#656 Tekken 1 (ARC) Bosses (9/9): Kunimitsu playthrough.

Channel:

AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

Subscribers:

9,070

Published on July 3, 2017 9:58:31 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP5DcCyf-KQ

Game:

Tekken (1994)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 9:36

3,084 views

0

A playthrough of the potential sub-boss Kunimitsu in the arcade version of Namco's Tekken 1.

Kunimitsu is the sub-boss of Michelle, for superfluous plot reasons which you can look up for yourself. It's pretty redundant anyway, considering Kunimitsu gets phased out pretty quickly as a character. Indeed, I'm not sure if there's a better example in a fighting game of "we have no clue what to do with this character", except perhaps Ryuhaku Todoh in Art of Fighting 1.

Kuni's design here is...just rough. The roughest in the game, nearly, were it not for Tekken 1 Kuma being such an abomination. Kunimitsu's design is just so horrendously goofy, and is damaged considerably by the fact that they had to save on space in the game's memory. To the point where a female character is given a male voice. Could they not just have used Nina's voice for her instead? It's just baffling. While Kuni's design will get significantly (and I do mean significantly) better in later games, it's in many ways barely worth stating considering she was effectively expunged from Tekken 3 onwards, only returning in Tekken Tag 1 and 2. Why Namco are so cold to the character is anyone's guess, but I suspect it's because they wanted Kunimitsu as a character without actually knowing what the hell to do with her, as evidenced by the fact that she never really got off the ground in terms of either character design or moveset. Indeed, she seems to more or less just be a model-swap of Yoshimitsu here, fighting using two kunai instead of a katana. Other than that, not a particularly interesting character, and one I never bothered to use much when I played this game on the PS1. Fun fact; in the PS1 version of Tekken 1, Kunimitsu actually uses strange doubled-sided Kunai. You can see them in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYQFJE_rmc

Why they made this cosmetic change is, again, anyone's guess. Such an odd thing to do. It might have had to do with the UK's ludicrous censorship laws at the time (which banned nunchuks of all things), but I couldn't confirm that by any means. I'll speak more about that when I get to Soul Blade, anyhow.

So, that FINALLY wraps it up for the bosses of Tekken 1. But, we're still not done with this game yet. There's a few more curious oddities to cover in this title, so stay tuned for more.

Other Statistics