Fighter Maker

"What a misleading name."

Fighter Maker. With a name like that, it sounds like you'd have a lot more customization of your fighter than this. While Fighter Maker DOES allow you to make your own fighting game (sorta), it's so difficult to do that it makes one wonder why you'd even want to.

This game is part of Agetec's Designer Series. To the best of my knowledge, only two Designer Series games were released for the PS1. The first game to be released was Fighter Maker (though, in Japan, RPG Maker preceded it by a year or two.) That's about all I know about the game. Now, for the review.

Fighter Maker gives you a set of tools to create your very own fighter. Everything is customizable- moves, battle stance, appearance...wait, did I say everything is customizable? I'm sorry, I must have forgotten-

You can't customize what your fighters look like. You have a very generic set of fighters. One of them looks like Guile from Street Fighter, another one of them is a scantily clad female (the token sex object- every fighting game needs one) who kind of resembles (kind of is the word here) Anna Williams of Tekken, and another one of them looks kind of like John Torque from Vigilante 8, or kinda like Lance Vance from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

If you can't customize what your fighters look like, how can they truly be your own? Simple- create some special moves for them. However, it's hard to even do that. The editor is ridiculously complex. To do a simple punching animation, it took me at least 15 minutes. Even then, it looked REALLY unnatural. If I can't even make a punch animation look right, how am I gonna make an uppercut or a kick look right? Much less a special move...

The controls are standard fare for the most part. The game utilizes a six-button control scheme. It works well, for the most part. I don't have any real complaints here. Well, except for the fact that I can't actually make a fighter to use it with.

I can't even remember what the music and sound are like. They were that forgettable. There was a hit sound effect here and there, but it was so unmemorable that they may as well not have put any sound in it. It would have been the same effect.

The graphics are terrible, and we're considering a system which has butt-ugly graphics in the first place. The textures are grainy, and the actual character models themselves are very rough. The backgrounds are awful, as well. They consist of a static backdrop and a very grainy ground texture which loops indefinitely.

The final nail in this game's coffin is the fact that it takes a whole memory card to save just one fighter. Excuse me, did it ever occur to you that I don't want to have to use 25 memory cards to make a fighting game? But what does it matter if it's this hard to even make a single animation for a fighter? If any of you have created an entirely complete fighter, I salute you, because you have clearly done the impossible.

I paid 3 bucks for this game used. That's about all it's worth. If you ever see this game at a rental store (next to impossible now, because last I checked no one stocks PSX games anymore), don't rent it. If you ever see this game in a game store, don't buy it. It's not even worth the US$3 I paid for it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/10/06