Fatal Fury

"Causes neither anger nor death, unless swallowed in large quantities!"

Long time follower.

A series like the Fatal fury/king of fighters series, with it's many games trailing over several decades, attracts a certain sort of fan. These dedicated individuals follow the series like concussed zombies. They gather in huge walls of concentrated fandom around any new arcade cabinet, precluding it from the site of lesser mortals, and run with smiling happy faces and greedy outstretched hands to grab up any new offering the series may produce. they know the games, the charactors and moves backwards, sideways and even forwards, and they laugh with justified scorn at people who have perhaps only completed one game.

I am absolutely and categorically, not such a fan! I have only ever played one Fatal fury game (the one I'm reviewing now), which I bought on a whim from a friend who was selling off some of his old gaming equipment. while I have to admit, the total dedicated, die hard fans are still a great leap beyond my comprehension, I can see to some degree the reason for there zombie like obsession. In this review, I'll share my insight.

I killed your master, now I'm going to kill you, ooopse! wrong pronoun.

the plot of this first fatal fury game, is sadly not something to obsess over. Geese Howard, evil Marshal art toting Crime lord of south town, sets up a fighting tournament so that anyone who wishes to kill him can have a good fair chance. As part of his career of iron fisted oppression, which is obviously worse than normal oppression, Geese Howard made one bad mistake. Geese, maybe he's trying to compensate for being named after a plurality of birds? killed off fellow martial artist Geff Bogard. As any fighting game Devotee can tell, killing off a martial arts master is never a good move for an evil villain, since they will inevitably have students who seek revenge. Geff's students were his two sons, Andy and Terry Bogard, rather confusingly called the Lone Wolves (there's two of them!), who take a quick trip to Japan to hone their skills, meet up with Joe Higashi, a kick boxer friend, then come back to South town to enter Geese's tournament and put an end to him (after all, life insurance firms won't pay out if a martial art's master is killed by a jealous rival!).

Well, not the most original plot in the universe I think. Why the two brothers and their mate bother with the tournament when a quick sniper rifle could solve their problems is a mystery to me. About the only saving grace this plot has is that it starts of a larger series plot, but since I've not played any of that series, I can only think of this as a creation of uttermost standardness.

From dusk till dawn.

The graphics here are pretty good for a Mega Drive. The animations seem fairly fluid and the colours are used well to accent the atmosphere of each arena. One aspect to this game I particularly liked is the fact that each round, the time (and the lighting), in each arena will change from daylight, to dusk, to full dark. This is something that was lacking in Street fighter and Mortal Combat, and it's a fact that lends a lot to the game. On the other hands, the costumes and designs for some of the charactors are rather dull. Terry's outfit that resembles Cody of final Fight or Axle of Streets of rage, and his brother's martial art Gi, are just plain boring! I would have liked to have seen more done in this respect, though I suspect it's probably something that was changed in future games.

Sho ryu Ken.

the sound effects in this game are fairly minimal, which is a shame since what there is is quite nicely done considering the Mega Drive's deficiencies in the sound chip department. The voice sampling is grainy, but at least it's there. The game does however miss out on a lot of the usual hit and punch sounds seen in most fighting games, this often makes the charactors feel more sluggish than they actually are. Perhaps less voicing should have been traded for more whooshing (yes! I'm actually recommending a game has less sampling!).

Death by music.

Fighting games are not renowned for music. there is the odd game that stands out, like a very obscure game by Capcom called Street fighter 2, and of course the semi-orchestral tastiness of the Soul Calibre series, but fighting games generally, especially with the Mega drive's uninspired instrumentation, won't be producing wonderful tracks.

As you would expect, Fatal fury has music for each stage in varying states of Technoness. Some tracks are moderately tuneful, such as the player vs. player track, but many of them boil down to glorified jungle drums. I suppose they vaguely fit in with the combat atmosphere, but only if you have a particularly good imagination. One singular problem I felt was a degree of music slowdown going from scene to scene, this is either some cunning post modernistic randomness, or just dodgy software.

Kungfu fighting, so exciting.

Welcome to the Board of Game Observation Of Fatal Fury, Bog off to you! First on the agenda is the question of difficulty.

Many fighting games, especially these days, have interfaces and combo systems that are so complex it'd take a hyper powered, ultra intelligent computer with a doctoral degree in game playing (or just someone very dedicated), to understand them. Fatal fury However has the saving grace of being a game that any average scrubber like me, can pick up and play extremely easily. this is however a two edged sword. Unless I played on the hard difficulty I felt the game quickly becoming too easy, even in Normal. On my first game I got to the fifth opponent using simple jumping combos and throws. in a game with only 8 opponents, this is I think, slightly too much.
In keeping with this accessible mode though, the controls were instantly and easily masterable without even a glance at the manual or a Faq.

next on the table is the matter of the game's perspective. I'm sure it's probably a staple of the series, but I was quite surprised to see the game playing on two levels, background and foreground with free switching between them. Again, this is a bit of a double edged sword, swing it one way and it totally cuts out the problem of players simply fireballing their opponents into submission (as happens on several 2D fighters), but also, this particularly sword inflicts a nasty control glitch. When your enemy is on a different level to you, if you try to perform a special move you simply do a rather useless jump in their direction, this always leaves you open to attack (though the stupid computer Ai rarely exploits it), and quite often matches turn into jumping contests with a huge amount of switching between levels to try and get the drop onto your enemy. Now this is all well and good and part of the game, however it gives areally mobile charactors a supreme advantage, and any fighter with short legs (such as Andy Bogard), is going to lose out. I would have much preferred the move just missing, rather than doing a pointless jump.

While we are speaking of controls, the special move activation is rather strange, it has a system of circle movements and charges similar to Street fighter (how many times have I mentioned that in this review?), but while the circles are easy to pull off, the charges are nearly impossible. since most moves are activated by circles this doesn't matter over much, but it is still a pest.

A final gripe I have with this game is the choice of only three charactors in the main game. While it is true you can play as All of Geese's assorted thugs in the Vs mode, I would have very much liked to see them available in the game, I know it wasn't that way on the Arcade, but I'm sure a bit of improvement here wouldn't' have gone amiss. The character situation isn't all doom and gloom though. One aspect I rather like is that at random points the other two player charactors will appear and challenge you. Firstly this fight comes with nice music, and secondly I love the way they just join in unexpectedly, the same way a human player would. apparently this feature was put in to make up for some charactors from the arcade who were cut in the Mega Drive version, but it's a good addition.

As I've said, there are comparatively few charactors to play, and so not the usual fighting game challenge (I refuse to mention a certain Capcom game), of completing the game on every character. Since the normal mode is so easy, easy mode is pointless, thus once you've run through the game on the three charactors in normal and hard, there's not a lot left to do other than have your friends around for a versus. while the versus is obviously a major part of the game since you have the full gallery of charactors to choose from, I think a lot more work should have been put into the single player game.

angry? or dead?

Fatal fury is without question a fun little game to play, choose your martial artist, pound your way through the ranks of Howard's yes men (no ladies at all in this game), take on the fowl man himself and view the ending. the problem is, that's as far as it goes. Even comparing it to other 16 bit fighters, there's still little to do once you've finished the game, and given the easy difficulty that won't take long.
as it'll undoubtedly be cheap to buy, I'd say get it, but don't pay too much for it, and make certain you've got other stuff to play because Fatal Fury will be meeting it's ticked off demise sooner than you may think.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/05