modern adaptation there's part of me that wants to diagnose Bloodline with "Netflix Disease," the condition where, once infected possibly by some sort of executive motto, all anime produced by Netflix start feeling the same. The same pace, the same ADR, the same visual direction and plot beats. Despite being done by different people!! Jin at age 15 is being chased by bullies through the forest. He retributes by opening up a fresh can of ass-kicking upon them. But by that time I'm already inflicted by symptoms of drowsiness.

He gets scolded by his mom and teacher about the importance of self-control, but y'know in a down-to-earth mom fashion? She's got hella mom jeans.
You know I love me a MWCKMA (mom who can kick my ass), but it's a real shame that Jun only speaks in martial arts platitudes. And the endemic problem that plagues the whole production is pacing. There's so much redundant dialogue and soporific pauses in the action. It utterly fails to emulate any of that controller-clenching tension that keeps your blood pumping from bout to bout.
It's not an actor problem either since I know Kaiji Tang, who plays Jin, can do excellent work from hearing him as Gojo in the Jujutsu Kaisen dub. But every line read is just soooo slow and since it's likely recorded in English first, switching to the Japanese dub didn't make much of a difference in performance. But it's worth mentioning since it makes all Jun's lessons in particular feel pretentious and unimportant because there's no weight behind their meaning. This is a huge failure because she's supposed to be the moral crux of the story and her death is the thing that drives Jin throughout.

I am of the belief that it's partially in the writing because Jun is portrayed as this young and relatable cool-parent that's more typical of many mom stories now, but it creates a less imposing impression of someone who very strongly believes in her ideals that we're supposed to really internalize as truth.
The voice direction also feels like the equivalent of fiddling with margins and spacing to meet a page requirement in a high school English paper. Because the fact is, there's usually not a whole lot of meat in any one character's arc in any one fighting game. These are products that thrive on having large, colorful casts from a variety of backgrounds. Like, the ideal Tekken 3 anime adaptation is probably closer to an anthology than to a bildungsroman about Jin.

So what I'm saying is: give us an anime about Mokujin.

Wood bro doesn't even get a cameo in Bloodline. That's unforgivable.

It also doesn't really seem to fully flesh out some of the material it does have either. Like, it could've been a cool opportunity to show things like Jun's feelings towards Jin's evil father Kazuya in the way the games never could, or we could've seen some of the crazy things the Mishima Corporation were up to without tearing away from the focus of Jin's story. Instead, the scope seems small. Jin's mother tells him to seek out his grandfather, Heihachi Mishima, and then after a couple years of of training he's off to the tournament.

After being lectured by his mom for a full episode we then spend several episodes being lectured by Heihachi, his paternal grandfather. Unlike the Kazama style his mother taught him that focuses on throws and disarming people, the Mishima style is to be fully aggressive, striking down and destroying your opponent until there's nothing left. Heihachi is as brutal in the ring as he is in business. He doesn't respect anyone, especially not Jin.

I can respect the attempt to tie the martial arts and story themes together, but to be honest, what I respect more is how Bloodline adds in little impact VFX to its fights, to emulate the game.

While I don't know if that's a smart aesthetic decision, it is cute.
Unfortunately, the fights still feel pretty weightless due to the CG, so even though there's supposed to be different styles, none of them felt greatly different to me.
And Heihachi is one of the all-time great video game bastards, so you don't have to do much to make him look like an asshole. Though I do love Bloodline decides the best way to show this is to have him deny Jin's request for hella sick flame-print pants.

He has the potential to be a pretty good heel as well as ideological opponent for Jin, but he talks forever and never feels quite as interesting as your average Baki villain. Which is the level of HAM I would've wanted for something like this.
I'm just sad the show deprives us of the scene where Heihachi finally rubber-stamps Jin's pants request. That's a huge part of his arc.

Though the show's exposition is at its best when it's the most clumsy. Like the absurdly long montage of headlines as Jin reads about his dead dad. It goes on at least three times as long as it needs to, but at least most of the article titles are hilarious.

Like, screw the Iron Fist Tournament. Most Hated CEO has got have the stiffest competition out of any contest, period. This dude beat Elon Musk. Let that sink in.
If only the real world solved CEO battles through deadly combat. I could pick a few that could use a good toss off a cliff.
Once we do get to the tournament proper, things do pick up a bit, if only because we finally meet some more of the colorful roster that makes Tekken Tekken.
Why is Polnareff here and why did he steal Ken's outfit?
Top secret Speedwagon Foundation work, don't worry about it.
We also get Kazuma's friends/rivals Hwoarang and Ling Xiaoyu that he met during his time training and going to school while living under Heihachi's roof.

But also, major points down for the fact that Xiaoyu doesn't even have her panda with her.
Another unforgivable sin. And to be clear, by "met" we mean "they each got five seconds worth of screen time in the episode 2 montage."

That's part of what I meant about the scope being too small earlier, Jin spends more screen time punching training dummies than these guys before the tournament.
This is also as good a time as any to bring this up: Bloodline exhibits a consistent stylistic quirk where every character, regardless of the lighting, has a heavy triangular shadow covering their body. And let's just say some examples are more obvious than others.

It's the kind of thing where, once I noticed it, it's the only thing I could pay attention to.

The show's style isn't bad all the time, some of the 2D close-ups of expressions are clean, but it's that kind of consistency that makes it blur very hard for me both aesthetically and emotionally.
Yeah I don't think the show looks particularly bad or anything, and I do think it's pretty cool that they tried to stay true to each character's fighting style. But it's not gonna turn the heads of anyone who isn't already big into Tekken. Well, okay, the fight between Nina and Xiaoyu might, but for entirely separate reasons.
I think Xiaoyu had my favorite fights overall since she's really different compared to some of the more brute force styles and her technique comes off despite the floaty-ness of the animation. Even Heihachi gives her some credit, which is super rare for him.
The grappling definitely adds a fun layer onto Tekken's fight choreography, whether that goes down between Xiaoyu's thighs, or comes from King turning the tables on her.
Though, we also got Leroy Smith, who I was surprised to see cuz he's actually a new character that was introduced in Tekken 7 but then I got super disappointed as he only exists for Jin to break his leg in the first match.

He has a decent reason to hold a grudge too since Mishima Corp killed his whole family in New York 50 years ago but do we ever get see that? Nope. Again just a lot of waisted potential to expand the scope that the story never takes and leaves only to implication at best.
Bloodline leaves so much good stuff on the cutting room floor. It even has the gall to tease us about it. Like, how dare they give us this line of dialogue, then never show us a single peek of the action itself. Downright insulting.

Clearly, to some degree, it understands what attracts people to Tekken, but then it refuses to follow through with the deliciously absurd goods.

And while some of the tournament fights can be sweet, they're ultimately short and usually sandwiched with exposition. Like I thought the stuff surrounding King being a successor was interesting because the first King was reported killed by Ogre but the way it was told was kind of boring when everything is just delivered by Heihachi to make Jin and the audience feel dumb or by tell and don't show.
The only exposition I forgive is the stuff about the Devil Gene. Because lmao.

"Sorry kid, I had to throw your dad into a volcano because he was genetically predisposed to becoming Satan."
But it sucks when that applies to every character that you could feel just something better that you're not actually watching! Jin learns that Mishima might be totes responsible for the Ogre problem after Julia Chang fails an assault on Heihachi and still wants to go along with the tournament for the sake of his revenge.
The anime also never goes into WHY Heihachi wants Ogre in the first place, but that ties into the larger issue that Bloodline on its own just isn't a complete story. Neither is Jin's part in Tekken 3 for that matter. It's just one chapter in the larger Mishima family narrative, fleshed out by all the other characters' side stories and, of course, the gameplay. Paring it down to Jin's arc strips too much away, and the anime just isn't good enough to add sufficient depth to make up for what's lost.

On the surface, for example, Jin's final bout with Heihachi hits all the twisted familial cues you'd expect it to, but it's all way too hollow.

Yeah, so if the point of this series is to draw new people like us into the Tekken franchise it really fails at that because it leaves out so much that brings in wider appeal even when kept to its most base elements. I don't really see the appeal as fanservice either when you don't get an expanded version of the thing you've already experienced, even if this is technically a step above PSOne graphics.
It begs the eternal Netflix Original question "who asked for this?" Tekken 3 is an important entry in fighting game canon, and in video game canon overall. But I don't see a reason to adapt a >25 year old fighting game, except as an empty ploy on people's nostalgia. And if they were gonna do that, they needed to at least make it fun to watch.
I think even if this was somehow just supposed to be an empty excuse for a brain-off action show, it doesn't serve that treatment. I know there's a mass audience for a Tekken anime. There are a few satisfying moments in this but they can't carry the show through its slow pacing. If you're a big martial arts nerd, you've probably already got a bunch of more interesting foreign films clogging your Netflix queue or a ton of anime in your backlog you haven't watched yet.
I will acquiesce, my experience was almost entirely worth it solely for the moment (ripped from the game, admittedly) when Heihachi decides he's had enough martial arts bullshit and whips out a pistol. But sadly, that alone does not a worthwhile anime make. In fact, I wish I'd used this time to just pick up Tekken 3 again.

Maybe real Tekken diehards will see it differently, but personally, I'd put Bloodline out to pasture. RIP.
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