Tekken 8’s story mode The Dark Awakens is probably one of the best tales in any fighting game. Previously, the unhappy fans with the story mode in Tekken 7 had their voices addressed by developer Bandai Namco. As an illustration, Tekken 8 expands its main storyline. Tekken 8 story mode, The Dark Awakens, is twice as long as Tekken 7’s and features a more linear, unified tale that focuses on protagonist Jin Kazama and his close pair of friends. The game’s ending wraps up the series storyline to an extent, but it leaves fans wondering about a few mysteries.
According to Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada, most players haven’t seen the ending of Tekken 8. This narrative conclusion was 25 years in the making.
Statistically, apparently most players have not reached the other fateful ending of #TEKKEN8 Story mode: The Dark Awakening.
(I don’t have a concept of which is Good and which is Bad, but these are for the players to interpret for themselves).It (other ending) was this scenario…
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) January 31, 2024
So, we’re going to perform a little spoiling here. If you’re determined to keep playing blind, I’ll give you this warning.
In case you don’t know, Tekken 8 has two endings, and the majority of Tekken 8 players haven’t seen either. One of the endings is shorter and involves a bluff. This ending demands you to lose the final round of the final fight – a pretty clear-cut tragic conclusion. Then, the other requires you to win the final round and settle the storyline in a more obvious, positive way.
At the height of their enmity, Jin and Kazuya are both able to unleash the full potential of their devil genes. The result is that players meet Angel Jin and True Devil Kazuya, two characters who experience complete transformations. In the final chapters, these deadly fighters engage in a breathtaking battle consisting of six rounds atop a falling comet. Both fighters seem to have lost access to the powers granted to them via the Devil Gene.
The player needs to defeat Kazuya as Jin, doing it ensures the player sees the normal ending. However, if Jin loses to Kazuya in the last round, after Kazuya starts glowing red from the Rage mechanic, the ending will go another way instead. It appears like the scene is a reference to the original Tekken’s 1994 ending with Kazuya. Similar to his approach to Heihachi in that scene, Kazuya drags Jin to a cliff and then lets him fall.
The fact that Kazuya lost possession of his devil form in the fight with Jin is echoed from the original Tekken 8 ending. Despite losing his abilities, Kazuya, sits in his chair at the end of it all, indicating that he still plans to continue taking control of the world without his powers.
Tekken 8 Ending Holds Many Questions
After the final fight between Jin and Kazuya, neither parent can fully establish their dominance. In any case, it appears that Jin accomplishes his goal of eliminating the devil gene from his father and himself. A vicious fistfight breaks out as the men return to their human forms and the battle resumes. While they are fighting, Jin manages to knock his father out cold and leave him lying on the floor, unconscious. He then sees a dove flying past, which he interprets as a sign from his mother, and he ensures that this means the devil gene is gone from the world. To show his mother how much she helped him beat Kazuya, he picks up a white flower from the floor and puts it in his hands.
In the end, the story shows that Xiaoyu is waiting for Jin when he pulls over to the side of the road as the game shows him riding his motorbike on the US highway. After a brief pause, the camera returns to Kazuya, where an enigmatic pair of shoes approaches his motionless corpse. The shoes belong to Jin’s mother, Jun Kazama, which players with keen eyesight will notice. This suggests two key pieces of information: first, that Kazuya is not dead; and second, that Jun is alive. Until that moment, Jin believed his mom had died at Ogre’s hands; Tekken 8 hints Jun’s role is purely figurative, with her actual status remaining unknown.
