6 Retconned Plot Points That Ruined Beloved Video Game Characters

5. The Devil Gene Is Inherent, Then Mythological, Then Comes From Akuma(?!) - Tekken 3/6/7

What you think you know: 90s kid childhood hero and all-round legendary human being, Jin Kazama enters the Tekken franchise in part three. Discovering he's the son of Kazuya and the grandson of Heihachi Mishima, Jin is cursed by the mysterious 'Devil Gene'; a strange manifestation of power that when channelled in the right direction, allows him to go up against his grandfather, who just so happens to be responsible for tossing his father into a volcano.

As you do.

What you must accept: For years, the Devil Gene was something that just came as part of Jin's makeup, like King's mask or Paul Phoenix's towering hair, but come Tekken 6, Namco decided to relate it to some ancient being called Azazel. A nondescript ever-present evil, Azazel communicated with Jin through his mind, asking him to bring about as much 'evil energy' as possible - to which Jin enacts a world war - as it's played off as the only way for Jin to battle Azazel and for the former to finally perish, releasing himself from the curse of his bloodline.

From cool, mysterious trait to cosmological timeless energy? O... kay...

Now, in Tekken 7, this has been overridden again, as with Street Fighter's Akuma being factored into the game as more than just a guest character, Namco have written an entirely new backstory for how the Mishima family get along. Now it's Akuma that somehow factors into the appearance of the Gene, both in Kazuya's incarnation, and later Jin's.

No more "It's a manifestation of 'the sins of the father' coming back to haunt you", no more Jin struggling to understand precisely who or what he is - and being T7 is going to include a ton of prequel content, every sentence uttered that clarifies Jin's true nature undoes all his soul-searching in the future games of the chronology.