Jin, what the heck is a hamster?
Fans really enjoy reading into any posts and communications from video game developers looking for any deeper or hidden messages that are often times overblown, but then situations like this provide people seemingly enough evidence to feel vindicated that the clues were there all along.
After the recent announcement of Final Fantasy 16’s Clive Rosfield for Tekken 8, an older post of longtime Tekken Project Director Katsuhiro Harada started being put back under the microscope that most people originally wrote off as a joke or red herring.
All the way back in February of this year, Harada was asked about the remaining DLC character slots for Season 1 in Tekken 8 to which he responded.
He obviously didn’t give out the names, but what the veteran developer did do was state some rather innocuous animals.
A raccoon was coming in the Summer followed by a Koala in the Fall and then finally a hamster this Winter.
The characters actually announced for those roster additions were Lidia Sobieska, Heihachi Mishima, and Clive Rosfield.
Raccoon (Summer)
Koala (Autumn)
Hamster (Winter) https://t.co/SNemxoUAEn— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) February 20, 2024
Once Clive was unveiled earlier this month, Harada’s tweet gained attention again for those looking back and trying to find connections between the animals and fighters, which some feel they have indeed connected the dots.
But does that logic of the animals being a riddle from the Director when put under some scrutiny?
Let’s start with the more clear “connection” between the trio.
The hamster being Clive would be a direct reference to the children’s book character, Clive the Hamster.
His name and timeline do certainly match up though we still have some real doubts.
How would he even know who that is?
Clive the Hamster would be a real deep pull for a 54-year-old Japanese man to actively know about and reference, and that would give away their biggest surprise of the year if fans were able to solidly make that tie months ago.
Harada’s Tekken 8 Season 1 riddle has been solved…
– Hamster refers to a children story titled ‘Clive the hamster’ which was hinting at Clive Rosfield
– The silhouette of a Koala’s head matches Heihachi
– Raccoons are an invasive species in Poland which was hinting at Lidia pic.twitter.com/GWfyUtEhNN
— Moonsault Slayer (@VolSkimmer) December 15, 2024
None of the other two are connected to their names specifically though this supposed riddle follows different trains of thought for each.
And perhaps that’s all for a reason we’ll get into in a bit.
Next up is Heihachi, who is a koala because his hair spikes give him a similar silhouette to the Australian animal with their big furry ears.
That’s about it really unless Harada was also hinting at koalas also being bad parents and partners.
So there’s not really much more to read into than that as far as we can tell.
Finally, Lidia has probably the strangest connection of them all.
Harada allegedly used a raccoon for her because raccoons are an invasive species in Poland.
And though that may sound weird, it is apparently true that raccoons are not native to the region, and there are multiple news articles over the past few years sharing concerns of the raccoon population growing and migrating to Poland.
But just because the connection may be “factually correct” doesn’t mean that was Harada’s original intention with the post.
If these animals were meant to be sneaky hints, there is one way that could realistically come together.
That scenario being Harada did Google searches to try and find animals that could tangentially relate to their fighters.
And he went with Clive through his name and Lidia through Poland. Heihachi would require no additional research.
While it’s all possible, this is also still pretty shaky at best.
It’s just as if not even more likely Harada did this just to mess with fans and send them on a wild goose chase looking for possible connections to something he just made up.
The Director does have a history of giving fans unserious replies to those that give him outlandish or tired and repeated comments.
Just look at what happened when someone asked Harada who his favorite “Tekken milf” was.
But even if we work under the presumption that these loose connections were all incidental, that’s not going to stop people on the internet from trying to read into everything he says.
And he also knows that and will employ that against them, which is a bit impressive to do consistently for multiple languages outside of your native tongue.
Plus, he’s probably never going to drop that “Don’t ask me for ****” persona either since it’s become attached to Harada like the sunglasses.