I already wrote a piece detailing the story trajectory of Tekken’s original protagonist Kazuya Mishima who has now spent many more games as an antagonist than the main character, but what about the person who took over the role of protagonist after him?
I’m talking of course about his son, Jin Kazama, who took over the mantle as main character way back in Tekken 3 and has largely stayed in that role all the way through Tekken 8, though it’s hard to say there haven’t been some bumps in the road. What exactly is the deal with Jin’s story in the Tekken series… especially Tekken 6? Let’s just say, if you know, you know…
Jin’s story starts out fairly standard, with Kazuya presumed dead after the 17-year timeskip preceding Tekken 3 he is introduced as the child of Kazuya Mishima and Jun Kazama, two characters who had now been removed from the franchise, although his grandfather and Kazuya’s original antagonist Heihachi Mishima was still alive and well.
Heihachi, who clearly wasn’t satisfied with only receiving the “worst father of the year” award decided to go for the “worst grandfather of the year” prize as well by targeting his grandson Jin Mishima, fearing that he had the Devil Gene within him much like his father Kazuya did.
His fears turned out to be correct — although Heihachi attempted to kill Jin by shooting him in the head, his devil form awoke and smashed Heihachi through a wall before departing.
After the events of Tekken 3, Jin worked on distancing himself from the Devil form within him and from the Mishima bloodline as a whole, but after hearing of a new The King of Iron Fist tournament happening, he decided to participate to take down his grandfather and end the Mishima bloodline once and for all. Still a fairly valiant goal, given all that we know about Heihachi and the Mishimas in general.
Jin would end up getting a lot more than he bargained for, though, as it turned out Kazuya Mishima was still alive. Rather than a tearful reunion between father and son, Kazuya was instead plotting to steal Jin’s Devil energy for himself, though it backfired when Jin’s Devil Form awoke once more and he defeated both Kazuya and Heihachi one after the other.
Before finishing their lives he was stopped by a vision of his mother, Jun, who had raised him for the early days of his life and he still had vivid memories of. His humanity took control and he stepped away from killing his family members, instead leaving them merely defeated.
Once Tekken 5 rolled around, the Mishima storyline became all more convoluted as it turned out that Heihachi’s father, that is to say Jin’s great grandfather, Jinpachi Mishima was actually still alive and had an evil entity possessing him which… was apparently entirely separated from the Devil Gene, since it would later be established that it came from Heihachi’s wife’s side of the family (sounds like a retcon to me, but who am I to judge).
Jinpachi wished to be defeated before he got entirely possessed by the evil aura around him and Jin did defeat him, earning his place as the leader of the Mishima Zaibatsu in the process which leads directly into Tekken 6.
This is where things get… weird. In case you didn’t think they already were, you know…
In Tekken 6, despite being propped up as a force of good and going against the Mishima bloodline, Jin instead seemed to completely embrace the war-hungry nature we had already seen possessed by Heihachi and Kazuya before him.
The in-story explanation for Jin’s sudden heel turn may have made some kind of sense at the time of Tekken 6, but with the power of hindsight it really… doesn’t add up at all. See, the main villain of Tekken 6, Azazel, was claimed to be the origin of the Devil Gene and had been telepathically communicating with Jin, wishing to be released onto the world.
Jin, with his eternal savior complex, believed Azazel’s words that he would be resurrected if the world was struck by great calamity and negativity, which led Jin to believe that reviving Azazel and defeating him once and for all to eliminate him entirely was the right play. So… Jin bombed a bunch of people and caused strife and war all across the world.
Obviously, these acts were not very heroic and they are difficult to justify even with the caveat that Jin actually did defeat Azazel after reviving him and once Tekken 7 comes around, they are even more difficult to justify.
In Tekken 7, Jin himself takes a backseat since the main focus is on the continued animosity between Kazuya and Heihachi (and was meant to end things between them for good until, well… you know…), but a different character has massive implications for his character arc and his actions from Tekken 6.
Tekken 7 features Kazuya’s own mother, Kazumi Mishima, who Heihachi kills with his own hands in a flashback sequence and the reason he kills her is because she possesses the Devil Gene, something that as far as I’m aware was not stated at any point before Tekken 7. Thus, it is heavily implied that the Devil Gene had been inherited by Kazuya from his mother who would then later pass it on to Jin.
This doesn’t just make Jinpachi’s presence in Tekken 5 strange (I’m not sure that they ever explicitly say he’s possessed by the Devil Gene, but just having a random different evil entity impeding on this family seems… strange, to say the least), it also makes the entire narrative around Azazel which was meant to justify Jin’s horrific actions entirely untrue.
The reason stated for Jin to want to revive Azazel from the start was to rid the world of the Devil Gene by killing the origin of it. Well, he beat Azazel and the Devil Gene went nowhere, so that didn’t work. So how exactly do you justify all the chaos that Jin caused in Tekken 6? Well, honestly… I’m not sure that you can.
Despite this, Jin is presented once more as the main protagonist in Tekken 8 and the game centers around his quest to defeat Kazuya once and for all, which is noble and all considering all the evil Kazuya has done, but after Tekken 6’s events Jin isn’t much better himself.
He ends up not really being held accountable by anyone for what he did in Tekken 6 and while Azazel does still have some story presence by being sealed within Zafina’s arm and making a brief appearance to awaken Kazuya’s Devil Form, his connection to them having the Devil Gene at all seems fairly dubious.
Even if everything set up in Tekken 6 about Azazel is true, Jin’s actions can best be described as reckless and still led to massive loss of life, including the death of Tekken 6 newcomer Miguel’s sister who conveniently is not part of the Tekken 8 roster so that he can’t remind everyone that Jin killed a bunch of innocent people.
Once Tekken 8 wraps up, Jin has finally defeated Kazuya and the presence of Jun, who seems to have finally woken up from her long slumber, appears to have healed both the father and son of their Devil Gene affliction.
Of course, the Devil Gene still isn’t gone because after that we see that Reina also has such a form, making the whole business even more convoluted since she’s clearly far too young to be Kazumi’s daughter, thereby making it seem like her father Heihachi had some kind of strange affinity for targeting specifically Devil Gene-infected women to procreate with.
To sum it all up, Jin’s story as the Tekken franchise’s most frequent protagonist is intricately tied to that of the Devil Gene and it’s influence over the Mishima bloodline. The problem is that the Devil Gene itself has become far too convoluted to really pin down where it even comes from and it seems to just get more confusing with each game.
It wasn’t even until Tekken 4 that the Devil Gene itself was brought up at all, previously being more referred to as an actual demonic possession stemming from Kazuya’s hatred of his father after what Heihachi had put him through, so it’s been retconned at least once and given its history, probably a few more times after that.
Whatever the case, Jin Kazama is seen by most as the main face of Tekken and he will likely remain so in the future as well. But the actions he’s taken throughout the series, or more specifically Tekken 6, really do not fit that of a traditional protagonist.
That in itself is fine, especially since we already saw Kazuya go from a protagonist to an antagonist before his son, but the fact that the characters in the Tekken universe are kind of just glossing over Jin’s war crimes is… just kind of weird.
