He would return in SoulCalibur 2, alongside another Soul/ Tekkenconnection where Heihachi Mishima would magically travel back in time in the PlayStation 2 version of the game.

From there, the Manji Clan was reborn as the Manjitou with Yoshimitsu the First at its helm. He made enough of a name for himself that others sought him out to join his side. From there, he became a heroic bandit who looked out for the poor and the weak. Yoshimitsu decided that he would not allow the katana’s evil to overwhelm him and set out to conquer it. Yoshimitsu never did come across the villainous knight, but he got close enough that his own sword became possessed by traces of the Soul Edge’s evil, giving it an otherworldly glow. At some point during his adventure, he decided that maybe vengeance wasn’t the best course of action because he didn’t want to become a figurative monster like Nobunaga or a literal monster like Nightmare. Since there was news of an azure knight going around killing everything with a bigass eyeball sword, Yoshimitsu followed the bloodshed. It was his bizarre fighting style that felt like a kabuki actor, a samurai, and a disco dancer joined together and got really drunk. It wasn’t just that he wielded a sword in a hand-to-hand combat tournament. He was to Tekkenwhat Blanka was to Street Fighter, Baraka was to Mortal Kombat, and Gen-An was to Samurai Shodown. Even in a game featuring a robot and a man with a jaguar mask, Yoshimitsu was the token freak. Yoshimitsu was at the ground floor, appearing in 1994’s Tekken. Arc System Works has a big crossover game that just came out of some of their properties mashed together.įor Bandai-Namco, their staple fighting game series Tekken– the modern civil war within the Mishima bloodline – and SoulCalibur– the ancient war between two mystical swords – are bridged together mainly by one name: Yoshimitsu, the Cyborg Robin Hood. NetherRealm can’t make a game about DC Comics characters without Mortal Kombat dudes showing up. SNK’s Art of Fighting takes place a few decades before Fatal Fury, several centuries after Last Blade, and about a century before Savage Reign. Capcom’s Street Fighter introduces a Japanese schoolgirl and she later shows up when Capcom makes a fighting game about Japanese high schools. When a video game company makes enough fighting games, usually we start seeing some connections.

Tekken 1 yoshimitsu