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Rating: *

In 1993, NAMCO released the fighting video game 'Tekken' about a martial arts contest held by the powerful Mishima corporation. It was extremely successful, and was followed by the greatest fighting game of all time-- named (what else?) 'Tekken 2.' At this point, there have been four more sequels, including a Tag Tournament and a Game Boy version. This anime follows the storyline in the first two.

Let me start off by saying that I think anime stinks for the most part. Only one show, 'Dragonball Z', is any good, and it drags its stories out far too long. This adaptation of the game series, however, has the opposite problem: it is far too short.

The fight scenes are pitiful and don't even start to get thrilling. Of all the characters in the game, only Kazuya, Heihachi, Lee, and Jun get any decent screen time (Lei and Jack-2 are the only others that get any real time at all). And they're not developed nearly enough.

A couple of Lee's scenes are interesting and there is one attempted assassination on Kazuya by Nina that's sort of okay, but otherwise this is a badly written, boring anime flick.

And when a sixty minute movie is boring, you know you're in trouble.

Anyone not familiar with the story line will be utterly confused and find the film completely incomprehensible. Those familiar with it will be disappointed by how poor it is.

The script is so bad that the writers call 'Tekken' a mysterious thing that doesn't make sense. After Lee's two incomprehensible sentences about it, it is completely ignored. What is it-- the Force? A magical fighting style? An underwear style? Who knows.

Tekken means Iron Fights, and the geniuses who wrote this piece of crud don't understand that this is supposed to make just a little bit of sense. Not to mention that what is understandable is extraordinarily stupid and illogical.

Besides the script reeking, the rest stinks, too. The voice acting (I am talking about the English version) is awful, the direction is pointlessly poor, and the music score wanders between okay and really, really annoying.

If you aren't familiar with the games, avoid this at all costs. If you have, you might consider seeing it on TV as a point of interest, but don't waste any money on it. There aren't a lot of films worse than this.

Rating: *

This was a bad idea from the get go. Tekken is not a game that would translate to the screen very well. First of all Tekken has 20+ characters, most of which have little connection to one another so in order to get everyone on screen for a remotely decent length of time it would be a giant montage of fight scenes (because no one is about to sit through the slow development of all 20 characters out of which only 5 are worth talking about). There are too many characters to work with so it's inevitable that they focus in on a select few.

But which few? Most have nothing to do with each other. Adding insult to injury, this anime also tries to morph the plotlines of Tekken 1 and Tekken 2 together. Yay, more characters. If they stuck with the Tekken 1 premise – a simple tournament and a simple father/son rivalry, this would have worked much better. They should have focused in on Kazuya's past, his rise throughout the tournament, the very beginnings of his dealing with Devil, and his confrontation with Heihachi. The narrative could stick with Kazuya as he faces off with different people and occasionally jump to other fights by the main characters thereby incorporating them into the overall story as well - then it might be worth watching.

That would leave the door open for a Tekken anime sequel, it would keep the non-Tekken literate viewers informed as to the whole mythology around Tekken, and it would have been an overall better film. Also that approach would give them plenty of time to either kill off or incapacity and/or address certain characters so they don't have to deal with as many in a sequel. But nope, they tried to pack everything into one film – even Tekken 2's joke characters which had no place in the game, much less the movie. So we get lots of characters on screen who ramble and add nothing to anything and hardly ever fight despite being based on a fighting game.

Another point – for one I did not like for the quality of this anime's drawing. It wasn't very inspiring. Add to that the fact all of Tekken's characters previously have been strictly CG-rendered which makes a drawn interpretation feel like a fish out of water; looking across the characters I found myself saying, `That's not Lei Wu Long; that can't be Kazuya . . .' and I couldn't buy into much of it from then on out.

Final thoughts: Tekken isn't a game that lends itself too terribly well to anything other than its own medium. It's shallow as a fighting game, so it's no surprising that the anime adaptation reflects this so well.

This movie is about a rich man, Heihachi Mishima, who is obsessed with destroying the devil in order to create a better new world. He intentionally throws his son Kazuya from a cliff creating a devil within Kazuya. However, nobody has ever seen Kazuya ever since. Certain that Kazuya will go for it, Heihachi announces a martial arts competition. The one who get to Heihachi first and the manages to defeat him, wins the prize-money and the title of "King of Iron Fist". Kazuya shows up indeed but as he attempts to kill his father he is consistently stopped by Jun, a girl from his childhood, who was there when Heihachi threw him off the cliff. Now is there at the tournament and she won't stop at nothing to release Kazuya from the devil within him.

Although this Anime is not the exactly best, I think they did a very good job with the story. Considering the amount of Tekken characters in existence (52, including the ones that are not in the game)they managed to get many of the characters in it without harming the continuity of the story. On the other hand I thought there was too little of Devil in it and Jun just doesn't stop talking. 6/10

Tekken the emotion the storyline is basically is a combination of Tekken one and two it's not really that hard to follow of course back in the '90s that's when fighting games are so popular we don't actually follow the story is much we just play the game and enjoy it so if you want the story you have to read it for yourself on the Internet or in the booklets that each PlayStation game actually had I've actually seen this movie before I even read the actual story that was canon I can understand that some people dislike this movie but I've actually enjoyed it myself so it wasn't bad I've seen worse.

From the video game 'Tekken' comes an anime movie, 'Tekken: The Motion Picture'. The story begins the same as the story of 'Mortal Kombat'. As in 'Mortal Kombat' the main villain makes sure another person has to seek revenge, as in 'Mortal Kombat' martial art experts get on a boat to arrive on an island, and as in 'Mortal Kombat' a tournament is the reason to do so. We follow a couple of different persons who all want to kill the villain, all with their own reasons. On their journeys they encounter some strange enemies and of course hidden secrets are revealed.

Although the animation is not as good as we normally see in this kind of movies there still is some energy, especially in the fighting sequences. This is not a very good movie but since it is not that long, less than an hour, it was quite watchable. Although most things are ridiculous, even for anime, I was entertained. Because of its running time it doesn't find a chance to become really boring. There are better movies from the genre but for only an hour there is a good chance you will like it.