It's been 20 years since Namco first launched its seminal fighting game series into Japanese arcades – now it has announced a seventh instalment.
Revealed at the Evo 2014 tournament in Las Vegas on Sunday, the new Tekken 7 will once again revolve around the endlessly bickering Mishima family. Father Heihachi, son Kazuya and grand son Jin have been pummeling each other throughout the tortuously complex narrative that surrounds the game's King of the Iron Fist Tournament setting.
Judging by the short teaser, Heihachi's wife and Kazuya's mother, Kazumi Mishima, has returned from the dead to defeat her evil husband. Or it could be Jun, mother of Jin, who was apparently killed during Tekken 3, spurring Jin's own homicidal quest for revenge. We then see Heihachi and Kazuya (or maybe Jin) squaring up to each other possibly on the edge of a volcano, as the latter snarls: "You killed my mother."
The sequence ends with the worlds "final battle".
So, does this mean the end of the fight between the Mishimas, the end of the Iron Fist Tournament, or the end of Tekken itself? Namco, of course, isn't saying.
Certainly, for the last 20 years, this extravagant series has been one of the key fighting game franchises, bringing 3D polygonal graphics to the genre, and battling it out against Sega's more complex Virtua Fighter series.
With its outlandish characters, intuitive controls and slick visuals, the first three Tekken titles were vitally important in the early years of the PlayStation when Namco was bringing its hit arcade titles exclusively to Sony's console.
No platforms or release dates have been revealed, although series producer Katsuhiro Harada has confirmed that the title will use Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, a new multi-platform technology also being employed in Fable: Legends, Grasshopper Manufacture's forthcoming brawler Let It Die, and Epic's own procedurally generated shooter Fortnite.
“With Unreal Engine 4, we could rapidly achieve visual quality expected on next-gen platform and go beyond it," said Harada. "Not only is Unreal Engine 4 powerful and easy to use, but it allows us to immediately bring Tekken 7 to any platform we desire.”
Although mainstream interest in fighting games has waned since the glory days of the 90s, the later Street Fighter and Tekken titles have continued to review well, and have a large following.
With their complex character animations and stupendous "special move" effects they also provide excellent showcases for new console hardware – so whether or not gamers still want to smash each other with Fisherman's slams and idiot kick flips, Tekken 7 may well provide a fascinating graphical workout for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
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