You can understand how he ended up at that cliff with his son in his arms. Him being unable to forget the death of his wife at his own hands and the way the devil gene impacted both that relationship and the one he would develop with Kazuya. That said, I felt like even if 7 didn’t make me sympathetic towards him, it did help me understand him better. I feel it’s hard to make a character like Heihatchi sympathetic primarily because we have (depending on when you got into the series) 6 games of him being anything but. Of course when you start getting into if the devil gene forces the host to eventually become a monster regardless of upbringing, it gets a bit muddy and paints Heihatchi‘s actions at least somewhat in a different light, but do we have an example of someone with the devil gene who wasn’t raised in a constant state of violence and loss to compare to in the first place? Idk. Does that make Kazuya “right”? Not at all, but he didn’t start that cycle, he was born into it and shaped by it into the monster he is today. When playing though 7, I felt Heihatchi dying here is “karma” for not breaking that cycle of generational violence when he had the chance to do so, with the excuse he didn’t have a choice or know another way to do it. This is one of those ones that’s like, yea sure I can see why Heihatchi made some of the moves he made, but you have to ask yourself if he hadn’t been such a massive POS to his kid from day one would Kazuya have ended up the same way?

Male tekken 3 heihachi