#650 Tekken 1 (ARC) Bosses (3/9): Kuma playthrough.
0A playthrough of the potential sub-boss Kuma in the arcade version of Namco's Tekken 1.
What was it with bears in fighting games in 1994? We've already seen two bear bosses from that year in the form of Kumasama and Kumachan in Psikyo's Battle K-Road, and now we get to the most famous bear boss of them all, Kuma.
The early Tekken games, as we'll see, have a good contrast from dark and brooding to zany and comic-relief, and it makes for a refreshing kind of variety. Probably as a means to stick out from the very basic and down to earth roster of Virtua Fighter, Tekken not only includes a lot of zany personalites and also includes some outright comic relief characters from time to time. The first of these is the potential sub-boss Kuma, a giant brown bear which would easily rip a normal person to shreds. In the Tekken series however, a regular martial artist can potentially take out a 600kg brown bear if they're skilled enough. It's amazing, and it's difficult not to love just how wonderfully bizarre it actually is. Namco did have quite an obsession for a while with animal bosses, as we've seen previously with the Shark, Tiger and Falcon bosses in Fighting Layer.
Kuma is more or less a clone of Jack, the recurring cyborg character of the franchise. It's one of three Jack clones in the game, all of them sub-bosses, but he is somewhat differentiated by also having Michelle's horizontal chop combo. Kuma is actually the pet bear of Heihachi, but usually serves as the sub-boss of Paul Phoenix, as he is his rival in the franchise. As Torentsu said in my Lee video, it's amazing how they were building up to these plot points before they could even really articulate them. On the whole, Kuma's a pretty competent character, by like the others just a touch too basic to really say anything about.
Lastly, you have to love that his name is just the Japanese for bear. It's one of those funny times where leaving out the translation actually works better.
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