I watched the Tekken: Bloodline anime on Netflix so you wouldn’t have to - Review
Based on the Tekken fighting games from Bandai Namco, Tekken: Bloodline focuses on Jin Kazama, a boy with a mysterious lineage, who trains in martial arts with his mother in a remote area. As the series opens, Jin gets into a scuffle with some bullies. Although he won, his mother is not happy. After a bit of nagging, all is right in the world. But soon after, Jin’s world is turned upside-down when a strange creature attacks and kills his mother. She leaves him with the instructions to find his grandfather, a Heihachi Mishima, if anything happens to her.
The story is roughly based on the Tekken 3 game, with Jin Kazama looking to avenge his mother by killing the creature that attacked them. As someone who did not follow the Tekken games, it was not disorienting to jump into the series. The writing in the beginning was a bit cringey, but the overall story and flow got better as the series went on. Although this is an anime, and animated as such, it was written and produced by a Western team. The original voiceover was also in English. However, most of the animation was done by a seemingly Japanese studio/team.
Honestly, I’m not a fan of English dubs. I do prefer listening to original audio when possible (Japanese for a Japanese show, or Korean for a Korean show), but I ended up changing the audio options to Japanese dub for this series even though the original audio is supposedly English. This is not because the voice work was bad for this series – I don’t think I even listened to any lines outside those from the preview trailer – but I felt more comfortable with a Japanese voice over for this series seeing how close it seemed to a typical Japanese anime production. To be fair, the voice work in Japanese was not at the level I usually expect from a Japanese anime. It was still good, and it helped me get through the series, but it felt like it was… well, a dub – as in a dub over an original audio – which might be attributed to the fact that the animation may not have been perfectly tuned with the Japanese dub in mind, as opposed to the original audio. But like I mentioned before, it was not bad.
As for the animation: lots of criticism floated around about the CG animation when the trailers initially dropped. I’m not a fan of the lazy CG animation that anime likes to push out. Most of look janky and do not enhance the animation or story. You’d think that after 20 to 30 years, they’d evolved it by now, but most of it still looks stilted and painfully obvious in their usage to even the most inexperienced anime-phile. But upon seeing the final product, I think it isn’t that bad. Hey, I hate this CG anime stuff, but this one really isn’t bad. It looks like there is some actual effort put into blending it and choosing artful shots that play well with the CG. Don’t get me wrong, it still looks weird at times, but not as weird as the typical CG anime, and definitely not as bad as the recent Berserk series. The styling of the lines blend in well with the backgrounds, and even when the characters are in motion, the lines look decent. Still, I’ll say this: the anime industry needs to fix the fundamental problems with using CG animation in anime. I won’t go into details, but with how many shows they’ve forced CG on, they really should have had more than enough funding to research this stuff. Alright, I’ll end the preaching there… for now.
Overall, I say that it’s a “maybe” watch. If you’re a fan of the Tekken games, you may want to take a peak. It might irritate you if you know more of the story, I don’t know, or you may enjoy it way more than someone who went in with no knowledge like me. I walked away not feeling like it was a waste of time. It was definitely a short series with just about 6 episodes clocking in at around 25 mins per episode – any longer, and I think it would’ve suffered from over stretching the story to fit. Maybe it was okay for me because it was short. In any case, it might be a watch for you. And if you do decide to give it a shot, keep that fast-forward button handy for the cringey bits.
