Tekken 6: King of Iron Fists, Online Manga, and Paper Stories
November 23rd, 2009 by david brothers | Tags: manga, reviews, tekken, Video GamesTekken 6 came out on PS3 and 360 a while back (and is forty-four bucks on Amazon right now and totally worth the purchase
(It’s like playing with dolls, only they fight.)
The thing with Tekken, though, is that its story is dumb. It has a space alien/ancient Japanese ninja who looks like a bug, a bear who takes over a corporation, a kangaroo that gets divorced and that kangaroo’s son who goes on a quest to find his deadbeat father, and a series of people being thrown into volcanos, off cliffs, and into space so that someone else can become president of Mishima Corp. Everything is treated as having happened, including the dumbest “I had a secret twin all along!” twist I’ve seen in my entire life.
It would work very well as a comic, and luckily, Japan is on top of things. Ultra Jump, a spinoff of Shonen Jump, has an online arm called Ultra Jump Egg. And on Ultra Jump Egg is… TekkenComic, a Tekken manga by Rui Takato (author of Scape-God, summaries available here), produced for Tekken’s 15th anniversary and Ultra Jump’s 20th.
The twist is that it’s also available in English, which is new and neat. Pressing a button overlays English text over the Japanese balloons. It’s a little punctuation starved, save for… ellipses, and the font could scale better, but it reads pretty well. And it’s funny. It opens on the story of Paul Phoenix, who, along with Steve Fox and Marshall Law, have entered the King of Iron Fist Tournament to cheat their way to the ten million yen.
The comic has three chapters up (of three?) and it’s pretty entertaining. The shower scene is kind of gratuitous, and I hadn’t realized exactly how much of a stereotypical anime girl Asuka Kazama was before now (all she needs is a magically appearing hammer). Despite that, Lili as Schoolgirl Imperialist really, really works. And I dug Leo’s brief interlude, too. Considering the last page of Battle 03, if this is an ongoing thing (and some 4l! reader with Japanese language skills please let me know!) I’ll tune in once a week. It’s just as delightfully dumb as the game’s story, which may well be the anti-pull quote of all anti-pull quotes, but I like it. Maybe Viz will license it and put it out over here?
Fair warning, though. Battle 03 is basically frilly panty heaven. Or maybe hell, depending on who you are and where you work.
Similar Posts:
- My Grandpa’s Stories Can’t Be This Weird
- Here’s How You Break Your Thumb Playing Tekken 3
- Three Webcomics You Should Be Reading
- Service Interruption, or “JLA is inept”
- Anti-Americanism & Manga
I’ve been reading it myself, and I have found it entertainingly silly. I’ll admit a soft spot for some of the daft facial expressions and when the characters appear as superdeformed munchkins. Lili’s “look over there bit” is probably best for that.
Being a fan of characters like Sakura from Street Fighter, I like my stories about headstrong schoolgirls who kick the crap out of people…
But damn, for a 17 year old, Asuka is friggin’ racked. Seriously, for someone that young who is so physically active, that’s a pretty ludicrous cup size she’s sporting there. I mean, I’m as perverted and sexually frustrated as the next male comic book reader, but even I can tell that’s a little odd.
At least the comic draws attention to that fact once or twice… Although whether that’s a good or bad thing probably depends on your viewpoint.
@Eno: Yeah, it’s very much in the vein of a slightly dirty boy’s comic as far as that goes. “Ha ha, perverted humor” and all. Fan service at work, I guess. She’s more realistic, at least less stacked, in the game.
@david brothers:
Asuka’s disconnect compared to her in-game depiction is weird, but it’ll get creepy if the games actual fan service characters (like Christie & the Williams sisters) show up in future installments with comparably exaggerated attributes.
That said, other than the minor skeeviness, the comic’s very enjoyable. Here’s hoping there’ll be more stuff in the vein of the Paul & Law scam from the first chapter… Asuka’s schoolgirl vigilantism is a little too generic for my tastes.
I dunno, in her usual costume (the blue number with the bodysuit unzipped almost all the way down to her crotch) she’s still pretty busty. In her school uniform though she seems a lot more believably sized… However considering her ending in Tekken 5 mostly consisted of Jin landing face first between her bosoms, I don’t think this comic is the only source of breast-related fan service of the character.
Okay, maybe not best to dwell on it for too long. It was at least nice of the comic to bring up her relation to Jin, something that was almost entirely avoided in Tekken 5 except for her weird magic healing hands or whatever.
@JM: For some reason, I feel like Anna and Nina would show up closer to normal, but maybe that’s because their in-game depictions are so “healthy,” to put it delicately.
Say what you want about Tekken’s backstory, but if more corporations were run by bear kung fu masters, would the economy have gone into recession?
@LurkerWithout
No, they would not. Kuma-sama would have read something about “Grr, subprime loans make no sense”, and he would have Salmon Hunter’ed the shit out of the person who decided to hand him that piece of paper.