Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge (2014)

Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014)

Release Date: August 21, 2014

For this blog, I'm going to put in some Tekken music to listen to while you read. Let me know if you like this idea, I might do it again once in a while, though the music won't always be Tekken of course, it will be appropriate to the subject.

The Tekken film was mediocre. In all honesty, mediocre is generous. I should clarify by saying that it was actually pretty bad, but it did have two things going for it. Fortunately, one of those things was that the fight choreography was excellent, which is surely the main reason you would want to watch a Tekken film in the first place. As such, that alone is enough to elevate the film to the point that it scrapes a pass. (The first Mortal Kombat film is still better though.) I recently discovered that there was a sequel, entitled Kazuya’s Revenge. The film is actually a prequel, but the misleading title is the least of its concerns.

Kazuya Mishima (Technically, we’re not supposed to know this yet, but the title didn’t try to keep it a secret, so I’m not going to either) wakes up in a hotel room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Unfortunately, there were no hijinks the previous night that involved losing the groom the day before his wedding or stealing Mike Tyson’s pet tiger, and before Kazuya can start to think about what happened, a squadron of armed guards burst into his room, possibly to check that he isn’t trying to sneak hotel towels home in his luggage. Kazuya flees, which is an admission of guilt if that’s why the guards were there, but karma gets him intimately acquainted with the bumper of a car, and the film ends

Just kidding, Kazuya survives. When he comes to, he has been taken to the slums, where he is being held by the girls from Sucker Punch and their boss, the Minister. He asks if Kazuya is an angel, and Kazuya answers that he is not an Angel, or a Devil, or an Ogre, and he’s definitely not an Azazel, whatever one of those is. In return, Kazuya gets to ask a question.

Kazuya: Which character from the games are you supposed to be?

Minister: Excuse me?

Kazuya: I said, which character from the games are you supposed to be?

Minister: I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.

Kazuya: Admit it, you’re Wang Jinrei, aren’t you?

The Minster gives everyone that comes to his slum a new name, but Kazuya only gets a letter because he’s a weirdo who creeps the Minister out with his fourth-wall breaking. Conveniently enough, the Minister has reached K in the alphabet, and thus Kazuya is now known as K. Kazuya gets a bomb implanted in him because the Minister just watched Suicide Squad and is instructed to fight the other inhabitants of the slums, which he does for a bit. After fighting a few people, Kazuya finds an Irish accented mugger harassing a woman and beats the accent out of him, and the grateful woman becomes his friend and later, his lover. She works as a doctor, which comes in useful for removing the bomb that the Minister (who Kazuya is now convinced is Steve Fox) implanted in Kazuya, then promptly forgot about.

One of the Sucker Punch girls also takes an interest in Kazuya, and she gets him to help her with assassinations. Kazuya assassinates people for a bit, until one day, he is assigned to assassinate a character from the games. Kazuya gets very excited when it turns out to be fan-favourite Bryan Fury, as he was so desperate to meet someone at this point he was willing to settle for the universally-reviled Lucky Chloe. This works against Kazuya, as he gets so excited, he can’t focus on his mission, and Bryan escapes. Bryan then comes back to tell Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl that he escaped the slums because the Minister is bad, he knows how Kazuya can regain his memories, and he knows which game character the Minister is, but he’s not telling on the last one. It’s a secret. Armed with this new information, Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl kill the Minister.

Kazuya: I’m so sorry for killing you, Paul Phoenix, but if you’d just told me who you were, we could have avoided all this.

Minister: For the last time, I am not in the games! When will you get it through that thick skull of yours?

Kazuya: Stop lying Lei Wulong. You are in the games because Bryan Fury said so and he’s in the games, so he would know what he’s talking about.

Minister: Why can’t I die faster?

With the detour done, Kazuya and the Sucker Punch girl go to the Mishima Zaibatsu, where she doesn’t fight the other Sucker Punch girls, Heihachi explains the backstory and kills the love interest, and Kazuya fights Heihachi’s two henchmen, at which point the film ends with very little resolved and no indication of how the events will lead into the film to which this is supposedly a prequel.

Before getting into the meat, I’ll rant about the title first. It’s a petty complaint for sure, but it does tie into the issues with the film itself, so bear with me. Given how the first film ended with Jin defeating Kazuya in the King of Iron Fist Tournament, costing Kazuya his position as the heir of the Mishima Zaibatsu’s fortune, you would expect a sequel entitled Kazuya’s Revenge to be about Kazuya hunting Jin down for a rematch, either by arranging another tournament, but this time with the twist of a gauntlet where Jin has to battle all the other competitors one by one, all of whom are trying to kill him, or just skipping the tournament and trying to kill Jin outright. No, it is in fact a prequel in which Kazuya is an amnesiac for most of the running time, so he doesn’t actually want revenge. Not to mention, for most of the film he is referred to as K as he doesn’t remember his name, so the title spoils what is treated by the film as a twist. The title is both nonsensical in context, and clichéd out of context, and the same could be said of the film. How so? Let us count the ways…

If an adaptation’s faithfulness to the source material is a big deal for you, you would probably get rather annoyed with Tekken, as it takes great liberties with several things, such as heroic characters portrayed as villains or most of the characters having different fighting styles to the ones they usually use. Despite that, it’s bearable in the context of the film, where the world is a terrible place ravaged by war and corruption, with precious little optimism to go around. There was a sense that the film was aware of the source material but chose to go in a different direction. The solution Kazuya’s Revenge came up with was to jettison everything from the games except for a handful of character names, and replace for a series of clichés, most of which have no business being in Tekken. These include, but are not limited to: an amnesiac hounded by armed guards for reasons he doesn’t remember, a shanty town ruled by survival of the fittest, internal bombs, an evil megacorp, a charismatic but ominous leader and flashbacks to a sterile laboratory-esque location. Only three of the characters appear in the games, of whom two (Kazuya and Bryan Fury) act completely differently from their portrayals in both the games and the first film (Film 1 Kazuya is an utter bastard who usurps his father as the main antagonist, and Revenge Kazuya is far too nice in comparison, meaning that going completely off the rails off-screen between films is implausible despite being the logical explanation for the contradiction), and two only appear towards the end (Bryan Fury again and Heihachi.) As a result, we spend most of our time with Kazuya and a host of new characters exclusive to this film, none of whom are particularly interesting. The Minister is a pretty rubbish villain because although we’re assured that he’s evil, he doesn’t do anything evil, and we’re not even told what evil things he’s supposedly done. We just have to take the film’s word for it that he’s evil, although with a name like that and the vaguely ominous aura around him, it’s pretty obvious he’s the bad guy. The Sucker Punch henchwomen are similarly devoid of character, especially the one who switches sides for seemingly no reason, as she doesn’t get any personality or character traits to justify her increased focus in comparison to the others or why she would want to change her ways. Disappointingly, none of the major villains get fight scenes, as Heihachi escapes and the good Sucker Punch henchwoman on-shots everyone else without a fight. Consequently, all the fights are against unnamed mooks and as such, the outcome is never in doubt, with choreography that isn’t as fast-paced, weighty or exciting as before and the fights are over too quickly to get excited about them anyway. Kazuya’s Revenge is an adaptation in name only, and the new material isn’t nearly interesting enough to make up for ignoring the source material so brazenly.

Despite the short running time, not much happens in Kazuya’s Revenge. After the opening sequence where Kazuya escapes the hotel, there are several scenes of him fighting people and the Minister’s henchmen killing the defeated opponent when Kazuya refuses to do it himself. After that, there are several scenes of Kazuya assassinating people. This is followed by several scenes with the love interest, and finally what passes for a plot begins in the last 10 minutes, with no time to develop it, so the beats are hit with no fanfare or attachment to what’s going on. The film doesn’t end so much as it stops when Heihachi shows up to give an exposition dump, kills the love interest with poison lip stick, then leaves while Kazuya fights two of his henchmen. Heihachi only appears in this one scene, but since he’s played by Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, reprising the role from the first film, where he was the second thing the film had going for it, he’s automatically the best thing in Kazuya’s Revenge. Fun fact, he also played Shang Tsung in the Mortal Kombat film, which honestly explains a lot of things. It makes far too much sense.

I could kinda sorta maybe see what the first Tekken film was trying to do, with its darker and edgier, more grounded take on the fighting tournament. However, I can’t say the same about the sequel. It’s a jumbled mess of elements with no cohesion to each other and nothing to do with Tekken. It’s closer to Jason Bourne than Jin Kazama, but here’s the thing: If I wanted Jason Bourne, I’d watch Jason Bourne, I wouldn’t watch a poor imitation of such, especially not when I wanted Tekken.

KO

Continue? No

Game Over

2/10

Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot celebrated his 20^th anniversary earlier this year. That sounds impressive at first, until you remember he hasn’t had any new games in 8 years, and has therefore spent most of his second decade in retirement. Happily, that is finally changing to commemorate the occasion, with cameo appearances in Uncharted 4 and Skylanders Imaginators (accompanied by Dr Cortex, Aku Aku and even Fake Crash in the latter), and Playstation 4 remakes of the first three games to come next year. I chose to celebrate by going back to the original to see how it holds up today.

Dr Cortex is a scientist, a mental aberration; he’s totally fixated on global domination! He aims to achieve this goal by capturing the animal populace of the archipelago of Australian islands he has taken as his base of operations, and subjecting them to rapid evolution via the Evolvo Ray to form his own private army, hence the creation of out marsupial hero. However, Crash is immediately thrown out for not being evil enough, leaving it up to him to stop Cortex’s plot and rescue his female bandicoot companion Tawna, even if she vanishes from the sequels. Talk about ungrateful! That’s the extent of the plot, which is restricted to a blurb in the manual and an easily missed cutscene that is seen by leaving the game idle on the title screen, but it’s not particularly important. More than anything, it’s an excuse to justify going through the levels, rather than anything with more depth or meaning behind it, and in that respect it does the job.

What this approach does succeed in doing is give the game a sense of going on a great quest. After escaping Cortex Castle, Crash washes up on the beach of N Sanity Island. From there, he starts working his way back to Cortex Castle, and each level represents him getting one step closer to his goal. As Crash progresses, the levels become more dangerous and artificial. The lush jungles of N Sanity Island give way to temple ruins and abandoned bridges of ancient civilisations on Wumpa Island, which are in turn replaced by Cortex’s industrialised castle and laboratory. There may not be much plot in terms of exposition or events, but there is a lot more just from the levels themselves and even the level select map. The game operates on a show, don’t tell policy and it’s quite a novel way of presenting a game’s story. This is something the sequels lost both in letting you choose from 5 levels at a time, and also in having a selection of level themes that connect to the overall game, but don’t offer a sense of progression to each other.

In each level Crash must get from one end to the other, navigating pits and hazards, and using his spin attack to break boxes and defeat enemies. Crash’s only abilities to achieve this are a jump and spin attack, which means the game can be picked up and understood instantly, and everything you need to do is intuitive. The boxes are a good inclusion, as they fill up the levels, giving you something to do while going through each level, and trying to break them all is compulsive. There are different kinds of boxes that each serve a particular purpose, and these are similarly intuitive, including regular boxes, bouncy boxes to use for extra height, TNT boxes that will kill Crash if spun into and can only be opened safely by jumping on and getting to a safe distance, and so on. As well as being satisfying to break, the layout of the boxes also provides mini puzzles throughout the levels, trying to figure out how to break them all to maximise the content payout and without dying or rendering some boxes unobtainable. The puzzles are particularly prevalent in the bonus levels, which offer prizes such as the ability to save your progress, a horde of extra lives or keys to unlock secret levels. To avoid repetition or monotony, there are occasional levels that offer alternative challenges such as boulder chases, a ride on the back of a warthog, or using masks to light up a pitch black castle.

On the other hand, there are some flaws with the game. A lot of things about this game were changed in the sequels, and most of these changes were for the better, so their absence here is missed. Crash’s newer abilities like the belly flop, slide and double jump speed up Crash’s movements and make him more agile with more movement options, so their absence here makes Crash feel more heavy and limited. Crash’s heaviness is also applied to his existing abilities, most notably in that spinning in the air sometimes carries his momentum slightly after he lands, but sometimes doesn’t. In some cases, this can result in jumping onto a small platform and spinning to break a box on there or to spin away an airborne enemy, then have the momentum carry Crash off the edge despite your attempts to counter it.

Other changes include gems being significantly harder to get in this game than the sequels. Gems are obtained by finishing a level and breaking every box. In this first game, there is the additional condition that this must be done without dying, as the boxes respawn if Crash dies. In the sequels, broken boxes stay broken after each checkpoint is reached, and the amount of boxes obtained and in the level is counted at the in the second game, and as Crash progresses in the third. In this game, Crash is instead shown at the end of a level how many boxes were missed, so there’s less of an idea how many boxes there are. The bonus levels are also oddly done, with the need to collect three tokens to access them, and these also being the only way to save your progress. The sequels made these more straightforward with just a platform to jump on and access the bonus level, and letting you save at any time.

The difficulty starts off simple enough, but it starts to get harder towards the end of the first island, and keeps increasing from there, being pretty hard by the end. There are occasional difficulty spikes in some levels, most notably Sunset Vista and Slippery Climb, which are interesting in that Sunset Vista is the longest level and one of the hardest, but it was originally going to be even longer and harder. Slippery Climb is the hardest level in the game, and there was going to be an even harder version named Stormy Ascent that was fully finished, but was cut for being too difficult. The linear progression can get you stuck particularly later on as the difficulty gets ratcheted up, and the system from the sequels lets you choose from five levels, so that if you get stuck, at least there are four other levels to choose from, and backtracking to earlier levels is easier because of the layout, whereas in this game, Crash has to backtrack all across the islands to replay a level. The bosses are significantly easier, with only the final battle against Cortex himself offering a challenge. There are two bosses in particular that have safe zones where Crash can stay without the boss hitting them until they become vulnerable, at which point Crash can hit them then go back to his safe zone.

Stormy Ascent remains accessible via hacking and it looks like we dodged a bullet. Maybe it could be a secret level or downloadable content in the remake?

I remembered this first game being significantly weaker than the sequels and not holding up very well as a result, but my memory had been playing tricks on me, as the game is a lot better than I remember it being. It is certainly not as good as the sequels, but it’s definitely still worth a go.

Graphics: 7      They hold up surprisingly well, although they’re more jagged and subdued than the sequels.

Sounds: 6         Amateur hour voice acting. Music is more in the form of background ambience than tracks you’ll be humming when not playing, though there are exceptions (Hog Wild, please stand up.)

Gameplay: 7  Intuitive pick up and play fun, if rather simple.

Lifespan: 6       The same length as usual, though you could get stuck thanks to the linear progression.

Overall: The original Crash Bandicoot is really showing its age today, and it’s definitely the weakest of the original trilogy, but despite that, it holds up better than my memories of it would suggest.   7/10

I am Death

I am Death

Well, that’s certainly ominous!

Fictional police officers can’t move for serial killers, and this particularly unpleasant fellow calls himself Death, taunting the police with messages at each of his crime scenes, being so incredibly thorough that he leaves no clues, witnesses or anything else that he doesn’t intend to leave behind, while also abducting a young boy and torturing him on the side. It’s up to detective Robert Hunter to catch this sick SOB before too many people make a one-way trip to the morgue.

This book unfortunately has several problems with it. First, Robert Hunter himself is a blank canvas, a conduit through which the plot is advanced rather than a character in his own right. The closest he comes to having a personality or character details is that he suffers from insomnia, which is a convenience as the book doesn’t have to stop for him to go to bed more than anything, and showing a caring attitude with some practical advice towards a depressed witness so they can go outside and start to fight their anxiety.

Second is the villain, the unimaginatively named Death. His character is as stock as Hunter, but at least he actually has a character. His character is to be as horrible as is humanly possible. He’s established as an irredeemable monster within the first 30 pages, (and is even referred to as such by other characters) and he only gets worse from there with his abuse of the boy he kidnapped and gruesome murder methods. The grisly detail in which the murders are described is excessive to the point that on a few occasions I started to feel nauseous and had to put the book down to get some air. It could just be me, since I am rather squeamish as far as medical matters go, which the first kill revolves around, but nevertheless, this is definitely not a book I would recommend for the faint of heart. While reading, the thought occurred to me that hopefully author Chris Carter sticks to writing about serial killers – if he ever starts to try out his ideas in real life, we’ll be in big trouble. Come to think of it, a murder mystery author becoming a real life killer using the methods from their books to kill their victims would be a pretty good idea for a story, but I digress.

Third, the book abuses end-of-chapter cliffhangers to the point of annoyance. Numerous chapters, particularly later on, end with characters saying something to the effect of “You’ll want to see this,” “I have some information for you,” or “Holy shit!” You don’t find out what prompted this response for 2 or 3 chapters, and more often than not, the result wasn’t interesting enough to leave it on a cliffhanger before resolving it. For an exaggerated idea, here’s an example:

Chapter 1: I got hungry, so I went to make lunch. There was nothing in the fridge.

Chapter 2: There was no food there because it’s Wednesday and that’s when I do the weekly shop. I reached for a pen and paper to write a shopping list. They weren’t where I left them.

Chapter 3: The pen and paper were slightly to the left of where I thought they were.

And so on. This abuse means that the cliffhangers soon lose all meaning.

Finally, there’s a big twist at the end regarding the killer’s identity and their motives which turns the whole story on its head. However, this is completely unsatisfying because there’s no foreshadowing of the twist, as it relies entirely on information that is completely unknown to the reader until the killer reveals it in an exposition dump during the climax. There isn’t even a hint as to its nature, so there’s nothing to pick up on that might end up being important later, thus denying the reader the opportunity for some speculation or prediction, which is honestly the most fun in these things. The killer is a minor character from early on, which is usually a shocker, but it doesn’t have any impact here, because said character was both completely unremarkable and not a suspect in the case. They weren’t even suspicious in the sense that they were above suspicion, therefore they must be involved somehow.

Worse, the nature of the twist means we’re asked to sympathise with the killer in the final 20 pages, after they’ve spent the previous 380 pages doing unspeakable things because they have an excuse for why they turned out the way they did. Even as the killer dies (there was no way they were taking this perp in alive), it’s a win for the killer because they die on their terms, having proven their point against the police and won their game. Just to add insult to injury, Hunter and his colleagues don’t celebrate the fact they’ve made the streets safe again, for about 12 seconds before some other nutjob with a God complex crawls out of the woodwork, instead they bemoan his passing. To this I say no! None of that! Shame on you. The killer had long crossed the line of human decency before the book had even started, you don’t get to come back from that and have their death treated as redemption while the police say “Alas poor villain.”

He is Death, but I am Jack’s growing disdain.