I made this blog about four years ago but never published it as Heihachi was shown as a mii costume right before I could. I decided to post this now just to have it out and not stuck in draft forever. So have my ramblings and a broken image from way back!
Before I begin, some clarification. Yes this does conflict with the Lloyd document sort of. However, do keep in mind me and Kagura are different people with our different thoughts on what will happen. Even if we are probably only getting one of them in, we should still discuss all possibilities for who can join Smash.
Now, for those of you who are unaware, Heihachi Mishima is the main antagonist of the Tekken series, a 3D Fighting game developed by Bandai Namco. In these games, many fighters compete in the King of Iron Fists Tournament with their own stories, but the main story line revolves around the Mishima Family. To sum it all up, it isn’t exactly a happy family. Throwing each other off cliffs or into active volcano, attaching the rest of the family to a rocket, starting World War III, the usual family feud. Anyways, I will get into everything that Heihachi (and the Tekken series in general) has going for them and bring up some counterpoints along the way.
TEKKEN’S LEGACY
Tekken is one of the biggest fighting game franchises. In terms of sales, Tekken is one of the best selling fighting games of all time. The first Tekken was the first game on the PlayStation to sell over a million copies (Source). Tekken 3 is the fourth best selling fighting game (only beaten by Brawl, 3DS and Ultimate) with 8.3 million copies sold. If you do not consider Smash to be a fighting game, it outright becomes the best selling fighting game of all time. The whole franchise has sold 49 million copies as of December 29, making it the second best selling fighting game franchise (again, only beaten by Smash). The series is also well received in terms of critical reception. Tekken 3 for example has a 95 and 96 on GameRankings and MetaCritic respectively and is usually cited as one of the best games of all time. There even exists a Tekken museum which showcases many goods, artwork and statues.
TEKKEN TODAY
To this day, Tekken is still going strong. The most recent entry, Tekken 7, has gotten support in terms of DLC and its competitive scene. For DLC, the game had gotten up to 3 different seasons of DLC content, including new, returning, and guest characters. The competitive scene also gets support from Bandai Namco itself and is played by players all over the world, such as the United States, Japan and South Korea.
TEKKEN ON NINTENDO
While history with Nintendo is way less significant these days thanks to the inclusion of characters like Cloud and Joker, I should go over this anyways. While Tekken is mostly known for being on the PlayStation, it did have its fair share of games on Nintendo consoles. These include Tekken Advance on the Gameboy Advance, Tekken 3D: Prime Edition on the 3DS and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 on the Wii U. Tag Tournament 2 was even given exclusive content in which every character is given an alternate costume based on a Nintendo character.
WHY HEIHACHI?
Now to talk about the old man himself. One thing you may have noticed is that I referred to Heihachi as the “main antagonist” rather than say protagonist. This may make you wonder “Wait, if this guy is the villain then why would they pick him?” Despite not being the main protagonist, Heihachi is still one of the most recognizable characters, and tends to be the one used for cross overs. These games include Soul Calibur 2, Namco x Capcom, Pro Baseball Famista 2011, Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale and in Smash itself (though only as a mii costume in 4 and a cameo in Ultimate). When Sakurai was considering different options from Bandai Namco, he has stated there were a few in consideration and naming Heihachi specifically as one of them. Heihachi also happens to be the favorite of the series director, Harada.
Now while I do think Heihachi would be the one picked for Smash, I would still like to go over the other potential candidates. Namely Kazuya and Jin. While not the face like Heihachi is, they are still major characters as well, with Jin being the main protagonist of the series starting from Tekken 3. If for some reason they do not pick Heihachi, these two could easily end up being the rep instead.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST HEIHACHI
Now it’s time to counter some common arguments against Heihachi.
“Sakurai tried to make him work but couldn’t!”
If you remember, I did mention Heihachi was considered for Smash 4 among other Namco characters, so what happened? Basically, Sakurai stated that “implementing his movement would be quite difficult.” Many people have taken this quote the wrong way however, and stretched it to different meanings. I will now clear things up.
- Heihachi was not developed at all. They did not actually attempt to work on him. This is an important clarification as some people think they did attempt to make him work even though Sakurai only stated that he was “considered.”
- The main thing that was considered difficult is movement. While we don’t have a definite guess on what he meant by this, the most likely answer is Tekken’s 3D movement, in which characters are able to move around in 3D, unlike in 2D fighting games. With Smash being a 2D fighting game, implementing such movement would be difficult, yes. However, Heihachi has been implemented in 2D fighting games, such as Street Fighter x Tekken and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. Heck, even the first 2 Tekken games didn’t have the 3D movement the franchise has nowadays.
While this is a legitimate concern, Sakurai has been able to make things that he deemed difficult in the past work in later games such as Villager and Ridley. Like I said, they never actually attempted it before. Things may be different than back then.
“His voice actor passed away!”
For those unaware, Heihachi’s most recent voice actor named Unshō Ishizuka (Who is also the Japanese voice of Incineroar) had passed away in 2018. The main issue people bring up is that Japan tends to retire characters if their voice actors pass away. An example of this happening is with Colonel Roy Campbell from Metal Gear Solid. When his Japanese voice actor passed away, Kojima retired the character. This even affected Smash, as no new Codecs were done to respect Kojima’s wish. Seems like a big hit against Heihachi, right?
However, there are many issues when using this argument against Heihachi. The big issue being that Ishizuka was only his “most recent voice actor.” That’s right, Heihachi has had multiple voices over the years! His previous voice, Daisuke Gōri, had also passed away. However, instead of retiring the character, Heihachi still continued to appear in games. So what can they do about this? There are two options.
- Reuse voice clips. Many characters in Smash such as Banjo reuse voice clips from their own games. The same can be done with Heihachi, who ended up appearing in a King of Fighters mobile game with reused voice clips and everything.
- Recast. If they don’t want to just reuse voice clips, getting a new voice actor is always an option. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a brand new one as Heihachi’s original VA, Banjō Ginga is actually still alive and doing roles with his most recent video game role being in Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
Basically, while on paper it is a good argument, Heihachi has many things that cause this argument to fall apart.
THE RUMOR
Now for the last part of this blog post, I will go over some recent rumors.
Recently, a DM that is supposedly from Vergeben has showed up with multiple details on upcoming games.
Now it is a lot of stuff, but the one I am here to talk about is the “Heihachi guest staring in something.” part. Now of course, Smash isn’t the only game in existence, so let’s look at all the upcoming fighting games or fighting games with DLC.
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
- Street Fighter V
- Soul Calibur 6
- King of Fighters XV
- Mortal Kombat 11
- Guilty Gear Strive
Now we can eliminate some of the options here. Obviously he isn’t going to be in a game like MK11, and we can probably rule out a game like Guilty Gear as well. Soul Calibur 6 for its current season already had its guest character along with the remaining two characters data mined and neither of them are Heihachi, so we can potentially rule out that game as well. For Street Fighter V, there has been stuff pointing to several characters being the remaining 5 for the final season (such as in here and here) and none of them are Heihachi. Besides, the closest Street Fighter has ever had to guest characters are the multiple Final Fight characters that appear throughout the series. This leaves us with two remaining options, KOF XV and Ultimate.
Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt. Not only has Vergeben not been as active with the DLC fighters compared to base game, but it’s important to keep in mind this in a private message that was not meant to be public. Vergeben tends to only make public info he is confident in and we aren’t sure where Vergeben’s specific source on this info comes from.
CONCLUSION
With all of this, I think Heihachi has a very good shot for Ultimate. With Tekken’s legacy and having already been considered for Smash before, many things go in his favor. Of course, there is a possibility of Nintendo going for Bandai Namco’s other IPs. If you want to learn more about them, check out Kagura’s post on Lloyd by clicking “here“. I hope you all enjoyed this, and feel free to check out the other blogs on this site as well!
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