To say that Tekken has a bit of a convoluted story is an understatement. It’s a lot harder to follow than the simpleton good versus evil story of Street Fighter, and has a lot more twists and turns than the layered story for King of Fighters. To help catch newbies up on the story that Namco has unfolded for Tekken over the course of some 20 years, they released a four minute retro recap that’s designed like an 8-bit visual novel.

The video features a lot of badly drawn images that recounts the bad blood between the Mishima family, and how they’ve come to blows with one another in the quest for ultimate power.

You can check it out below.

The first part of the video covers the events leading up to Kazuya getting revenge against Heihachi after getting dropped on his head as a kid.

Kazuya throws Heihachi off the cliff, takes over the Mishima corporation, makes it real illegal, and then knocks up Jun with Jin and then becomes a deadbeat dad and leaves.

The story is told through a series of 8-bit fights, covering the first several Tekken games.

It turns out that according to the lore, Paul defeats Ogre, and Jin defeats True Ogre.

Heihachi has Jin killed, or so he thinks, but then Jin comes back as Devil Jin, which is how Tekken 3 ended after Heihachi betrayed Jin.

I imagine part 2 of the retro recap will cover Tekken 4, 5 and 6.

They’ve managed to reduce much of the story down to only the base elements strictly involving the Mishima family. They left out all the stuff involving Lee, Kazuya’s half brother, as well as all the other fighters that Ogre killed, and the whole subplot involving Nina trying to kill Kazuya while her sister Anna tries to kill her. That’s not even getting into the whole Jack subplot, which is a beast all its own.

Anyway, I imagine they’ll roll out the second recap ahead of the June 2nd release of Tekken 7 in North America for PS4, Xbox One and PC.