Even though he may seem at first glance like the same “hard-ass martial arts master” archetype we’ve seen time and time again, the show faithfully paints Heihachi as both a fighter and a CEO of a major corporation, and it’s fun to watch him apply his “no mercy” rules of fighting in a business setting. Even though the god is effectively Aztec Hulk, he isn’t all that interesting to watch, but Heihachi is.

Of all three characters, only one has a real personality.

It involves young fighter Jin Kazama being trained by his grandfather, Heihachi Mishima, to win a fighting tournament, which will lure out an immortal, green god of fighting. The anime is loosely based on the plot of Tekken 3. The slower animation might not be an issue if Bloodline featured fascinating characters.

Passively watching characters move slowly in an anime series is much less rewarding. That’s all fine and good in a video game, where the audience controls the action. That’s why Tekken matches may look slow and simple, even though they require a lot of skill. This forces players to move beyond button-mashing and master the process of stringing together the simple movements to unlock each individual character’s full potential and unique fighting style. Tekken’s core gameplay involves controlling a character’s individual limbs with different buttons, so one button is for right-hand punches, the other for left-leg kicks, and so forth. Among all the big fighting games out there, the Tekken games have always been some of the slowest ones. That said, Bloodline actually does try to re-create many familiar elements from the Tekken games in anime form. This probably wasn’t done intentionally to make the show more interactive, like the video game that spawned it. The six-episode miniseries, streaming on Netflix, has its characters moving so slowly and in such cumbersome ways that the show only looks “right” at 1.25x playback speed, with some fights needing to be cranked up to 1.5x. The first sign that the anime Tekken: Bloodline probably won’t break the long chain of failed adaptations of the popular fighting-game series is the fact that it’s nearly impossible to enjoy at normal speed.

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