New Video! The Success (and Failure) of Tekken Bloodline (ad-free!) (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Just letting you know the new video is available, ad-free! For many reasons, the many attempts to adapt Tekken to another medium outside of games have ranged from boring to downright unwatchable. Enter Tekken Bloodline—a six episode anime recently released on Netflix that attempts to solve the franchise's key problems, and ends up being just as fascinating for its failings as it does its successes. In its telling of the Jin Kazama backstory, Tekken Bloodline illustrates the potential for future iterations to bring life to the wild lore of this fighting game behemoth, but perhaps at the expense of actually realising that potential itself.

Another pretty beefy video for this month! I thought it would be the Mad Max video next (which I am still working on, alongside the long-awaited yakuza cinema piece, don't worry haha), but I saw that Bloodline had released on Netflix to little fanfare and, as someone who is really invested in not only the Tekken lore but the very concept of adapting video games into TV and film, I felt I had to talk about it.

It was my aim that with that focus on the latter—what it takes to adapt something into another medium—this video would hopefully appeal to people even if they weren't Tekken fans specifically.

As an update, I'm still getting back into the swing of things with balancing work and life stuff and, while it's been stressful at times trying to make time for everything, I can't tell you how freeing and inspiring it's felt in terms of the channel—I mean hell, the videos are getting more and more densely packed as a result (with the amount of editing and cutting I do with each video/script, twenty minutes is a long vid for me haha). I am coming up with mad video ideas faster than I can actually make them, but they're on their way!

Feels like I can breathe a bit and focus on weird things like a twenty minute video on this fighting game TV show because it's important to me, without worrying too much about how it'll do views-wise. Feels like I'm injecting a bit more of "me" into the pieces I'm currently working on, which might make for slightly different pieces, but hopefully ones you enjoy.

I do need to catch up on the two exclusive videos and for that further delay I'm sincerely sorry. This month I've essentially been working on five or six videos in various stages of production at once—it's a lot, and it's just taking a bit of time to get it all out the door. Hoping the next post will be in just a few days.

I want to get back into streaming again too—that'll hopefully come sometime this week.

You all allow me to work harder, healthier and better at this thing I'm still incredibly passionate about, even seven years in. You keep this channel going with your continued, unbelievably generous support and I can never thank you enough for that.

Enjoy the video and much more stuff coming very soon!

Hamish

Writing on Games