Last week, I did a piece talking about Asuka Kazama and the strange pivot her story took in the Tekken franchise after her introduction, where she started out as a seemingly plot relevant character with potentially serious implications but ended up being a total side character with more humorous and unimportant content.
But there’s another character who had a very stellar position right when the franchise started back in the original Tekken game and gradually grew into the position of almost a complete joke character with his original objective long since forgotten… that character is Paul Phoenix.
Way back when the Tekken series started out, Paul Phoenix was one of the eight original characters in the arcade version alongside JACK, Kazuya Mishima, King, Marshall Law, Michelle Chang, Nina Williams and Yoshimitsu, although there were more characters available on the console release.
Being one of the original fighters obviously carries some gravitas with it and Paul’s story in the first game was definitely taken seriously. He was an undefeated fighter who had only ever tasted victory until he ran into then-series protagonist Kazuya Mishima, with who he fought for hours in a battle that ended in a draw.
Seeing the King of Iron Fist Tournament as his opportunity for a rematch with Kazuya, Paul jumped at the chance to fight his rival and remove any doubt that he was truly the unbeatable fighter that his reputation suggested he was.
However, the canon storyline shows that Paul actually lost in his rematch with Kazuya and tasted bitter defeat for the first time. Not letting it demotivate him, he rose back up to challenge Kazuya again and get his revenge… but then it kind of went off the rails.
After Tekken 2, it’s stated that Paul managed to miss out on fighting Kazuya again because of… bad traffic. That’s right, a car pileup made him late to the tournament and robbed him of his opportunity to face off against the series’ main character. Not exactly a serious way to end a rivalry…
Despite originally being positioned as Kazuya’s rival, developers seemed to have other ideas for Paul after the console roster for the first Tekken game had been developed and expanded on the character pool and they found a different… less human adversary for Paul.
During his tournament run in the first Tekken game, Paul had fought against Heihachi’s pet bear Kuma and beaten him, something that developers apparently thought was notable enough to turn into something of a running joke and ever since then, even though Paul’s desire to fight Kazuya again gets an off-handed mention on occasion he seems to always end up in a battle with Kuma instead.
Even in Tekken 8, Kuma goes out of his way to try to fight Paul but ends up inadvertently saving him from a missile being fired at him by a soldier and though Paul’s grateful reaction seems to suggest they’ll put an end to their long-running feud, I’m sure the developers will find an excuse for them to keep fighting in Tekken 9 again.
As for the general character stories, Paul’s endings have typically been humorous in nature often involving some kind of traffic mishap, such as his Tekken 2 ending where he gets stopped by a rockslide (which he then punches away) or his Tekken 3 ending where he’s speeding on the highway and gets ticketed by a highway patrol officer.
Another aspect of Paul which has been explored much more after his more comedic turn is his long-standing friendship with Marshall Law and the many antics they get up to in order to try and get money, sometimes even involving the latter’s son Forest Law who was playable back in Tekken 3 and in later games sometimes also incorporating Steve Fox.
Paul has basically gone from a serious threat who is on equal level with Kazuya to a complete buffoon who may still be strong but is dumb as a bag of rocks and manages to land himself in strange trouble and always has no money.
While there’s definitely charm to Paul’s more comedic endings, it’s hard to see how this turn happened exactly. The most likely culprit is the time skip in Tekken 3, where Paul went from being a fairly young fighter in his late ’20s to a 40+ year old man who was just kind of a bumbling loser who also happened to be strong.
In Tekken 3, the series shifted its focus to new protagonist Jin Kazama and the former protagonist (who would later turn villain) Kazuya Mishima was believed to be dead, so with Paul’s rival no longer existing it was probably difficult to find anything serious for him to do, which is what led to this turn of events.
Since Kazuya’s return in Tekken 4, however, a pivot could’ve been made back to Paul being a more serious character but maybe the developers felt like the humorous turn with him had enamored him more to fans and decided to just keep going with it.
Paul’s strange adventures truly hit a fever pitch in Tekken 5 when is ending depicted him training for… fighting aliens?
Bizarrely, the ending goes on to show a bunch of UFOs getting ready to descend onto Earth as well, with no further reference being made to this throughout the series outside of background cameos featuring UFOs (Tekken 8 UFO image snatched from REC Gaming’s video).
It’s clear that at whatever point, Bandai Namco decided that Paul was simply not to be taken seriously in any way, shape or form. While that has now been true for the majority of his appearances in the Tekken franchise, it’s still strange to look back and see him originally depicted as a serious character and a real threat to Kazuya on the tournament stage.
Although Paul will probably still be the butt of the joke for the foreseeable future of Tekken, there’s always the off chance that the developers decide to tap in to his once serious demeanor. Given his outfit choice for Tekken 8 though, I really wouldn’t count on it…
Source: Event Hubs
