So yeah, Azazel really did return and we had to fight him as Kazuya who was aiming to take Azazel's power. It worked fine I thought making Zafina the temporary host then Kazuya removes Azazel from her.

Reina is Heihachi's daughter and has a Devil form. She's still seemingly young so who did Heihachi get with?! She did get blasted by Devil Kazuya which may have given her Devil power but if not that then was it from the mother somehow, or is she an experiment? Lars got blasted too when he fought Kazuya and he didn't seem to get any.

Jin accepts Devil Jin to become Angel Jin, fights Devil Kazuya and they both cancel each other out and both lose their powers for good. That fight was quite intense and was also annoying a bit from the amount of armour and regen Kazuya got but whatever. Then the two fight again as mortals. The stage that is sent into space I was completely confused by though, I had no idea what caused the piece of land to lift out from the sea, other than that though the two stages looked good to fight on.

Jun was a vision basically until the very end where we see her foot stepping next to a KO'd Kazuya after the battle with Jin and she's now confirmed to be alive...I think. Her Story Episode said she was basically completely out ever since fighting Ogre. The shrine type thing she entered had a type of effect on her, Jin enters it too in the Story and he goes into a lull state where he confronts Devil Jin. Jun isn't there then so she had finally woken up by the conflict between Kazuya and Jin.

Claudio may have died but it wasn't completely certain, he got hit by the same blast Reina and Lars but they both have strong genes, but still may not have been lethal. He couldn't do much with his Exorcist Art...want to say I expected more from him but I just felt whatever really. In the credits there was an image of Zafina and a foot that might have been Claudio's or just a random Sirius member.

Oh and er, Law fought against Paul because Paul broke his promise to share his earnings with Law.  

Not much to comment on Chapter 1 because it was in the demo, so that can be skipped.

I liked how Chapter 2 sets up a fight despite being a chapter consisting entirely of downtime. I can't tell from watching footage so I'm curious, does Jin's gameplay differ here at all compared to Chapter 1 besides the lack of any moves that display a Devil trait such as that kick where the wing appears? With Lee's analysis that he's weaker and just trash on all fronts I would hope that was reflected in the gameplay, but I'm never going to tell from watching.

The biggest thing the story has addressed so far that I like the most is the issue people were speculating about pre-launch with Kazuya declaring anyone who loses in the tournament will see their country punished when a lot of countries have multiple fighters. I know it's probably been a thing in most of the Tekken plots that the tournament involves qualifiers and isn't just everyone on the roster in a gigantic fighting bracket, but it never occurred to me that qualifiers to pick one person from each country immediately solves the problem of equal representation. It's probably supposed to be nobodies, but I'm curious if Reina and Hwoarang won their fights against an actual character or not like how we see Paul defeating Law.

Given that pretty much the entire cast show up in the Story Mode (at least I'm assuming they will) I wonder how characters like Asuka get involved because she isn't in the tournament due to Jin winning the spot to represent Japan. I know that Yoshimitsu also won't be in the tournament because it would serve nothing for the story, but I wonder if he would even be allowed to enter when he doesn't actually have a country to represent.

I'm aware that Reina has a Devil form as I have seen the post-credits scene of it, and although I have no further context than that her fight with Jin tells me that she's investigating the power to figure out how to use her own. I'm sure whatever happens to trigger it in her probably looks crazy or just unusually cruel (I dunno if she's gonna activate it from getting her shit utterly shoved in or pulling an Ash Ketchum and running between Jin and Kazuya as they fire lasers) without the knowledge of that post-credits scene, so I'm curious if you saw her post-credits scene reveal coming or not @Mr EliteL.

Yes, as you already knew Jin loses the new devil moves he could do that this game gave him. So inputting any of them they turn into a generic or just non-devil version of the move, or even the input just doesn't do anything. It differs, I can't remember what ones did what, I tended to avoid them while playing.

Adding a qualifying section of the tournament was neat. Brought the roster down a lot as it goes into the final bracket, there's also randoms as if you saw when it announced Lili was in the finals she was fighting some dude. So...( I need to separate this)

..back when it was the original Arcade mode the amount of characters would fit in a way, if you tried to imagine a massive tournament of 8 or so matches to get to the end, the starting tournament would be...TWO-HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX entrants!! (256, yes, I felt the need to capitalise it), plus the final stage 9 that has the boss. So Tekken 1 had the 8 starter characters plus the other 8 unlockables taking only 16 of the entrant spots. Which I so happened to have made an image of when I was figuring out how many there would be in an 8 stage tournament.

You'll see what happens with the rest in the story, well perhaps you already have by now. Two characters kinda get shafted as in very very minor screen time though, I assumed they cut them out during the mass fight later or something.

As for Reina, I was expecting something special as in getting or having the gene, just wasn't sure how it was going to be done. That or perhaps something else since Heihachi was always trying to put an end to Kazuya either eradicating the power from him too or somehow taking some of it for himself. So makes sense in a way that Reina's taken over.

I love that Azazel got used and even gets an actual fight! It really makes up for how he was handled post-T6.

Reina likely already had the Devil Gene in her, and doesn't get it from Kazuya's blast. From the moment she turns up, she is trying to work out how the power works and how to activate it, as seen in her fight with Jin. She goes on to fight Kazuya one-on-one at the tournament venue to likely try and have him beat the living shit out of her and activate her power, but when what she receives there isn't enough to trigger the Devil Gene in her she opts to welcome the giant laser during the battlefield segment of the story.

The qualifying section was cool, but those brackets made no sense. Each side has three fights, and because that can't work out evenly it ends up with one person having to win two fights just to face the other person in their half of the bracket who only had to win one fight.

The Angel Jin vs. Devil Kazuya fight stage gets lifted into space purely from an explosion created under the ocean by Kazuya's Spirit Bomb.

I doubt Claudio died.

I really hope the open battlefield part was a test bed for a new Tekken Force mode.

Oh! I loved that the trailer announcer got to have a part in the story as the announcer for the tournament fights chapter. It makes me wish she was an option for the match announcer in regular fights instead of the normal person they use. Heck, if not for probably needing to get permission and payments sorted for it it'd be cool if every announcer from previous Tekken games could be an option to use; it would go well with having the ability to use music from previous Tekken games in stages too.

Yeah she was just trying to find a way to activate it. We need to know though how the Devil Gene got passed on to her though even if dormant at first, because why Heihachi want another one with it, where, how and who?

That's where I think they cut the story a bit, why is Yoshimitsu vs Bryan here instead of the mass fight where a lot of the characters were, because the trailer showed Bryan there shooting wildly and Yoshimitsu avoiding it, but that scene never happened. So for whatever reason the tournament was shorter using only 12 fighters instead of 16, or Kazuya was a bastard to test two of them even more than the rest.
I'm also glad they fit her in to announce in the story, wouldn't mind the option to choose her for elsewhere but I'm OK with the current one anyway.

I completely missed the explosion for the stage to happen, I was too "wtf" with Angel Jin to notice, then when it lifted into I was even more "WTF?!" Still it made sense, that fight was insane and with the music it amped it up even more, it's become my favourite stage in T8.