With the announcement that The Walking Dead‘s Negan is joining Tekken 7, it’s clear that absolutely anybody can be a Tekken character. Matthew Codd has a few more suggestions.
Last week, Tekken creator Katsuhiro Harada surprised everyone with the announcement that Negan (who?) from The Walking Dead would be coming to Tekken 7. The game already has guest fighters from Street Fighter, Final Fantasy XV, and The King of Fighters, but they’re at least all properties that have a vague connection to Harada’s iconic fighting franchise.
With the Negan announcement, though, it’s clear that all bets are off. There are no limits on who can earn entry into Tekken‘s hallowed halls, and with that in mind, I’ve got some very serious, not-at-all sarcastic suggestions of my own.
1. Queer Eye‘s Fab Five
Karamo, Tan, Jonathan, Bobby, and Antoni are the most obvious candidates for Tekken 7, and I’m honestly surprised that this hasn’t happened yet. To play Tekken is to spend approximately 1% of your time fighting and the rest dressing up your fighters until you’ve got the perfect look, so it’s already pretty much Queer Eye: The Game. Why not just make it official?
They’d be pretty solid fighters, too. Karamo would wear out his opponent with brutal (but effective) workouts, while Bobby would play a nice defensive game by redecorating the arena with a gauntlet of obstacles to get through. Tan and Jonathan would confuse the heck out of their foes by giving them a full makeover mid-match, and Antoni would be flinging easy-to-make, delicious food all over the place.
On the other hand, being the charming and supportive guys they are, they’d probably just decline to fight and restore all their opponents’ health instead.
2. Marama Fox
Marama Fox is no stranger to fighting games – after all, she was the star of that Battle to the Beehive game in the lead up to the last election. But a wahine toa of Marama’s powerhouse status deserves more than an odd gimmick to encourage electoral enrolment, important though that is. She deserves the grand stage that only Tekken can deliver.
As a Tekken fighter, she’d bring Te Ao Māori to the world just like she did every time she stood up in Parliament or took the dance floor on Dancing with the Stars. When they want to, the game’s developers go to great lengths to make sure their fighters can be authentic celebrations of their culture, and Marama wouldn’t let them get away with anything less.
(Also, she’s owed this after being robbed on Dancing with the Stars, dammit.)
3. Pusheen the Cat
The Tekken series has had its share of cute animal fighters, from the diminutive dinosaur Gon (who, incidentally, was the series first ever licensed guest character) to the extremely huggable Kuma and Panda. There’s never been a cat, though, which seems a grave oversight from the game’s development team.
So why not introduce the greatest cat of them all, Pusheen? (Please don’t tell my cats I said this.) Pusheen has proven time and again how good she is at playing dress-ups, which, as I noted earlier in this list, is a crucial Tekken skill. But she’s also a skillful (?) fighter, a talented adventurer, and a cat with plenty of experience with video game crossovers as it is.
Tekken needs more “d’awwww!”, and you don’t get much more “d’awwww!” than Pusheen.
4. Taika Waititi
Honestly, do we even need a reason? This is Taika Waititi we’re talking about.
(Plus, it seems a good way to get that pineapple print outfit into the game.)
5. Lucille Bluth
Tekken needs a new villain. The Mishimas are washed up, and Heihachi’s approximately 500 years old now.
Enter Lucille Bluth, the most terrifying villain ever to cross our screens. She’s tormented Newport Beach for a decade, and three generations of Bluths all have her to them for a lifetime of misery.
She wouldn’t even need to fight. She’d just sit there, drink in hand, while a barrage of shade and insults took care of any mortal foolish enough to challenge her.
6. Sue and Mel from Bake Off
If there’s one thing we learnt from Great British Bake Off, it’s that Sue Perkins and and Mel Giedroyc will fight to the very last for their beloved contestants. They wouldn’t be interested in the fame and glory that comes with a Tekken victory, but if that was the way to protect one of Britain’s premiere amateur bakers from a Paul Hollywood death stare, you just know they’d do it.
Tekken could also do with more soggy bottoms and double entendres, the likes of which Sue and Mel are perfectly qualified to deliver. Bake Off hasn’t quite been the same without them, so we can only hope they’re on to bigger and better things – like fighting in Tekken.
7. Suzy Cato
“See ya, see ya later, it’s time to say goodbye!” The closing song from an iconic children’s TV show, or the ultimate shade to drop on a defeated opponent?
Suzy Cato would be a particularly devious fighter among the Tekken ranks. She’d disarm everyone with her happy-go-lucky Suzy’s World persona, before going full Dancing with the Stars Thunderstruck Suzy and tearing her opponent in half. On that note, maybe she’d be a better fit for Mortal Kombat…
(And, like Marama Fox, she got robbed on Dancing with the Stars and deserves justice.)
8. Rey from Star Wars (and only Rey)
While the rest of this list is Very Serious Indeed, a Star Wars guest is, perhaps, the most plausible of all. It’s already been done for SoulCalibur IV, another fighting game from Tekken publisher Bandai Namco, so why not bring Star Wars to Tekken as well?
As the face of the new trilogy and a more than competent fighter, Rey is the obvious choice for a guest character. I’m more fascinated with the idea of her being the only one, though – not a Skywalker, an Organa, or a Solo in sight. The tears of the “Remake The Last Jedi” crowd would make a neat crossover that much more exciting.
9. Beyonce
Tekken has a long history of god-like beings as its boss characters, from the various incarnations of the devil among the Mishima family, to the sudden appearance of Angel in Tekken 2, to the particularly annoying Azazel in Tekken 6.
Beyonce is the one true goddess. Ergo, Beyonce is a Tekken boss. She’d be unbeatable, of course, but that’s fine; just being able to bask in her glory while she combos you to hell and back would be worthwhile.
10. Harada’s “well-muscled skin-head”
Back when Tekken 7 was first announced, gamers didn’t take kindly to Lucky Chloe, a deliberately annoying character designed as a parody of Western anime nerds. Rather than simply not pick her (she’s one character of 40 or so in the game), “fans” demanded that she be deleted from the game entirely.
Harada’s response? A joking suggestion that she was exclusive to Asia-region versions of the game, and the West would get something more befitting us: “Looks well-muscled, Skin-head, Very powerful attack”. That didn’t come to pass, and instead we got a game with a pleasantly diverse range of fighters (complete with Lucky Chloe and all her nonsense), but I wonder what could have been.
Jack-7 kind of fits the bill, but what would a full-blown Tekken parody of the quintessential American muscle-bound hero look like? We deserve to find out.
Given their seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before all of the above suggestions find their way into Tekken 7. I for one can’t wait to see Pusheen wailing on Heihachi, Negan (seriously, who?) bowing before the might of Beyonce, and Marama Fox cleaning up every Tekken tournament from here till next century.
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