So. Heihehachi is back. HIs fans are very happy, most of them anyway. Thing is, I'm one of his fans. He's one of my favorite fighting game charachters. But the thing is, Tekken 7 was supposed to be the fucking END. Thats what we were told, "the Mishima story is over, he's dead now, for real this time".
WE never should have believed it lol. But here's the thing. IT didnt have to be this way.
Fighting game designers are scared to kill off charachters becuase people main them and want them to be in each game. OK, cool. Here's the thing, bringing back a character does not mean they have to be part of the plot lol. You can just... have them be playable? But their prescence is totally extra canonical?
Thats what i wanted to happen with Heihehachi in this game. But no like. They couldn't do it. They HAD to bring him back "in story". Stupid.
They did the same thing with M Bison in SF6 this season but at least there's sort of a new twist on how they're doing it and at least I wasnt told that it was DEFINITLY the end of that charachter lol. For that one I'm just annoyed because there's a ton of characters id rather be brought back (Dudley, Makoto, Poison, Menat, Alex, C Viper, Laura, Ibuki, Yun, Yang, Sagat, Vega, and Balrog all come to mind. Also Skullomania if they can get the rights). But its fine overall there.
The thing with just putting a dead character in the game is that they don't want the character's popularity to decrease over time. Unfortunately if a character does not get included in new story elements then nobody new gains any connection to the character and they go into longterm popularity decline.
This is probably why they can't commit.
Dude is probably the most recognisable and iconic Tekken character too. If I think of Tekken I see his hair silhouette in my head.
I feel like he's so iconic you probably could get away with him not being in the story. I mean, who the hell plays fighting games for the story? You just need characters to name-drop his name every once in a while.
lol He's just there, the iconic title character, no more story, he is tekken.
The story could just have scenes that take place in the past or in a vision or something, it's not that difficult