Tekken's New Character Unmasked

In case you haven't seen the trailer yet, a new masked luchadora is making her debut in Tekken Tag Tournament 2. Well, after a closer look, the Tekken community has figured out that this character isn't new at all. At first, my guess was Christie Monteiro. After all, she was just an Eddy clone, and Namco had done a really good job of differentiating the clones in the original Tekken Tag. But I was wrong.

Famitsu revealed that this "new" character's name was, in fact, Jaycee. Well, it didn't take long for fans to deduce that Jaycee could also mean J.C. -- and that J.C. could mean Julia Chang. And after picture comparisons started to surface, it became quite clear. Look at the picture below.

The feathers in Jaycee's mask are the same color of feathers Julia wears. She is also wearing the exact same pendant that Julia wears. And while Jaycee is a wrestler, Julia Chang has always had a few wrestling moves. That hurricanrana that Jaycee performs in the trailer used to be one of Julia's side throws. The official art even has Jaycee flashing her elbow.

Why am I posting about this? Because Tekken is my favorite fighting game series and Julia Chang is my favorite character. That, and I really hated the changes they made to her character in the last game, Tekken 6. I even stopped playing the game because of it. But this gives Namco an excuse to make her completely different. And it gives me a chance to care about my favorite character again. I've never played with grapplers in the past, but I'm willing to start for the lovely Julia.

I applaud Namco for doing something cool with a character I assumed they would eventually kick from the series. I'm also glad that her secret persona was a lot harder to figure out than the pathetically obvious Violet from Tekken 4.