Tekken 7 has always been something of an anomaly in the way it approaches the fighting game genre. While games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat featured their fair share of over-the-top fighting tropes, Tekken is the series that featured a fighting kangaroo and has ties to a popular Japanese wrestling faction in its current iteration. Tekken 7 is known for its colorful characters - alongside some of the best gameplay the genre has to offer - and so it isn't much of a surprise to find out that some of its pro players share Tekken 7's flair for the dramatic and weird.

The synchronicity between game and players was evident this past week at E3 during the Twitch Esports Arena invitational tournament. The Tekken 7 competition was fierce, and was popular enough to warrant fan voting for the tournament's MVP. The award eventually went to a North California player named Bronson Tran, who accumulated the most votes on Twitter and was slated to go home with a brand new T-Mobile phone and service plan. Bizarrely, however, Tran immediately shot down the prize, saying he would raffle it away on Twitter later.

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His reasoning? Tran was already with AT&T, was very happy with his current data plan, and was unwilling to risk it by switching over to another company instead. The response was typical of Tran's sarcastic, trash-talking persona that he has cultivated in the fighting game scene, but it was also likely a result of the fact that Tran is one of the few "pro" or "semi-pro" players to have a day job at the event. The same MVP award and T-Mobile phone prize was distributed to all the other games present in the Twitch Esports Arena event, and Tran was the only one to turn it down.

Tran's brash rejection of a free prize has already become extremely popular via Twitch's clip sharing feature, and Bandai Namco should likely pursue Tran's participation in other Tekken 7 events further in the future. While he might not be an all-star competitor, Tran is a huge personality with magnetic drawing power, and his antics would be a welcome break from heavier discussions like those about Tekken 7's resolution lag problem.

Tekken 7 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Twitch