Tekken Pachislot trumps competitors with Nina Williams content en masse

Goddamn, and I thought CR鉄拳 had a lot of Nina content. Well, it got trumped by 鉄拳3rd in that regard, the Yamasa developed pachi-slot machine that has been released to Japanese pachi-slot/pachinko parlors in early July, and just recently got ported to iOS mobile devices.

鉄拳3rd for iPhone and iPad has been released on August 13, and has been charting pretty high in the Japanese charts for paid iOS apps since. The pachi-slot's "story" basically centers on 3 individual campaigns, a Jin campaign, a King campaign and one for Xiaoyu. Each of these protagonists is partnered with another main character for these campaigns, Jaycee for King, Alisa for Xiaoyu, Nina for Jin. The story itself, naturally, is pretty light, but the game is very successful in giving each of the 3 campaigns a different theme. While King+Jaycee's is kind of adventurous and spiritual, and Xiaoyu+Alisa's has a more humorous and playful feel and look to it, Jin+Nina's is definitely the most dramatic and very much focused on action. Jin and Nina team up for most of the campaign, though each of them has their fair share of solo scenes. There are about 9 major scenes that feature Nina very generously, with 4 of them focusing solely on her. We get a short but beautifully animated scene of Nina swinging a katana, a long and action packed scene featuring Nina and Jin on a highway, riding motorbikes and facing off against a tank(!), and, of course, the obligatory sibling rivalry bit where Nina "sneak[s] into Central Tower", steals (I presume) some kind of tube, triggers an alarm, has to face off against Anna and her (or rather Kazuya's G-Corp-) henchmen and escapes by effortlessly wall-running past them, throwing a grenade and jumping through a glass window seconds before the building explodes. It's silly, it's typically Japanese, and it's totally awesome! What's so cool about these videos produced specifically for Pachinko and Pachi-slot games is the possibility of the player failing at certain key moments in the game, so many of these sequences have several different outcomes. Nina might escape Anna via that flashy wall, but she might also be hit by a bullet mid-wall-run and then shot by Anna while lying wounded on the ground,... or she manages to knock Anna over right before being shot and escape that way. My favourite video has to be the short scene of Nina sitting outside a café, then getting up after noticing the camera (/the player) approaching from behind in her make-up compact mirror, and either (depending on what scene you trigger while playing the game) blowing a kiss at the camera, doing a gunshot motion with her hand or throwing her black(!) lipstick at us, smearing it all over the camera lens. It's one of the shorter scenes and nothing too exciting, but we get the chance to see Nina in a more intimate moment than we are usually used to, in an ordinary everyday public place no less, which is very rare for her. Not only did she change into a nicely fitting black-pants-white-leather-jacket combo, but the whole makeup pocket mirror and lipstick thing certainly reveals the more feminine side of her persona which we only get to see from time to time. We've seen similar scenes in her Tekken 6 ending cinematic, the  intro for the original Tekken Tag Tournament, and Tekken 2. It's certainly a rare sight, which makes it all the more satisfying when we get to see developers/writers/character-designers acknowledge that side of her.

For anyone wondering where the rest of the videos from the CR鉄拳 pachinko are that I was going to post, I will probably put them up together with the videos discussed in this post in a way that doesn't impair their original look/resolution. There's a whole bunch of them now, all of them cut into several small scenes, so anyone that's interested, I certainly need to stress your patience a bit longer.

Anyway, EXCELLENT job on 鉄拳3rd, Yamasa!