Yeah the "lean" and "mean" was definitely pretty weak in this movie. This movie totally did not cater to the longtime Tekken fan. This movie was for people who follow today's anime trends of cuteness and underage fanservice.
Which is something that completely irritates me about the cultural trends in Japanese video games.
Look, didn't anybody ever tell these people that there is a time and place for the different tropes of these genres?
A Tekken CGI movie is unlikely, in any incarnation, to ever appeal to anybody outside the hardcore faithful.
This is not Final Fantasy, which has a crossover appeal to female audiences and and to peoples' girlfriends due to all the flowery romance and fake teen idol badassery.
People like Tekken because it's a kinetic game with hard hitting fighting action. It's not my favorite series, but I like it and I understand why other people like it.
Whoever developed this movie's plot clearly doesn't understand it, however.
It feels like a bigger slap in the face because the people who made the intros to Tekken 5 and 6 were the ones who did this. But like I said, when you give people creative freedom they create the story through their eyes. This is essentially what happened with Falcoon and SNK. They saw him draw preexisting characters and were impressed then when they hired him and gave him creative freedom to create characters he pretty much drew what he wanted regardless of if they fit the SNK bill or not.
An excellent point. It's up to the editors of the endeavor to ensure that the creators are staying true to the core values of the IP when they're working on existing content.
If these guys were working on their own thing, then it's no big deal. But when you're making a Tekken movie, or a KOF game or whatever, it's important to stay true to the essential values of what makes it appealing.
People want to complain that 'nothing ever changes' if you don't allow creative freedom, but creative freedom can be applied without losing the essence of the thing.
The Blood Vengeance asshole is the Namco's Falcoon. If someone who had never heard of Tekken were to watch this terrible movie they'd have a completely wrong idea of what the game was really all about. They'd buy it thinking it was a dating sim with demons and robots or something.
I DO think some of these sensibilities are in the game, however.
Mokujin, Kuma, Heihachi strapping people to rockets and launching them into space. Some of this wacky shit is simply in the the games. But there is a proper way to utilize it, and I'm not so sure that a photorealistic CGI adenture movie is the right place for some of the more outlandish elements we see in the games. If the idea is to create a CGI 'realistic' Tekken movie, then you need to find a comfortable medium between the visceral and the fantastic. Sounds, by nearly every account, that the movie didn't do this. And that's a shame. Another waste of the potential of realistic CGI movies.
It could be such a great medium for bringing great things to life in a way that live action can't even touch, and instead they use it as softcore. If these fuckers wanted to do doujinshi, there's nothing stopping them. But this movie just sounds like it diultes the IP in generaly.
I'm actually kinda on the fence now about buying it. That movie made me that fucking mad. I know I love Tekken Tag but I don't know if I'd pay for that horrible movie.
Just get it, dude.
Tekken Tag Tournament HD.
You can't say no to that, and you aren't even being a hypocrite by buying it. You'd be getting it for the game, nothing more.
Small world! Glad he got his money's worth. I sure as hell didn't. I payed 14 dollars for a something I'm totally and completely against. I hate loli moe shit with a passion. I feel like a White Supremacist who accidentially bought tickets to the BET Awards. Fuckin ROBBED.
In all seriousness, I don't have a problem with loli/moe/high school anime and manga. But it has its time and place, and a hybrid of these concepts needs to be executed in exactly the right way.
Amazingly, Capcom pulled this off with Sakura in the SF games. Yes, she wears a sailor fuku. Yes, she's a high school student and a martial artist. Yes, she's cute. But she's a tomboy and barely acts like a girl at all in that respect. She's a scrapper and a fighter, and that's why the concept works for me when she's next to the other characters. Same with Makoto, who, like Sakura, wants to be a fighter first and a dainty high school student second. They don't try to maintain or upkeep their girlish qualities because they want to punch people in the face.
You could even argue that they got it right with Ibuki and Elena, and those two have 'hentai otaku fantasy' written all over them.
'Blah blah blah but what about the people that like school girls in their games?'
Well, there are games for that too. There are even fighters. Just keep them out of the fighters where they don't fit in, you shits.
