Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus

"The best XBOX exculsive game yet!"

I know what will be said in response of that synopsis, especially if you realize who I am from seeing me dig my own grave on the message board. I got Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus on the day it came out and have been playing it ever since. I want to give a bit of a breakdown of the game before I start ranting.

Graphics - Solid 10/10
Gameplay - 9/10
SFX - 9/10
Music - 9/10
Multiplayer - 9/10
Replay - 9/10

Ok, Now that I have that out of the way, here is why I rate this game so highly. The minute I popped this game into my friend's XBOX and interrupted their four player halo game at the announcement of a game none of them had ever heard of, I realized that either this game could be great, or I could end up with many bruises. Luckily, the quality of this fighter and the hotness of many of the girls in the game saved my hide and introduced all of us to one of the best fighting games out there.
I am not going to get into any comparisons to DOA3, Tekken 4, VF4, MKDA or any other games that aren't any good compared to Tao Feng because I have gotten into that many times on the boards. Let me start with the graphics.
Looking at the characters, the first thing you realize is that many of the programmers who have been making XBOX exclusive games like this have figured out that more intricate models needed to be used to show better realism than in other games. They needed not to have funny proportions when contorting into positions expected of a human being. You can see this when they bend and move and raise their arms, bend and stretch fingers, and basically act human. The animation helps with this due to the steady 60 fps frame rate. I was very impressed just with watching the game until the controller got to me. There hasn't been this kind of realism in a game. This completely blew Kakuto Chojin out of the water. Another thing I noticed was the animations when performing combos... it conformed to your tempo as you input commands. That is quality programming. The frame rate didn't suffer as many people have been saying... maybe I lucked out and got one of the 'good' XBOX systems.
Now to the meat of a fighter.. the game play. It is pretty interesting when compared to other fighters because it is very innovative, this plays nothing like many other fighters. That may be a good thing to many or a bad thing to many.. but to me it is good. I like to see creativity in a fighter. That keeps the genre fresh and insures that there will be a future to this type of game that rules my life. You can perform in close and forward attacks depending on what direction you press when attacking, and you can perform variations of leading and trailing punches and kicks. There are also crouching, jumping and forward jumping attacks at your disposal. Then, there are the combos. yes, you have to memorize. There is a lot of memorization and you might want to think of the combos as your special moves. You had to memorize dragon punch movements for street figher 2 and fatality motions for MK.. so you get the combos in this game. Some may think that there is a problem when you think about the fact that you have four short form combos, four long form combos, two jumping combos, two forward jumping combos, two alternate stance combos and one running combo, but the game goes way deeper than that. The ability to string together combos by interrupting the combo by starting another one opens a door for more advanced players to really take advantage of the system and win with much flair. This isn't easy and it takes a lot of experimentation, but it is worth it.
The other side to all the martial arts is the chi aspect of the game. chi is achieved by performing combos. Chi can be used only when the meter is full. The thing is that Chi can be used offensively or defensively. You can perform one of three super special chi moves, or you can heal a broken limb.
'Broken limb?' you say? yep. there goes all the turtling players that ever made you mad cause all they did was wait for you to finish your combo to pop in a cheap hit. if blocking is all you do in Tao Feng, you pay the price. Your arms or legs will break and then cut down your offensive capability. You might not even have the opportunity to perform a balancing chi move to bring your health to the same level cause you would have to hit twice as much to get there. On the other side, you can attack off of any object in reach. You can jump off of walls, attack off of poles, slam opponents into dangerous objects.
The main key point here is realism.
Anything is breakable.
Anything can hurt you.
Anything that hurts you will leave physical and visual damage on your character as your clothes and flesh tears and bleeds.
Lovin it yet?
Now the reason the game play didn't achieve a perfect score.
The problem is the camera. I didn't see this as a problem as many other people did. The camera will reverse its position to see the action from the other side if a wall or pole or any other object is about to come into view so as to keep both players as the sole two objects in main focus. This may be disorienting, but you can tell when it is happening, so no biggie.. just block the other way, and if you are performing a combo, keep at it with the same directional presses you would have inputted had you been on the other side, and you will not miss a beat. Like I said, no biggie.
Now the sound and music. There is a lot of talking in this game, and I mean a lot. From the taunts, to the explanations of everyone's reason to resent everyone else.. there is just loads of talking and background story that you can call this a universe of it's own. I like this touch cause it fleshes out the characters even more. The music is kinda what you would expect from a story that takes place in a colonized west coast of the US being New China.. just think of what you would hear, and you pretty much will hear it. The explosions and breaking of items everywhere is very well done as well.. this is a part of a game that not many people take into account, but I do and I give much props to the professionals at Studio Gigante.
Multi player suffers one little drawback. Competition. If everyone is at the same skill level, this game is great. if there are guys who don't know how to do all the combos going against someone like... oh, say ... me, then there will be some frustration and the game might be switched out after a while. That kills it sometimes. If you can convince everyone at your party to practice in the two helpful training modes, then you will have some real fun. The only problem is people that will just be stubborn and want a button mash friendly fighter.. then I say.. Kabuki Warriors.. there is only one attack button and you can really win the game by slamming the controller on your butt.
Replay might suffer as well cause of the fact that after you have beaten the quest mode with both clans of characters and unlocked the boss character, then there really isn't much else to do other than go through it again at a harder difficulty level... This can be challenging, but some might find that it is just repetitive.
I like the story and I feel that it is worth going through again and again. The only thing I personally lack is real competition.. but that will come in time.
Rent or Buy - If you like fighters at all.. then buy this game. If you like having a game that shows off how great your XBOX is, then buy this game... your friends are tired of watching DOA beach volleyball.
If you don't like fighers or you are just plain lazy, then play something else... you will form a bad opinion of Tao Feng if you rent it and make other people who would have liked it stay far away due to biased judgements.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/03, Updated 04/02/03