《铁拳8》首次展示来自Baki的客串角色Yujiro Hanma游戏内形象

You couldn't beat me in a hundred years

The main selling point of Tekken 8's Season 3 DLC pass, alongside veterans Kunimitsu, Bob and Roger Jr, is Yujiro Hanma, the main antagonist of fighting manga Baki and father of its eponymous protagonist. Yujiro was initially revealed in May through a trailer made up entirely of panels from Baki, leaving it in question just how a character that looks like that would be adapted into the Unreal Engine 5 hyper-realism of Tekken 8. The answer, apparently, is that Bandai just said fuck it, and let him look inevitably grotesque.

The first look at Yujiro in-game arrived during Evo France (where Marvel Tōkon also revealed a bunch of new fighters), with a trailer featuring just a quick tease of his intro animation. Inexplicable flexibility, absurdly huge musculature and horrifying grin on show, Yujiro is horrible to look at. Which, I guess, is the intent? This is kinda just how he looks in the manga, too, but seeing him alongside the rest of the Tekken cast is very jarring. Some part of me hopes he's low tier just so I can see less of him on tournament streams, but somehow I doubt that'll happen: his whole thing is being The Strongest Creature on Earth, after all.

He's a strange pick for a fighting game character, honestly. Yujiro in the manga bears the lazy narrative trope of simply being 'the strongest', winning any fight because he's Yujiro Hanma, like a child in a playground quickly coming up with excuses for why he wins, actually. There have been characters in fighting games that are unfathomably strong and therefore shouldn't lose before, such as Slayer in Guilty Gear or Saitama in One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, but those characters are designed to make their losses make sense; Slayer is just toying with his opponent, lazily blocking with one hand as he feels no threat, and Saitama is a guaranteed win button balanced by the fact he takes a long time to enter the fight. Yujiro, from what I can see, doesn't have one of these loopholes: he just cannot lose. I'm really curious to see how his appearance in Tekken 8 deals with this aspect of his character, and seemingly I'll find out in January when his full gameplay trailer drops alongside the Tekken World Tour finals.

Also, as a fun aside, Yujiro has something in common with Heihachi, other than just generally being an awful dad fighting his son forever: throwing his young child off of a cliff to 'test' his resilience. Tekken continues to be the series of bad dads, just no longer limited only to its own universe.