Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada has been dropping mad amounts of Tekken lore on Twitter, including more details about Tekken 8’s mysterious newcomer Reina.
Tekken’s lore is a magical thing, the 30-plus year saga of guys throwing their sons off cliffs, the sons then throwing their dads into volcanoes, the dads retaliating by sending his son, grandson, and father into space strapped to a rocket – you get the gist. But the fighting game genre has never been the most effective at telling stories, so a lot of the Tekken lore is found outside of the core gameplay, such as on series producer Katsuhiro Harada’s Twitter account.
Over the last few days Harada has been sharing stories about the Tekken lore on Twitter, answering fan questions about a variety of the series’ characters. Some of these tales have explained just small details in Tekken history, such as the Tekken team’s failed plans to do a fakeout with an Armor Queen during the Armor King trailer, or the fact that Hwoarang and Ganryu aren’t those characters’ real names.
However, the most interesting detail Harada shares is a big one. It has to do with Heihachi Mishima (who Harada established as having 25 kids back in 2011), and why the dude has an army of Mishima children primed to be thrown off a cliff.
Heihachi originally threw Kazuya off a cliff to test whether he had inherited his mother’s Devil Gene, since, due to the Mishima clan’s history of slaying demons, Heihachi feared that it may have infected his bloodline.
“Heihachi has fathered numerous biological children in an effort to prove his hypothesis that the Devil Gene does not originate from the Mishima bloodline. In addition to this, he has pursued every possible avenue of genetic research,” says Harada.
Harada then explains that Lars’ mother was a researcher who was working alongside the Tekken Force, which is why Lars has no demonic abilities. But then there’s Reina – the latest of Heihachi’s kids to appear – whose mother is someone Heihachi had identified as having the Devil Gene, which comes to light at the end of Tekken 8’s story mode. However, despite not being raised by Heihachi or her mother, Harada notes “in the Mishima bloodline’s long history of intergenerational conflict, Reina and Heihachi are – at least for now – the only parent-child pair to have a genuinely positive relationship.”
