Review — Tekken: Bloodline
If there’s one thing that’s proven true about video games, they’re difficult to adapt — the number of quality adaptations to cinema or television that don’t suffer from significant backlash is not hard to count. Tekken is no stranger to this. With a late ’90s OVA and pair of live-action films that were all widely panned, and a CGI film that didn’t fare much better, going into Tekken: Bloodline, one might expect some trepidation.
Thankfully, Bloodline succeeds as a competent retelling of Tekken 3, arguably the most acclaimed game in the franchise, modernising and streamlining the game’s story into a slick six-part package. Bloodline focuses on Jin Kazama, a young martial artist who competes in the legendary King of Iron Fist Tournament in order to draw out and defeat Ogre, a supernatural demon-warrior responsible for the death of his mother.
Stripping back Tekken 3 to an almost laser-guided focus on the story of Jin was the right choice — Tekken has a huge roster of memorable characters, and attempting to do justice to all would have been impossible in the limited runtime. For what it is, Jin’s story is a compelling, if somewhat bog-standard, story of a plucky teenage boy corrupted on the road to vengeance. But there is little of the faff and padding that characterises the mundane Shōnen storytelling of longer series; every character, every scene, contributes directly to Jin’s character arc, and this is only to the series’ benefit.
Anime, on the whole, tends to have an easier time of adapting video games, and Bloodline is no exception. The plot moves along at a compelling pace, bolstered by well-drawn cinematography and choreographed fight sequences. The show does make mild use of computer-generation animation, particularly in fights, and one the whole it blends well with the more traditional 2D style, with only a few noticeable instances of character stiffness and weird camera angles. On the whole, Bloodline is shot well enough: it may not blow your mind, but on reflection, it doesn’t need to.
If you grew up playing Tekken during the PlayStation’s heyday, it’s unlikely you won’t find something to smile about in Tekken: Bloodline. The show does a solid job of celebrating the franchise’s legacy and squeezing in shout-outs and references wherever it can, while also offering an easy-in to newcomers, explaining key aspects of the backstory and general world-building as the series goes on.
I got a whole lot more out of Tekken: Bloodline than I expected. I sat down on a whim one night to watch an episode before bedtime, only to find myself watching the credits roll at 3AM after binge-watching all six episodes (as the Netflix model expects of us). It won’t win any awards, but it hardly needs to — if you’re in the market for some good fights, a compelling character arc in Jin, and to see Heihachi Mishima be an evil bastard, this will absolutely be your jam. Check it out.
